Weather rambling — Goose bone forecast

Make a silent wish as you break the breastbone of a turkey.

But save the breastbone of a goose hatched in spring to forecast the weather before the goose is cooked for a holiday dinner.

“We knew it. We knew the venerable gray goose bone prophet would make his appearance simultaneously with the fall of the leaf and the stovepipe joke,” the latter a perennial weather-related joke, The Morning Star of Glens Falls reported on Oct.11,1889.

As local lore had it, one could observe a row of blood spots on the keel of the breast bone to forecast the weather.

“The darker those spots, the colder the winter will be.”

In 1889, the goose bone forecast a mild winter, contradicting the corn husk forecast.

“There will not be many days which running water will freeze. The coldest weather will come the latter half of January, and the coldest day of all will be January 24,” the goose bone forecasted.

Mild temperatures were not necessarily a good thing.

“The January thaw will come in February, and there will be disastrous floods and dam bursting, and the fiend to pay generally,” the goose bone predicted. “After that, we shall have an early spring. We ought to.”

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