Do you believe that horses and cats and birds and even domestic fowl (if such a creature exists around you), react to coming changes in the weather, and are always more sensitive in this than are the average human? The writer, Ian Niall, in an old issue of Country Life, admits that old men, "and those of us with old wounds or scars, get warnings of change and look to the barometer to confirm the information", but cows out in the fields lie down before the rain comes, horses become frisky and, he says, when a severe storm is threatening, find a more sheltered place and turn their backs to the wind. He goes on to tell us that goats come downhill well before the deluge, though you'd think the wild ones stay put. He brings birds into it, in stating that many of the smaller kinds come to the seaboard before frosts catch up with them, and certainly it has been noted that kingfishers in winter make for the estuary of the Boyne, and possibly the same happens on other rivers.
The most sensitive animal, to him, was, however, a pet called Topsy, presumably a dog rather than a cat, which suddenly seems possessed with an urge to race at high speed all around the house, upstairs and down. "She becomes quite mad and we know that it will soon be raining." When it does rain, she settles down at the window to watch. Sometimes, apparently bored by the view from one side of the house, she moves to the other side, asking for the other door to be opened "as though expecting that here the weather will be different."
What about the effect of bad weather on wild creatures. We know that a severe winter kills very many of our small birds. (Hence, feed the birds as best you can.) Gilbert White, author of The Natural History of Selborne gives a picture of the effect on many wild creatures of a prolonged period of frost and snow. "Tamed by the season, skylarks settled in the streets of towns because they saw the ground was bare; crows watched horses as they passed and greedily devoured what fell from them; hares now came into mews' gardens, and, scraping away the snow, devoured such plants as they could find."
This was 1776. And of 1768 he notes that after the cold, the first signs of a turn in the weather came "roost-cocks, which had been silent began to sound their clarions, and crows to clamour, as prognostic of milder weather; and moreover moles began to heave and work and a manifest thaw took place." From that, White concluded that thaws originate from underground warm vapours! Y