*EDITOR'S NOTE: Due to breaking news of the grass fire last week, this installment of The Village Naturalist was moved to this week. Though Leap Day is past, the history of Leap Year is quite interesting.

The purpose of the Leap Day is to bring our calendar back in line with the solar year. Three out of four years our calendar has 365 days, but there are actually 365.24218 days in a solar year so after the fourth year our calendar is off by 0.969 days, so we add a day. Of course, we are now 0.03 days ahead and that did lead to some problems…but ultimately we worked it out.

Going back at least 11,000 years there were calendars. The one believed to be the oldest was found in Australia and a 10,000-year-old calendar was found in Scotland. Of course, we all heard about the Mayan Calendar and there are a variety of them from India and China. The calendar most related to ours dates back 2,100 years to Southern Iraq and the Sumerians.

All of the calendars were based upon nature…specifically astronomy! You had a day, sunset to sunset, a month, new moon to new moon, and a solar year, the sun rising in the same spot each year. The Sumerian Calendar, like the Jewish Calendar is based upon the lunar cycle. Because there are approximately 12 new moons in a solar year, most calendars had 12 months.

The Greeks and Romans messed everything up because in addition to a calendar based upon nature, they developed one based upon politics. No wonder by 46 B.C. when Julius Caesar came to power there was total confusion as to even what year it was. To add to the confusion the original Roman Calendar, developed 600 years B.C., had 10 months of 30 days each which meant a year of 300 days and they had an eight-day week. That was eventually changed to 12 months of 30 days each.

Julius Caesar threw out the old Roman Calendar in part because “intercalations” (extra days) were necessary to bring the calendar in line with the solar year. Politicians were in charge of when and how long the “intercalation” was, so as you would guess, over time that led to a lot of corruption.

Julius Caesar kept the 12 months but only four months continued to have 30 days, seven months had 31 days, and one month, February had 28. Caesar then dictated that every fourth year we have 29 days in February, the month of purification, to bring the calendar back in line with the sun.

Of course, as I explained earlier, the calendar still didn’t line up with the Solar Year so after about 1,600 years the calendar was ahead of the solar year by 10 days, so in 1582 Pope Gregory XIII tweaked the Julian Calendar and subtracted the extra 10 days. He kept in the Leap Day of Feb. 29. That is the calendar we are using today.

In 1582, Great Britain and the Catholic Church had trouble agreeing on anything and so Great Britain didn’t adopt the new “Catholic” calendar until 1752. New England was still a British Colony so that’s when “we” adopted it as well.

Today most of the world is on the Gregorian Calendar with the last country, Saudi Arabia, adopting it in 2016. So, Happy Leap Day, World, and Happy Birthday all you Leap Babies.