I didn't set out to purposefully learn how soon the rain will be here based on the sound of it coming, but after living here for a while, I can do that.
It's very place-specific. I'm sure that if I went somewhere else with different rain patterns, I'd be way off.
This is my favorite kind of learning: the kind you get just from hanging out with nature long enough. 
This is the foundation of a lot of indigenous knowledge: being in a place, living with it, being a part of its cycles, and gaining that knowledge. Now, multiply that by many many generations of people who purposefully shared that knowledge with the next generation. This is not knowledge that can even be gained in a single generation because some of these cycles span many many many generations. This is the kind of knowledge that enables living with the land. And for those of us in the "modern world" who have been totally cut off from that knowledge, tossed far from where our ancestors lived, think of the disadvantage we have when it comes to starting to live with the land.
This is why it's so important to listen to indigenous folks when it comes to living with the land - because a lot of the rules they've got around how to relate to the land have been hard won over generations, despite hundreds of years of colonizers trying to sever people from ancestral knowledge and sever people from their lands.
