Lotting off a large wood-lot for auction, I find i have been cutting new paths to walk in.
This part of the earth was an open cultivated field some thirty years ago, but, the wood being suffered to spring up, became a covert and concealed place. Nobody has walked here, nobody has penetrated its recesses. The walker habitually goes round it, or follows the single cart-path that winds through it. Its denseness excludes man.
How private and sacred a place a grove thus becomes! Woods, both the primitive and those which are suffered to spring up in cultivated fields, preserve the mystery of nature.
The chickadee is the bird of the wood the most unfailing. When, in a windy, or in any, day, you have penetrated some thick wood like this, you are pretty sure to hear its cheery note therein. At this season it is almost their sole inhabitant.
I see here today one brown creeper busily inspecting the pitch pines. It begins at the base, and creeps rapidly upward by starts, adhering close to the bark and shifting a little from side to side often till near the top, then suddenly darts off downward to the base of another tree, where it repeats the same course.
It is worth the while to have these thickets on various sides of the town, where the rabbit lurks and the jay builds its nest.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 26, 1859
Brown creeper . . .suddenly darts off downward to the base of another tree. See May 16, 1860 ("flies across to another bough, or to the base of another tree, and traces that up, zigzag and prying into the crevices.”)
The chickadee is the bird of the wood the most unfailing. . . . At this season it is almost their sole inhabitant. See November 4, 1855 (“The birds are almost all gone. The note of the dee de de sounds now more distinct, prophetic of winter”); November 16, 1860 (“In my two walks I saw only one squirrel and a chickadee. Not a hawk or a jay.”); December 1, 1853 ("I hear their faint, silvery, lisping notes, like tinkling glass, and occasionally a sprightly day-day-day, as they inquisitively hop nearer and nearer to me. They are our most honest and innocent little bird, drawing yet nearer to us as the winter advances, and deserve best of any of the walker.”)
It is worth the while to have these thickets on various sides of the town. . . See January 22, 1852 ("I see, one mile to two miles distant on all sides from my window, the woods, which still encircle our New England towns. . . Where still wild creatures haunt .How long will these last?”); Walking ("A town is saved by the woods and swamps that surround it.”)
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