Third growth

October 17

October 17.

The noblest trees and those which it took the longest to produce, and which are the longest-lived, as chestnuts, hickories and oaks, are the first to become extinct under our present system and the hardest to reproduce.  Their place is taken by pines and birches, of feebler growth than the primitive pines and birches, for want of a change of soil.

There is many a tract now bearing a poor and decaying crop of birches, or perhaps of oaks, dying when a quarter grown and covered with fungi and excrescences, where two hundred years ago grew oaks or chestnuts of the largest size.

Hereabouts a pine wood, or even a birch wood, is no sooner established than the squirrels and birds begin to plant acorns in it. First the pines, then the oaks; and coniferous trees, geologists tell us, are older, as they are lower in the order of development, — were created before oaks. 

I observe to-day a great many pitch pine plumes cut off by squirrels and strewn under the trees, as I did yesterday.

A month ago I saw the smoke of many burnings in the horizon (even now see one occasionally), and now in my walks I occasionally come to a field of winter-rye already greening the ground in the woods where such a fire was then kindled. 

If any one presumes that, after all, there cannot be so many nuts planted as we see oaks spring up at once when the pines are cut, he must consider that according to the above calculation (two pages back) there are some ten years for the animals to plant the oak wood in; so that, if the tract is ten rods square or contains one hundred square rods, it would only be necessary that they should plant ten acorns in a year which should not be disturbed, in order that there might be one oak to every square rod at the end of ten years. This, or anything like this, does not imply any very great activity among the squirrels. A striped squirrel could carry enough in his cheeks at one trip. 

While the man that killed my lynx (and many others) thinks it came out of a menagerie, and the naturalists call it the Canada lynx, and at the White Mountains they call it the Siberian lynx, — in each case forgetting, or ignoring, that it belongs here, — I call it the Concord lynx.


H. D. Thoreau, Journal, October 17, 1860





The man that killed my lynx (and many others) thinks it came out of a menagerie. See February 15, 1858 ("Saw, at a menagerie, a Canada lynx, said to have been taken at the White Mountains."); September 13, 1860 ("Five [lynx] I have heard of (and seen three) killed within some fifteen or eighteen miles of Concord within thirty years past.")