Our first spring morning

March 1. 

Here is our first spring morning according to the almanac. It is remarkable that the spring of the almanac and of nature should correspond so closely.  The morning of the 26th was good winter, but there came a plentiful rain in the afternoon, and yesterday and to-day are quite springlike.


This morning the air is still, and, though clear enough, a yellowish light is widely diffused throughout the east, now just after sunrise. The sunlight looks and feels warm, and a fine vapor fills the lower atmosphere. I hear the phoebe or spring note of the chickadee, and the scream of the jay is perfectly repeated by the echo from a neighboring wood. 

For some days past the surface of the earth, covered with water, or with ice where the snow is washed off, has shone in the sun as it does only at the approach of spring, methinks. 

And are not the frosts in the morning more like the early frosts in the fall, — common white frosts?

As for the birds of the past winter: 

• I have seen but three hawks, — one early in the winter and two lately; have heard the hooting owl pretty often late in the afternoon. 

• Crows have not been numerous, but their cawing was heard chiefly in pleasanter mornings.

• Blue jays have blown the trumpet of winter as usual, but they, as all birds, are most lively in springlike days. 

• The chickadees have been the prevailing bird.

• The partridge common enough. 

• One ditcher tells me that he saw two robins in Moore's Swamp a month ago. 

• I have not seen a quail, though a few have been killed in the thaws. 

• Four or five downy woodpeckers. 

• The white-breasted nuthatch four or five times. 

• Tree sparrows one or more at a time, oftener than any bird that comes to us from the north. 

• Two pigeon wood peckers, I think, lately. 

• One dead shrike, and perhaps one or two live ones. 

• Have heard of two white owls, — one about Thanksgiving time and one in midwinter. 

• One short-eared owl in December. 

• Several flocks of snow buntings for a week in the severest storm, and in December, last part. 

• One grebe in Walden just before it froze completely.

• And two brown creepers once in middle of February.

• Channing says he saw a little olivaceous-green bird lately. 

• I have not seen an F. linaria, nor a pine grosbeak, nor an F. hyemalis this winter, though the first was the prevailing bird last winter.

In correcting my manuscripts, which I do with sufficient phlegm, I find that I invariably turn out much that is good along with the bad, which it is then impossible for me to distinguish — so much for keeping bad company; but after the lapse of time, having purified the main body and thus created a distinct standard for comparison, I can review the rejected sentences and easily detect those which deserve to be readmitted.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 1, 1854

Here is our first spring morning according to the almanac. See March 1, 1856 ("I hear several times the fine-drawn phe-be note of the chickadee. . .Singular that I should hear this on the first spring day.") See also  A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, the Chickadee in Winter

For some days past the surface of the earth, covered with water, or with ice where the snow is washed off, has shone in the sun as it does only at the approach of spring. See March 1, 1855 ("This more dazzling white must be due to the higher sun.")

As for the birds of the past winter. See A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, Winter Birds

Blue jays have blown the trumpet of winter as usual, but they, as all birds, are most lively in springlike days..  February 12, 1854 ("You hear the lisping tinkle of chickadees from time to time and the unrelenting steel-cold scream of a jay, unmelted, that never flows into a song, a sort of wintry trumpet, screaming cold; hard, tense, frozen music, like the winter sky itself; in the blue livery of winter's band. It is like a flourish of trumpets to the winter sky") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau. The Blue Jay