The town clock is out of order

February 17.

The river very high, one inch higher than the evening of January 31st. The bridge at Sam Barrett’s caved in; also the Swamp Bridge on back road. Muskrats driven out. 

Hear this morning, at the new stone bridge, from the hill, that singular springlike note of a bird which I heard once before one year about this time (under Fair Haven Hill). 

The jays are uttering their unusual notes, and this makes me think of a woodpecker. It reminds me of the pine warbler, vetter vetter vetter vetter vet, except that it is much louder, and I should say has the sound of l rather than t, — veller, etc., perhaps. Can it be a jay? or a pigeon woodpecker? 

Is it not the earliest springward note of a bird? In the damp misty air. 

Was waked up last night by the tolling of a bell about 11 o’clock, as if a child had hold of the rope. Dressed and went abroad in the wet to see if it was a fire. It seems the town clock was out of order, and the striking part ran down and struck steadily for fifteen minutes. If it had not been so near the end of the week, it might have struck a good part of the night..

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 17, 1855


That singular springlike note of a bird which I heard once before one year about this time. See March 13, 1853 (“But what was that familiar spring sound from the pine wood across the river, a sharp vetter vetter vetter vetter,”); February 14, 1854 ("This greater liveliness of the birds methinks I have noticed commonly in warm, thawing days toward spring"); February 18, 1857 (“When I step out into the yard I hear that earliest spring note from some bird, perhaps a pigeon woodpecker (or can it be a nuthatch, whose ordinary note I hear?), the rapid whar whar, whar whar, whar whar, which I have so often heard before any other note.”);  March 5, 1859 ("Going down-town this forenoon, I heard a white-bellied nuthatch on an elm within twenty feet, uttering peculiar notes and more like a song than I remember to have heard from it.. . .It was something like to-what what what what what, rapidly repeated, and not the usual gnah gnah; and this instant it occurs to me that this may be that earliest spring note which I hear, and have referred to a woodpecker! (This is before I have chanced to see a bluebird, blackbird, or robin in Concord this year.) It is the spring note of the nuthatch");  See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Nuthatch

Was waked up last night by the tolling of a bell . . .See May 3, 1852 ("There is a grand, rich, musical echo trembling on the air long after the clock has ceased to strike, like a vast organ, filling the air with a trembling music like a flower of sound. Nature adopts it. Beautiful is sound.”)