A pitch pine cone blossoms winged seeds

March 3.

This afternoon it is somewhat overcast for the first time since February 18th inclusive. Day before yesterday there was good skating, and it was a beautiful warm day for it. Yesterday the ice began to be perceptibly softened. To-day it is too soft for skating.

I see a dirty-white miller fluttering about over the winter-rye patch next to Hubbard’s Grove. 

A few rods from the broad pitch pine beyond, I find a cone which was probably dropped by a squirrel in the fall, for I see the marks of its teeth where it was cut off; and it has probably been buried by the snow till now, for it has apparently just opened, and I shake its seeds out. 

Not only is this cone, resting upright on the ground, fully blossomed, a very beautiful object, but the winged seeds which half fill my hand, small triangular black seeds with thin and delicate flesh colored wings, remind me of fishes.

I see, in another place under a pitch pine, many cores of cones which the squirrels have completely stripped of their scales,   These you find left on and about stumps where they have sat, and under the pines. Most fallen pitch pine cones show the marks of squirrels’ teeth, showing they were cut off.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 3, 1855

I found a cone apparently just opened, and I shake its seeds out. See February 1, 1856 ("I see a pitch pine seed, blown thirty rods from J. Hosmer’s little grove.”)   March 1, 1856 ("I see a pitch pine seed with its wing, far out on Walden.”);  February 22, 1855 (“Pitch pine cones must be taken from the tree at the right season, else they will not open or “blossom” in a chamber.” ); February 27, 1853 (“ The expanding of the pine cones, that, too, is a season.”);March 6, 1853 ("Part of the pitch pine cones are yet closed.”) see also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Pitch Pine.

I see, in another place under a pitch pine, many cores of cones which the squirrels have completely stripped. See note to February 21, 1861 ("This plucking and stripping a pine cone is a business which he and his family understand perfectly. That is their forte."); February 28, 1858 ("I see twenty-four cones brought together under one pitch pine in a field, evidently gnawed off by a squirrel, but not opened.”); April 2, 1859 (" I find under one small pitch pine tree a heap of the cones which have been stripped of their scales, evidently by the red squirrels,. . . I counted two hundred and thirty-nine cones under this tree alone, . . .These had all been cut off by the squirrels and conveyed to this tree and there stripped and eaten.")