The third day of wind.

March 6.

March 6, 2015

Still stronger wind, shaking the house, and rather cool. This the third day of wind.

Our woods are now so reduced that the chopping of this Winter has been a cutting to the quick. At least we walkers feel it as such. There is hardly a wood lot of any consequence left but the chopper’s axe has been heard in it this season. They have even infringed fatally on White Pond, on the south of Fair Haven Pond, shaved ofl’ the topknot of the Cliffs, the Colburn farm, Beck Stow’s, etc., etc.

Observed a mouse or mole's nest in the Second Division Meadow, where it had been made under the snow, —a nice warm globular nest some five inches in diameter, amid the sphagnum and cranberry vines, etc., — made of dried grass and lined with a still finer grass. The hole was on one side, and the bottom was near two inches thick. There were many small paths or galleries in the meadow leading to this from the brook some rod or more distant.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 6, 1855

Observed a mouse nest where it had been made under the snow, —a nice warm globular nest some five inches in diameter. See  February 3, 1856 (“Track some mice to a black willow by riverside, just above spring, against the open swamp; and about three feet high, in apparently an old woodpecker’s hole, was probably the mouse-nest, a double handful, consisting, four ninths, of fine shreds of inner bark, perhaps willow or maple; three ninths, the greenish moss, apparently, of button-bush; two ninths, the gray-slate fur, apparently, of rabbits or mice. Half a dozen hog’s bristles might have been brought by some bird to its nest there. These made a very warm and soft nest.”); February 18, 1857 ("Picked up a mouse-nest in the stubble at Hubbard's mountain sumachs, left bare by the melting snow. It is about five inches wide and three or four high, with one, if not two, small round indistinct entrances on the side, not very obvious till you thrust your finger through them and press aside the fine grass that closes them, . . .A very snug and warm nest, where several might have lain very cosily under the snow in the hardest winter.”); March 22,1855  (“A (probably meadow) mouse nest in the low meadow by stone bridge, where it must have been covered with water a month ago; probably made in fall. Low in the grass, a little dome four inches in diameter, with no sign of entrance, it being very low on one side. Made of fine meadow-grass.”)