At sunset after the rain, the robins and song sparrows fill the air along the river with their song.

April 9. 

5.15 A. M. —To Red Bridge just before sunrise. 

Fine clear morning, but still cold enough for gloves. A slight frost, and mist as yesterday curling over the smooth water. 

I see half a dozen crows on an elm within a dozen rods of the muskrats’ bodies, as if eyeing them. I see thus often crows very early in the morning near the houses, which soon after sun rise take their way across the river to the woods again. It is a regular thing with them. 

Hear the hoarse rasping chuck or chatter of crow blackbirds and distinguish their long broad tails. Wilson says that the only note of the rusty grackle is a chuck, though he is told that at Hudson’s Bay, at the breeding-time, they sing with a fine note. Here they utter not only a chuck, but a fine shrill whistle. 

They cover the top of a tree now, and their concert is of this character: They all seem laboring together to get out a clear strain, as it were wetting their whistles against their arrival at Hudson’s Bay. They begin as it were by disgorging or spitting it out, like so much tow, from a full throat, and conclude with a clear, fine, shrill, ear-piercing whistle. Then away they go, all chattering together. 

Hear a phoebe near the river. The golden willow is, methinks, a little livelier green and begins to peel a little, but I am not sure the bark is any smoother yet.

Hear a loud, long, dry, tremulous shriek which reminded me of a kingfisher, but which I find proceeded from a woodpecker that had just alighted on an elm; also its clear whistle or Chink afterward. It is probably the hairy woodpecker, and I am not so certain I have seen it earlier this year. Wilson does not allow that the downy one makes exactly such a sound. 

Did I hear part of the note of a golden-crowned wren this morning? It was undoubtedly a robin, the last part of his strain. 

Some twenty minutes after sundown I hear the first booming of a snipe. 

The forenoon was cloudy and in the afternoon it rained, but the sun set clear, lighting up the west with a yellow light, which there was no green grass to reflect, in which the frame of a new building is distinctly seen, while drops hang on every twig, and producing the first rainbow I have seen or heard of except one long ago in the morning. 

With April showers, me thinks, come rainbows. Why are they so rare in the winter? Is the fact that the clouds are then of snow commonly, instead of rain, sufficient to account for it?

At sunset after the rain, the robins and song sparrows fill the air along the river with their song.

MacGillivray says that divers, mergansers, and cormorants actually fly under water, using their wings fully expanded. He had seen them pursuing sand eels along the shores of the Hebrides. Had seen the water ouzel fly in like manner. 

Several flocks of geese went over this morning also. Now, then, the main body are moving. Now first are they generally seen and heard.

H. D. Thoreau,  Journal, April 9, 1855

Still cold enough for gloves. See April 10, 1855 ("Since April came in, however, you have needed gloves only in the morning"); April 22, 1855 ("Though my hands are cold this morning I have not worn gloves for a few mornings past, — a week or ten days.")

 
Some twenty minutes after sundown I hear the first booming of a snipe. See April 9, 1853 (“Evening. -- Hear the snipe a short time at early starlight.”); April 9, 1858 ("This “booming” of the snipe is our regular village serenade."). See also A Book of Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Snipe

Several flocks of geese went over this morning also.  See April 8, 1855 ("This evening, about 9 P.M., I hear geese go over, . . . The first I have heard.  See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau: Signs of Spring, Geese Overhead

With April showers, me thinks, come rainbows. Why are they so rare in the winter? Compare January 9, 1854 (" Looking for rainbow-tinted clouds, small whiffs of vapor which form and disperse, this clear, cold afternoon . . ."); December 11, 1855 ("Great winter itself looked like a precious gem, reflecting rainbow colors from one angle."); December 30, 1855 ("I see a few mother-o’-pearl tints, and methinks the same or rainbow tints in the drifting snow there, against the bright light of the unseen sun. ")