— Up Assabet. A fine clear morning.
April 8, 2022
The ground white with frost, and all the meadows also, and a low mist curling over the smooth water now in the sunlight, which gives the water a silver-plated look. The frost covers the willows and alders and other trees on the sides of the river fifteen or twenty feet high. Quite a wintry sight.
At first I can hardly distinguish white maple stamens from the frost spiculae. I find some anthers effete and dark, and others still mealy with pollen. There are many in this condition. The crimson female stigmas also peeping forth. It evidently began to shed pollen yesterday.
I find also at length a single catkin of the Alnus incana, with a few stamens near the peduncle discolored and shedding a little dust when shaken; so this must have begun yesterday, I think, but it is not so forward as the maple. Though I have looked widely, I have not found the alder out before.
I see some long cobweb lines covered with frost, hanging from tree to tree, six feet in one case, like the ropes which extend from mast to mast of a vessel. Very thin dark ice-crystals over shallowest water, showing the flat pyramids.
Hear and see a pigeon woodpecker, something like week-up week-up. The robins now sing in full blast.
Also song sparrows and tree sparrows and F. hyemalis are heard in the yard. The fox-colored sparrow is also there. The tree sparrows have been very musical for several mornings, somewhat canary-like.
As to which are the earliest flowers, it depends on the character of the season, and ground bare or not, meadows wet or dry, etc., etc., also on the variety of soils and localities within your reach. The columbine leaves in the clefts of Cliffs are one of the very earliest obvious growths. I noticed it the first of April.
The radical leaves of the buttercup now at Lee’s Cliff --a small flat dense circle -- are a very different color from those evergreen leaves seen when the snow first goes off. They are emphatically a green green, as if a sort of green fire were kindled under them in the sod.
The buds not only of lilacs, but white birches, etc., look swollen.
When taking the brain out of my duck yesterday, I perceived that the brain was the marrow of the head, and it is probably only a less sentient brain that runs down the backbone, -- the spinal marrow.
Abiel Wheeler tried to plow in sandy soil yesterday, but could not go beyond a certain depth because of frost.
P. M. — Up Assabet to G. Barrett’s meadow.
This forenoon it was still and the water smooth. Now there is a strong cool wind from the east.
Am surprised to see a sound clam close to the shore at mouth of Dakin’s Brook, in one foot of water. A school of small minnows. Already a turtle’s track on sand close to water.
The great buff-edged butterfly flutters across the river. Afterward I see a small red one over the shore.
Though the river -- excepting Fair Haven Pond before the 6th -- has for a week been completely free of ice, and only a little thin crystalwise forms in the night in the shallowest parts, that thick ice of the winter (February) on the meadows, covered by pieces of meadow-crust, is in many places still nearly as thick as ever, now that ice is a rather rare sight and plowing is beginning. It is remarkable how long this frozen meadow-crust lying on it has preserved it. Where the piece of meadow is only three or four feet in diameter, its edges now project over the ice, so that the whole looks like a student’s four-cornered cap, -- or that which the President of Harvard wears. All that mass on B.’s meadow appears to have been taken from the upper part of the meadow near the road, about thirty rods off from where it now lies.
In the ditches near which it was taken up I see the coarse yellow, reddened, and sometimes already green-tipped pads of the yellow lily, partly unrolled at the bottom of the warm water, the most of a spring growth, perhaps, in the water; also two or three good-sized buds of a healthy green.
Hear at a distance in the sprout-lands the croaks of frogs from some shallow pool.
See six muskrats’ bodies, just skinned, on the bank, ~ two large yellowish, fatty-looking masses of (I suppose) musk on each side the lower part of the abdomen. Every part of the animal now emits a very strong scent of musk. A foot which I brought home (together with a head) scented me all over. The fore feet are small and white on the palm, while the hind ones are black. All the skin being stripped off except on the nose and feet, the fore feet look like hands clothed in gauntlets of fur.
This evening, about 9 P.M., I hear geese go over, now there in the south, now southeast, now east, now northeast, low over the village, but not seen. The first I have heard.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 8, 1855
At first I can hardly distinguish white maple stamens from the frost spiculae. The crimson female stigmas also peeping forth. It evidently began to shed pollen yesterday. See April 9, 1856 ("White maples also, the sunny sides of clusters and sunny sides of trees in favorable localities, shed pollen to-day. “)See also note to April 6, 1855 ( "A very few white maple stamens stand out already loosely enough to blow in the wind.”) See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, White maple buds and flowers
As to which are the earliest flowers, it depends on the character of the season. See April 2, 1856 (“It will take you half a lifetime to find out where to look for the earliest flover.. . . It is evident that it depends on the character of the season whether this flower or that is the most forward”); .February 28, 1857 ("It takes several years' faithful search to learn where to look for the earliest flowers."); ("At six this morn to Clamshell. The skunk-cabbage open yesterday, — the earliest flower this season."); April 10, 1855 ("These few earliest flowers . . .are remote and unobserved and often surrounded with snow, and most have not begun to think of flowers yet.");April 17, 1855 ("So quickly and surely does a bee find the earliest flower, as if he had slumbered all winter at the root of the plant. No matter what pains you take, probably —undoubtedly—an insect will have found the first flower before you.”) See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Earliest Flower
The great buff-edged butterfly flutters across the river. See April 9, 1853 ("You see the buff-edged . . . in warm, sunny southern exposures on the edge of woods or sides of rocky hills and cliffs, above dry leaves and twigs, where the wood has been lately cut and there are many dry leaves and twigs about.”); April 9, 1856 ("The great butterflies, black with buff-edged wings, are fluttering about”) See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Buff-edged Butterfly
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