Still falls a little snow and rain this morning, though the ground is not whitened. I hear a purple finch, nevertheless, on an elm, steadily warbling and uttering a sharp chip from time to time.
P. M. — To Cliffs and Hubbard’s Close.
Fair with drifting clouds, but cold and windy.
At the spring brook I see some skunk-cabbage leaves already four or five inches high and partly unrolled.
From the Cliff Hill the mountains are again thickly clad with snow, and, the wind being northwest, this coldness is accounted for.
As I sit in a sheltered place on the Cliffs, I look over the pond with my glass, but see no living thing. Soon after, I see a boat on Lee’s meadow just inside the button-bushes on the west of the pond, about a mile distant, and, raising my glass, I see one man paddling in the stern and another in white pantaloons standing up in the bow, ready to shoot. Presently I see the last raise his gun, take aim, and fire into the bushes, though I hear no sound from over the dashing waves, but merely see the smoke as in a picture.
There is a strong wind from the northwest, while I am looking southwest. The gunner then points out the course while his companion paddles and strikes the game in the water with a paddle, and I distinctly see him lift up a muskrat by the tail. In a few moments, very nearly the same actions are repeated, though this time I do not see the rat raised.
Then, turning my glass down the stream, I see, on the Miles meadow shore about half a mile distant, a man whom I know emptying his boat of fat pine roots which he had got for spearing, while his dog digs digs at a woodchuck’s hole close by. For a week past I have frequently seen the tracks of woodchucks in the sand.
Golden saxifrage out at Hubbard’s Close, -- one, at least, effete. It may have been the 10th.
The grass has within ten days shot up very perceptibly in shallow water and about springs. In the last place it forms dense moss-like tufts in some cases; also some warm southward banks are considerably greened, and some hollows where the ice has recently melted, but generally there is no obvious greening as yet. It is at most a mere radical greenness, which you must seek to find. Cowslip will apparently open in two days at Hubbard’s Close.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 12, 1855
I hear a purple finch on an elm, steadily warbling and uttering a sharp chip from time to time. See April 12, 1856 ("There suddenly flits before me and alights on a small apple tree in Mackay’s field, as I go to my boat, a splendid purple finch. Its glowing redness is revealed when it lifts its wings "); April 12, 1860 ("Elm bud-scales have begun to strew the ground, and the trees look richly in flower") See also
April 11, 1853 ("I hear the clear, loud whistle of a purple finch,. . . from the elm by Whiting's"); April 15, 1854 ("The arrival of the purple finches appears to be coincident with the blossoming of the elm, on whose blossom it feeds") and also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Elms and the Purple Finch
The wind being northwest, this coldness is accounted for. I hear it fell fourteen or fifteen inches deep in Vermont. See May 11, 1857 ("A very cold northwest wind. I hear they had a snow-storm yesterday in Vermont.")
April 12. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, April 12
Mountains clad with snow
and the wind being northwest
accounts for this cold.
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, I hear it fell fourteen or fifteen inches deep in Vermont.
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau
"A book, each page written in its own season,
out-of-doors, in its own locality."
~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx © 2009-2024
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