Croaking frogs and peepers.

c

April 13

P. M. — To Second Division cowslips. 

A fair day, but a cool wind still, from the snow covered country in the northwest. It is, however, pleasant to sit in the sun in sheltered places. 

The small croaking frogs are now generally heard in all those stagnant ponds or pools in woods floored with leaves, which are mainly dried up in the summer. At first, perhaps, you hear but one or two dry croaks, but, if you sit patiently, you may hear quite a concert of them at last. — er-wah er-wah er-wah, with a nasal twang and twist. — and see them dimpling the surface here and there by their movements. But if you approach the pond-side,.they suddenly cease. 

We, hear them at J. P. Brown’s Pond, which is edged with ice still on the north. The water must be smooth and the weather pretty warm. 

There is still some icy snow in hollows under the north sides of woods. 

I see the feathers, apparently of a fox-colored sparrow, completely covering a stump, where some creature has devoured it. 

At a great ant-hill, the common half red, half-black ants are stirring, apparently clearing out rubbish from their nest. 

Great quantities of odoriferous sweetgale seed are collected with the scum at the outlet of Nut Meadow, for they float. The Alnus incana blossoms begin generally to show. The serrulata will undoubtedly blossom to-morrow in some places. 

The pine on the Marlborough road which I saw from my window has been sawed down the past winter. I try to count its circles; count sixty-one from centre to sap, but there the pitch conceals the rest completely. I guess there were fifteen more, at least. The tree was probably quite eighty years old. It was about two and a quarter feet in diameter. 

The common hazel just out. It is perhaps the prettiest flower of the shrubs that have opened. A little bunch of (in this case) half a dozen catkins, one and three quarters inches long, trembling in the wind, shedding golden pollen on the hand, and, close by, as many minute, but clear crystalline crimson stars at the end of a bare and seemingly dead twig. 

For two or three days in my walks, I had given the hazel catkins a fillip with my finger under their chins to see if they were in bloom, but in vain; but here, on the warm south side of a wood, I find one bunch fully out and completely relaxed. They know when to trust themselves to the weather. 

At the same time I hear through the wood the sharp peep of the first hylodes I have chanced to hear. 

Many cowslip buds show a little yellow, but they will not open there for two or three days. The road is paved with solid ice there. 

Returning by the steep side-hill just south of Holden’s wood-lot and some dozen or fourteen rods west of the open land, I saw, amid the rattlesnake-plantain leaves, what I suspect to be the Polygala paucifolia, -- some very beautiful oval leaves of a dull green (green turned dark) above, but beneath -- and a great many showed the under side -- a clear and brilliant purple (or lake?), growing and looking like checkerberry leaves, but more flaccid. It is three or four inches high, with the oval and revolute leaves at top and a few remote small bract-like leaves on the (three-sided) stern. This polygala is sometimes called flowering wintergreen, and, indeed, it is not only an evergreen but somewhat pyrola-like to the eye. 

See a sparrow without marks on throat or breast, running peculiarly in the dry grass in the open field beyond, and hear its song, and then see its white feathers in tail; the baywing. 

A small willow by the roadside beyond William Wheeler’s, to-morrow.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 13, 1855

A fair day, but a cool wind still, from the snow covered country in the northwest. It is, however, pleasant to sit in the sun in sheltered places. See April 8, 1859 (" Cold as it is, and has been for several weeks, in all exposed places, I find it unexpectedly warm in perfectly sheltered places where the sun shines. And so it always is in April. The cold wind from the northwest seems distinct and separable from the air here warmed by the sun.")

Stars at the end of a seemingly bare twig. See March 27, 1853 ("so minute that only an observer of nature, or one who looked for them, would notice it.”); April 11, 1856 (You thread your way amid the rustling oak leaves on some warm hillside sloping to the south, detecting no growth as yet,. . . when, glancing along the dry stems, in the midst of all this dryness, you detect the crimson stigmas of the hazel, like little stars peeping forth, and perchance a few catkins are dangling loosely in the zephyr and sprinkling their pollen on the dry leaves beneath); April 24,1852 (""Observed the interesting light-crimson star-like flowers of the hazel, the catkins being now more yellowish.) See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau: the Hazel

Here, on the warm south side of a wood, I find one bunch fully out and completely relaxed. They know when to trust themselves to the weather. See May 7, 1854 ("Flowers are self-registering indicators of fairweather. I remember how I waited for the hazel catkins to become relaxed and shed their pollen, but they delayed, till at last there came a pleasanter and warmer day and I took off my greatcoat while surveying in the woods, and then, when I went to dinner at noon, hazel catkins in full flower were dangling from the banks by the roadside and yellowed my clothes with their pollen.”)

The small croaking frogs are now generally heard in all those stagnant ponds or pools in woods floored with leaves, which are mainly dried up in the summer. See March 31, 1857 ("The dry croaking and tut tut of the frogs (a sound which ducks seem to imitate, a kind of quacking...) is plainly enough down there in some pool in the woods, but the shrill peeping of the hylodes locates itself nowhere in particular."); April 8, 1852 ("To-day I hear the croak of frogs in small pond-holes in the woods, and see dimples on the surface, which I suppose that they make, for when I approach they are silent and the dimples are no longer seen. They are very shy.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Wood Frog (Rana sylvatica)

At the same time I hear through the wood the sharp peep of the first hylodes I have chanced to hear. See  March 23, 1859 ("We hear the peep of one hylodes somewhere in this sheltered recess in the woods. And afterward, on the Lee side, I hear a single croak from a wood frog,");  March 31, 1855 ("I go listening for the croak of the first frog, or peep of a hylodes.");  April 18, 1855 ("Hylodes are peeping in a distant pool.") See also A Book of Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The first frogs to begin calling