Early leaf-out. A crow's nest in Beck Stow Swamp

May 5.

P. M. - To Beck Stow’s. 

Cold weather for several days. 

Canada plum and cultivated cherry and Missouri currant look as if they would bloom to-morrow. The sugar maples on the Common have just begun to show their stamens peeping out of the bud, but that by Dr. Barrett’s has them an inch and a half long or more. 

The trees and shrubs which I observe to make a show now with their green, without regard to the time when they began, are (to put them in the order of their intensity and generalness) :— 

• Gooseberry, both kinds 
• Raspberry 
• Meadow-sweet 
• Choke-cherry shoots 
• Some young trembles 
• Very young apples 
• Red currant, and probably black 
• Pyrus, probably arbutifolia 
• Young black cherry 
• Thimble-berry 
• Probably wild red cherry in some places 
• Salix alba with bracts (?) 
• Some small native willows 
• Cultivated cherry 
• Some mountain-ash (i.e. European) 
• Some horse-chestnut

Excepting the S. alba, I am inclined to stop with the Pyrus arbutifolia. 

The Andromeda Polifolia will apparently open about the 10th. High blueberry began to leaf in some places yesterday. 

Larch began to leaf, say when it opened, the 28th of April, but not noticeably till to-day. I find one bundle with needles a quarter of an inch long and spreading. 

The small andromeda has lost its reddish leaves, probably about the time it blossomed, and I can neither get the red cathedral-window light looking toward the now westering sun in a most favorable position, nor the gray colors in the other direction, but it is all a grayish green. 

But the patches of cranberry in the swamp, seen at some distance toward the sun, are a beautiful crimson, which travels with you, keeping between you and the sun, like some rare plant in bloom there densely. I could not believe it was cranberry. 

Looking over my book, I find I have done my errands, and say to myself I will find a crow’s nest. (I had heard a crow scold at a passing hawk a quarter of an hour before.) I have hardly taken this resolution when, looking up, I see a crow wending his way across an interval in the woods towards the highest pines in the swamp, on which he alights. 

I direct my steps to them and am soon greeted with an angry caw, and, within five minutes from my resolve, I detect a new nest close to the top of the tallest white pine in the swamp. A crow circles cawing about it within gunshot, then over me surveying, and, perching on an oak directly over my head within thirty-five feet, caws angrily. 

But suddenly, as if having taken a new resolution, it flits away, and is joined by its mate and two more, and they go off silently a quarter of a mile or more and light in a pasture, as if they had nothing to concern them in the wood.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, May 5, 1855

Crows. See A Book of the Seasons: The American Crow

Larch.  See A Book of Seasons, the Larch

Andromeda and sunlight. See November 24, 1857 (“Looking toward the sun, the andromeda in front of me is a very warm red brown and on either side of me, a pale silvery brown; looking from the sun, a uniform pale brown.”); January 24, 1855 ("Those Andromeda Ponds are very attractive spots to me. They are filled with a dense bed of the small andromeda, a dull red mass as commonly seen, brighter or translucent red looking toward the sun, grayish looking from it...);January 10,1855 ("As I go toward the sun now at 4 P. M., the translucent leaves are lit up by it and appear of a soft red, more or less brown, like cathedral windows, but when I look back from the sun, the whole bed appears merely gray and brown or less reddish.”); April 19 1852 ("How sweet is the perception of a new natural fact! suggesting what worlds remain to be unveiled. That phenomenon of the andromeda seen against the sun cheers me exceedingly. When the phenomenon was not observed, it was not at all. I think that no man ever takes an original or detects a principle, without experiencing an inexpressible, as quite infinite and sane, pleasure, which advertises him of the dignity of that truth he has perceived.The thing that pleases me most within these three days is the discovery of the andromeda phenomenon . It makes all those parts of the country where it grows more attractive .... It is a natural magic. These little leaves are the stained windows in the cathedral of my world.”) April 17, 1852 (Observed in the second of the chain of ponds between Fair Haven and Walden a large (for the pond) island patch of the dwarf andromeda, I sitting on the east bank; its fine brownish-red color very agreeable and memorable to behold. In the last long pond, looking at it from the south, I saw it filled with a slightly grayish shrub which I took for the sweet-gale, but when I had got round to the east side, chancing to turn round, I was surprised to see that all this pond-hole also was filled with the same warm brownish-red-colored andromeda. The fact was I was opposite to the sun, but from every other position I saw only the sun reflected from the surface of the andromeda leaves, which gave the whole a grayish-brown hue tinged with red; but from this position alone I saw, as it were, through the leaves which the opposite sun lit up, giving to the whole this charming warm, what I call Indian, red color, — the mellowest, the ripest, red imbrowned color; but when I looked to the right or left, i. e. north or south, the more the swamp had the mottled light or grayish aspect where the light was reflected from the surfaces of the leaves. And afterward, when I had risen higher up the hill, though still opposite the sun, the light came reflected upward from the surfaces, and I lost that warm, rich red tinge, surpassing cathedral windows. Let me look again at a different hour of the day, and see if it is really so. It is a very interesting piece of magic.")