The maples now stand like smoke along the meadows.

October 13

October 13, 2015

The maples now stand like smoke along the meadows. The bass is bare. A thick carpet of white pine needles lies now lightly, half an inch or more in thickness, above the dark-reddish ones of last year.

Larks in flocks in the meadows, showing the white in their tails as they fly, sing sweetly as in spring.  

Methinks I have seen one or two myrtle-birds, sparrow-like. 

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

The maples now stand like smoke along the meadows. See October 13, 1852 ("Many maples have lost all their leaves and are shrunk all at once to handsome clean gray wisps on the edge of the meadows. Crowded together at a distance they look like smoke.”); October 13, 1857 (“Maple fires are burnt out generally, and they have fairly begun to fall and look smoky in the swamps.”); See also  October 10, 1851 ("Some maples which a week ago were a mass of yellow foliage are now a fine gray smoke, as it were, and their leaves cover the ground.");  October 18, 1855 ("The maple swamps, bare of leaves, here and there about the meadow, look like smoke blown along the edge of the woods.")

A thick carpet of white pine needles.  See October 13, 1857 ("The pitch and white pines on the north of Sleepy Hollow,. . . are at the height of their change, generally, though many needles fallen, carpeting the ground.") See also  October 12, 1852 ("A new carpet of pine leaves is forming in the woods. The forest is laying down her carpet for the winter.") and A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The October Pine Fall

Larks in flocks in the meadows, showing the white in their tails as they fly, sing sweetly as in spring. See June 30, 1851 ("The lark sings a note which belongs to a New England summer evening."); October 6, 1851 ("Both larks and blackbirds are heard again now occasionally, seemingly after a short absence, as if come to bid farewell."); October 18, 1858 ("See larks, with their white tail-feathers, fluttering low over the meadows these days"); November 1, 1853 ("I see and hear a flock of larks in Wheeler's meadow on left of the Corner road, singing exactly as in spring and twittering also, but rather faintly or suppressedly."); November 8, 1853 ("Three larks rise from the sere grass on Minott’s Hill before me, the white of their outer tail-feathers very conspicuous, reminding me of arctic snowbirds by their size and form also.") See also  August 4, 1852 ("I must make a list of those birds which, like the lark and the robin, if they do not stay all the year, are heard to sing longest of those that migrate.") and A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, the Lark in Early Spring

Methinks I have seen one or two myrtle-birds, sparrow-like. See   September 23, 1855 (“A little wren-like (or female goldfinch) bird on a.willow at Hubbard’s Causeway, eating a miller: with bright-yellow rump when wings open, and white on tail. Could it have been a yellow-rump warbler?”); September 29, 1858 ("One or two myrtle-birds in their fall dress, with brown head and shoulders, two whitish bars on wings, and bright-yellow rump."); October 3, 1859 ("I see on a wall a myrtle-bird in its October dress, looking very much like a small sparrow.");  October 5, 1857 ("The myrtle-bird . . .only transiently visit us in spring and fall."); October 10, 1859 ("White-throated sparrows in yard and close up to house, together with myrtle-birds (which fly up against side of house and alight on window-sills)");  October 14, 1855 ("Some sparrow-like birds with yellow on rump flitting about our wood-pile. One flies up against the house and alights on the window-sill within a foot of me inside. Black bill and feet, yellow rump, brown above, yellowish-brown on head, cream-colored chin, two white bars on wings, tail black, edged with white, — the yellow-rump warbler or myrtle-bird without doubt. "); October 15, 1859 ("I think I see myrtle-birds on white birches, and that they are the birds I saw on them a week or two ago, — apparently, or probably, after the birch lice."); October 19, 1856 ("See quite a flock of myrtle-birds, — which I might carelessly have mistaken for slate-colored snowbirds, — flitting about on the rocky hillside under Conantum Cliff. They show about three white or light-colored spots when they fly, commonly no bright yellow, though some are pretty bright."); October 21, 1857 ("I see many myrtle-birds now about the house this forenoon, on the advent of cooler weather. They keep flying up against the house and the window and fluttering there, as if they would come in, or alight on the wood-pile or pump. They would commonly be mistaken for sparrows, but show more white when they fly, beside the yellow on the rump and sides of breast seen near to and two white bars on the wings."); October 28, 1853 ("Little sparrow-sized birds flitting about amid the dry corn stalks and the weeds, — one, quite slaty with black streaks and a bright-yellow crown and rump . . .")

October 13. See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, October 13

The basswood is bare.

The maples now stand like smoke 

along the meadows.

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The maples now stand like smoke along the meadows.

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 © 2009-2025