Birch scales (bird-like) on the snow.

January 7.

At breakfast time the thermometer stood at -12°. Earlier it was probably much lower. Smith’s was at -24° early this morning. 

The latches are white with frost at noon. They say there was yet more snow at Boston, two feet even. 

P. M. — Up river. 

The snow is much deeper on the river than it was, —on an average, eight or nine-inches. 

The cold weather has brought the crows, and for the first time this winter I hear them cawing amid the houses. 

I noticed yesterday, from three to six feet behind or northwest of a small elm, a curve in a drift answering to the tree, showing how large an eddy it had produced. The whole surface of the snow on fields and river is composed now of flat, rough little drifts, like the surface of some rough slaty rocks. 

Hardly anywhere is the ice visible now. It is completely frozen at the Hubbard’s Bath bend now, — a small strip of dark ice, thickly sprinkled with those rosettes of crystals, two or three inches in diameter, this surrounded by a broad border of yellowish spew. The water has oozed out from the thinnest part of the black ice, and I see a vapor curling up from it. 

There is also much vapor in the air, looking toward the woods. I go along the edge of the Hubbard Meadow woods, the north side, where the snow is gathered, light and up to my middle, shaking down birds’ nests. 

Returning, just before sunset, the few little patches of ice look green as I go from the sun (which is in clouds). It is probably a constant phenomenon in cold weather when the ground is covered with snow and the sun is low, morning or evening, and you are looking from it. 

I see birch scales (bird-like) on the snow on the river more than twenty rods south of the nearest and only birch, and trace them north to it.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 7, 1856

Ice looks green as I go from the sun. See February 12, 1860 ("Returning just before sunset, I see the ice beginning to be green..."); January 20, 1859 (“The green of the ice and water begins to be visible about half an hour before sunset. Is it produced by the reflected blue of the sky mingling with the yellow or pink of the setting sun?”); February 21, 1854 ("The ice in the fields by the poorhouse road — frozen puddles — amid the snow, looking westward now while the sun is about setting, in cold weather, is green.”). See also January 27, 1854 ("Walden ice has a green tint close by, but is distinguished by its blueness at a distance.”)

I go along the edge of the Hubbard Meadow woods, the north side, where the snow is gathered, light and up to my middle, shaking down birds’ nests. See December 30, 1855 (“He who would study birds’ nests must look for them in November and in winter as well as in midsummer, for then the trees are bare and he can see them, and the swamps and streams are frozen and he can approach new kinds”)

I see birch scales (bird-like) on the snow on the river more than twenty rods south of the nearest and only birch.  See January 7, 1854 ("The bird-shaped scales of the white birch are blown more than twenty rods from the trees.")

January 7. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, January 7

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