A new leaf of Nature’s Album.

January 31.

P. M. —Up North Branch. 

There are a few inches of light snow on top of the little, hard and crusted, that I walked on here last, above the snow ice. The old tracks are blotted out, and new and fresher ones are to be discerned. It is a tabula rasa. 

These fresh falls of snow are like turning over a new leaf of Nature’s Album. At first you detect no track of beast or bird, and Nature looks more than commonly silent and blank. You doubt if anything has been abroad, though the snow fell three days ago, but ere long the track of a squirrel is seen making to or from the base of a tree, or the hole where he dug for acorns, and the shells he dropped on the snow around that stump. 

The wind of yesterday has shaken down countless oak leaves, which have been driven hurry-scurry over this smooth and delicate and unspotted surface, and now there is hardly a square foot which does not show some faint trace of them. They still spot the snow thickly in many places, though few can be traced to their lairs. 

More hemlock cones also have fallen and rolled down the bank. 

The fall of these withered leaves after each rude blast, so clean and dry that they do not soil the snow, is a phenomenon quite in harmony with the winter.

Perhaps the tracks of the mice are the most amusing of any, they take such various forms and, though small, are so distinct. Here is where one has come down the bank and hopped meanderingly across the river. Another an inch and a quarter wide by five, six, or seven apart from centre to centre. 

The tracks of the mice suggest extensive hopping in the night and going a-gadding. They commence and terminate in the most insignificant little holes by the side of a twig or tuft, and occasionally they give us the type of their tails very distinctly, even sidewise to the course on a bank-side.

But what track is this, just under the bank? 

It must be a bird, which at last struck the snow with its wings and took to flight. There are but four hops in all, and then it ends, though there is nothing near enough for it to hop upon from the snow. The form of the foot is somewhat like that of a squirrel, though only the outline is distinguished. The foot is about two inches long, and it about two inches from outside of one foot to outside of the other. Sixteen inches from hop to hop, the rest in proportion. Looking narrowly, I see where one wing struck the bank ten feet ahead as it passed. A quarter of a mile down-stream it occurs again, and near by still less of a track, but marks as if it had pecked in the snow.

Could it be the track of a crow with its toes unusually close together? Or was it an owl? [Probably a crow. Vide Feb. 1st. Hardly a doubt of it.]   

Some creature has been eating elm blossom-buds and dropping them over the snow. 

See also the tracks, probably of a muskrat, for a few feet leading from hole to hole just under the bank.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 31, 1856

More hemlock cones also have fallen and rolled down the bank. ... See January 24, 1856 (“A great many hemlock cones have fallen on the snow and rolled down the hill.”); February 3, 1856 ("See many seeds of the hemlock on the snow still, and cones which have freshly rolled down the bank.")

The track of a crow with its toes unusually close together.  See January 22, 1856 ("See the track of a crow, the toes as usual less spread and the middle one making a more curved furrow in the snow than the partridge as if they moved more unstably,"); January 24, 1856 (“The tracks of a crow, like those of the 22d, with a long hind toe, nearly two inches. The two feet are also nearly two inches apart.”);  February 1, 1856 ("The two inner toes are near together; the middle, more or less curved often."); January 19, 1859 ("The inner toe is commonly close to the middle one. It makes a peculiar curving track (or succession of 'curves), stepping round the planted foot each time with a sweep.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the American Crow