The food of crows in severe weather when the snow is deep.

January 22.

P. M. — To Walden. 

The Walden road is nearly full of snow still, to the top of the wall on the north side, though there has been no snow falling since the 14th. The snow lies particularly solid. 

Looking toward the sun, the surface consists of great patches of shining crust and dry driving snow, giving it a watered appearance. 

Miss Minott talks of cutting down the oaks about her house for fuel, because she cannot get her wood sledded home on account of the depth of the snow, though it lies all cut there. 

James, at R. W. E.’s, waters his cows at the-door, because the brook is frozen. 

If you wish to know whether a tree is hollow, or has a hole in it, ask the squirrels. They know as well as whether they have a home or not. Yet a man lives under it all his life without knowing, and the chopper must fairly cut it up before he can tell. If there is a cleft in it, he is pretty sure to find some nutshell or materials of a bird’s nest left in it. 

At Brister’s Spring I see where a squirrel has been to the spring and also sat on a low alder limb and eaten a hazelnut. Where does he find a sound hazelnut now? Has them in a hollow tree. 

At Walden, near my old residence, I find that since I was here on the 11th, apparently within a day or two, some gray or red squirrel or squirrels have been feeding on the pitch pine cones extensively. The snow under one young pine is covered quite thick with the scales they have dropped while feeding overhead. I count the cores of thirty-four cones on the snow there, and that is not all. Under another pine there are more than twenty, and a well-worn track from this to a fence post three rods distant, under which are the cores of eight cones and a corresponding amount of scales.  The track is like a very small rabbit. They have gnawed off the cones which were perfectly closed.  I see where one has taken one of a pair and left the other partly off. He had first sheared off the needles that were in the way, and then gnawed off the sides or cheeks of the twig to come at the stem of the cone, which as usual was cut by successive cuts as with a knife, while bending it. One or two small, perhaps dead, certainly unripe ones were taken off and left unopened. I find that many of those young pines are now full of unopened cones, which apparently will be two years old next summer, and these the squirrel now eats. There are also some of them open, perhaps on the most thrifty twigs. 

Somebody has been fishing in the pond this morning, and the water in the holes is beginning to freeze. 

I 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, recovering their balance, — feeble on their feet. The inner toe a little the nearest to the middle one. This track goes to every hole but one or two out of a dozen, -- directly from hole to hole, some times flying a little,-- and also to an apple-core on the snow. I am pretty sure that this bird was after the bait which is usually dropped on the ice or in the hole. E. Garfield says they come regularly to his holes for bait as soon as he has left. So, if the pickerel are not fed, it is. It had even visited, on the wing, a hole, now frozen and snowed up, which I made far from this in the middle of the pond several days since, as I discovered by its droppings, the same kind that it had left about the first holes. 

I was surprised, on breaking with my foot the ice in a pickerel-hole near the shore, evidently frozen only last night, to see the water rise at once half an inch above it. Why should the ice be still sinking? Is it growing more solid and heavier? 

Most were not aware of the size of the great elm till it was cut down. I surprised some a few days ago by saying that when its trunk should lie prostrate it would be higher than the head of the tallest man in the town, and that two such trunks could not stand in the chamber we were then in, which was fifteen feet across; that there would be ample room for a double bedstead on the trunk, nay, that the very dinner table we were sitting at, with our whole party of seven, chairs and all, around it, might be set there. On the decayed part of the butt end there were curious fine black lines, giving it a geographical look, here and there, half a dozen inches long, some ? times following the line of the rings; the boundary of a part which had reached a certain stage of decay. The force on the pulleys broke off more than a foot in width in the middle of the tree, much decayed. 

I have attended the felling and, so to speak, the funeral of this old citizen of the town, -- I who commonly do not attend funerals, -- as it became me to do. I was the chief if not the only mourner there. I have taken the measure of his grandeur; have spoken a few words of eulogy at his grave, remembering the maxim de mortuis nil nisi bonum (in this case magnum). But there were only the choppers and the passers-by to hear me. Further the town was not represented; the fathers of the town, the selectmen, the clergy were not there. But I have not known a fitter occasion for a sermon of late. Travellers whose journey was for a short time delayed by its prostrate body were forced to pay it some attention and respect, but the axe-boys had climbed upon it like ants, and commenced chipping at it before it had fairly ceased groaning. There was a man already bargaining for some part. How have the mighty fallen! Its history extends back over more than half the whole history of the town. Since its kindred could not conveniently attend, I attended. Methinks its fall marks an epoch in the history of the town. It has passed away together with the clergy of the old school and the stage-coach which used to rattle beneath it. Its virtue was that it steadily grew and expanded from year to year to the very last. How much of old Concord falls with it! The town clerk will not chronicle its fall. I will, for it is of greater moment to the town than that of many a human inhabitant would be. Instead of erecting a monument to it, we take all possible pains to obliterate its stump, the only monument of a tree which is commonly allowed to stand. Another link that bound us to the past is broken. How much of old Concord was cut away with it! A few such elms would alone constitute a township. They might claim to send a representative to the General Court to look after their interests, if a fit one could be found, a native American one in a true and worthy sense, with catholic principles. Our town has lost some of its venerableness. No longer will our eyes rest on its massive gray trunk, like a vast Corinthian column by the wayside; no longer shall We walk in the shade of its lofty, spreading dome. It is as if you had laid the axe at the feet of some venerable Buckley or Ripley. You have laid the axe, you have made fast your tackle, to one of the king-posts of the town. I feel the whole building wracked by it. Is it not sacrilege to cut down the tree which has so long looked over Concord beneficently? 

Supposing the first fifteen feet to average six feet in diameter, they would contain more than three cords and a foot of wood; but probably not more than three cords. 

With what feelings should not the citizens hear that the biggest tree in the town has fallen! A traveller passed through the town and saw the inhabitants cutting it up without regret. 

The tracks of the partridges by the sumachs, made before the 11th, are perhaps more prominent now than ever, for they have consolidated the snow under them so that as it settled it has left them alto-relievo. They look like broad chains extending straight far over the snow. 

I bring home and examine some of the droppings of the crow mentioned [three] pages back. They are brown and dry, though partly frozen.  After long study with a microscope, I discover that they consist of the seeds and skins and other indigestible parts of red cedar berries and some barberries (I detect the imbricated scale-like leaves of a berry stem and then the seeds and the now black skins of the cedar berries, but easily the large seeds of the barberries) and perhaps something more, and I know whence it has probably come, i. e. from the cedar woods and barberry bushes by Flint’s Pond. These, then, make part of the food of crows in severe weather when the snow is deep, as at present. 

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 22, 1856

I count the cores of thirty-four cones on the snow there, and that is not all. Under another pine there are more than twenty, and a well-worn track from this to a fence post three rods distant, under which are the cores of eight cones and a corresponding amount of scales. Compare April 2, 1859 ("In the wood on top of Lee's Cliff,...I find under one small pitch pine tree a heap of the cones which have been stripped of their scales, evidently by the red squirrels, . . . I counted two hundred and thirty-nine cones under this tree alone, and most of them lay within two feet square upon a mass of the scales one to two inches deep and three or four feet in diameter.")