Analyzed the crow blackbird’s nest from which I took an egg last summer, eight or ten feet up a white maple by river, opposite Island. Large, of an irregular form, appearing as if wedged in between a twig and two large contiguous trunks. From outside to outside it measures from six to eight inches; inside, four; depth, two; height, six. The foundation is a loose mass of coarse strips of grape-vine bark chiefly, some eighteen inches long by five eighths of an inch mikania stems, a few cellular river weeds, as rushes, sparganium, pipe-grass, and some soft, coarse, fibrous roots. The same coarse grape-vine bark and grass and weed stems, together with some harder, wiry stems, form the sides and rim, the bark being passed around the twig. The nest is lined with the finer grass and weed stems, etc. The solid part of the nest is of half-decayed vegetable matter and mud, full of fine fibrous roots and wound internally with grass stems, etc., and some grape bark, being an inch and a half thick at bottom. Pulled apart and lying loose, it makes a great mass of material. This, like similar nests, is now a great haunt for spiders.
P. M. — Up North Branch. A strong northwest wind (and thermometer 11°), driving the surface snow like steam. About five inches of soft snow now on ice.
See many seeds of the hemlock on the snow still, and cones which have freshly rolled down the bank.
Track some mice to a black willow by riverside, just above spring, against the open swamp; and about three feet high, in apparently an old woodpecker’s hole, was probably the mouse-nest, a double handful, consisting, four ninths, of fine shreds of inner bark, perhaps willow or maple; three ninths, the greenish moss, apparently, of button-bush; two ninths, the gray-slate fur, apparently, of rabbits or mice. Half a dozen hog’s bristles might have been brought by some bird to its nest there. These made a very warm and soft nest.
Get some kind of vireo’s nest from a maple far up the stream, a dozen feet high, pensile; within, almost wholly rather coarse grape-vine shreds; without, the same and bark, covered with the delicate white spider-nests (?), birch-bark shreds, and brown cocoon silk.
Returning, see near the Island a shrike glide by, cold and blustering as it was, with a remarkably even and steady sail or gliding motion like a hawk, eight or ten feet above the ground, and alight in a tree, from which at the same instant a small bird, perhaps a. creeper or nuthatch, flitted timidly away. The shrike was apparently in pursuit.
We go wading through snows now up the bleak river, in the face of the cutting northwest wind and driving snow-steam, turning now this ear, then that, to the wind, and our gloved hands in our bosoms or pockets. Our tracks are obliterated before we come back.
How different this from sailing or paddling up the stream here in July, or poling amid the rocks! Yet still, in one square rod, where they have got out ice and a thin transparent-ice has formed, I can see the pebbly bottom the same as in summer.
It is a cold and windy Sunday.
The wind whistles round the northwest corner of the house and penetrates every crevice and consumes the wood in the stoves, — soon blows it all away. An armful goes but little way. Such a day makes a great hole in the wood-pile. It whisks round the corner of the house, in at a crevice, and flirts off with all the heat before we have begun to feel it.
Some of the low drifts but a few inches deep, made by the surface snow blowing, over the river especially, are of a fine, pure snow, so densely packed that our feet make hardly any impression on them.
River still tight at Merrick’s.
There comes a deep snow in midwinter, covering up the ordinary food of many birds and quadrupeds, but anon a high wind scatters the seeds of pines and hemlocks and birch and alder, etc., far and wide over the surface of the snow for them.
You may now observe plainly the habit of the rabbits to run in paths about the swamps.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 3, 1856
See many seeds of the hemlock on the snow still, and cones which have freshly rolled down the bank. See January 14, 1857 ("Up Assabet on ice. . . . Hemlock seeds are scattered over the snow."); January 20, 1860 ("The snow and ice under the hemlocks is strewn with cones and seeds and tracked with birds and squirrels."); January 24, 1856 (" A great many hemlock cones have fallen on the snow and rolled down the hill."); January 31, 1856 ("More hemlock cones also have fallen and rolled down the bank. ').
There comes a deep snow in midwinter, covering up the ordinary food of many birds and quadrupeds, but anon a high wind scatters the seeds of pines and hemlocks and birch and alder, etc., far and wide over the surface of the snow for them. See January 20,1860 ("What a bountiful supply of winter food is here provided for them! No sooner has fresh snow fallen and covered up the old crop than down comes a new supply all the more distinct on the spotless snow. The snowy ice and the snow on shore have been blackened with these fallen cones several times over this winter.")
I can see the pebbly bottom the same as in summer. See July 5, 1852 ("We are favored in having two rivers, flowing into one, whose banks afford different kinds of scenery, the streams being of different characters; one a dark, muddy, dead stream, full of animal and vegetable life, with broad meadows and black dwarf willows and weeds, the other comparatively pebbly and swift, with more abrupt banks and narrower meadows. To the latter I go to see the ripple, and the varied bottom with its stones and sands and shadows; to the former for the influence of its dark water resting on invisible mud, and for its reflections . . . We have become accustomed to the summer. It has acquired a certain eternity"); November 23, 1850 (“I lay down on the ice and look through at the bottom.”) See also Walden (“The first ice is especially interesting and perfect, being hard, dark, and transparent, and affords the best opportunity that ever offers for examining the bottom where it is shallow; for you can lie at your length on ice only an inch thick, like a skater insect on the surface of the water, and study the bottom at your leisure, only two or three inches distant, like a picture behind a glass.”); December 19, 1856 ("The ice is now from two and a half to three inches thick, a transparent green ice, through which I see the bottom "); Walden, Where I lived and what I lived for ("While I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars")
You may now observe plainly the habit of the rabbits to run in paths about the swamps. See January 1, 1856 ("I see the tracks apparently of a white rabbit, afterward many tracks of gray rabbits . . . Many have run in one course."); January 9, 1856 ("The rabbits have run in paths about the swamp."); January 10, 1856 ("A few rabbits have run in a path amid the blueberries and alders about the edge of the swamp.); see also November 24, 1860 ("Though a slight touch . . . The rabbits in the swamps enjoy it, as well as you.”); December 22, 1850 ("I see more tracks in the swamps than elsewhere.”); December 22, 1853 ("Last night's sprinkling of snow does not now whiten the ground, except that here in the swamp it whitens the ice and already I see the tracks of rabbits on it."); December 22, 1858 ("I see where a rabbit has hopped across [Walden] in the slosh last night, making a track larger than a man’s ordinarily is."); February 17, 1854 ("The track of the white rabbit is gigantic compared with that of the gray one.")
February 3. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, February 3
Thin transparent ice –
I see the pebbly bottom
same as in summer.
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, A cold and windy Sunday.
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 © 2009-2026
https://tinyurl.com/hdt-560203
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