Tracks in fresh snow.

February 9.

February 9, 2020

How much the northwest wind prevails in the winter! Almost all our storms come from that quarter, and the ridges of snow-drifts run that way. 

If the Indians placed their heaven in the southwest on account of the warmth of the southwest wind, they might have made a stern winter god of the northwest wind. 

P. M. — Up Assabet. 3.30 P. M., thermometer 30°. 

This and yesterday comparatively warm weather. Half an inch of snow fell this forenoon, but now it has cleared up. 

I see a few squirrel-tracks, but no mice-tracks, for no night has intervened since the snow. 

It is only where the river washes a wooded bank that I see mice or even squirrel tracks; elsewhere only where dogs and foxes have traversed it. For example, there are no tracks on the side of the river against Hosmer’s and Emerson’s land, though many alders, etc., there, but many tracks commonly on the opposite wooded side. 

In the swamp west of Pigeon Rock, I see where the rabbits have bitten off the swamp white oak sprouts, where they have sprung up tender, looking like poplar, from stocks broken by the ice last winter. 

I hear a phoebe note from a chickadee. 

See a pensile nest eighteen feet high, within a lichen clad red maple on the edge of the Assabet Spring or Pink Azalea Swamp. It looks very much like a bunch of the lichens dangling, and I was not sure it was not till I climb up to it. 

Without, it is chiefly the coarse greenish lichens of the maple, bound with coarse bits of bark and perhaps bleached milkweed bark (?) and brown cocoon silk, and within, a thin lining of pine needles, hemlock twigs, and the like. Is it a yellow throat vireo’s? 

It is not shaped like the red-eye’s, on a side twig to one of the limbs and about a foot from the end of the twig.

H.D. Thoreau, Journal, February 9, 1856

Half an inch of snow fell this forenoon, but now it has cleared up. See February 9, 1851 ("Now we do not think of autumn when we look on this snow. That earth is effectually buried. It is midwinter."); February 9, 1855 ("A very fine and dry snow, about a foot deep on a level"); February 9, 1858 (" Begins to snow at noon, and about one inch falls, whitening the ground.")

I hear a phoebe note from a chickadee. See February 9, 1854 ("I heard one wiry phe-be.") See also  January 9, 1858 ("Some chickadees come flitting close to me, and one utters its spring note, phe-be, for which I feel under obligations to him."); March 1, 1856 ("I hear several times the fine-drawn phe-be note of the chickadee, which I heard only once during the winter. Singular that I should hear this on the first spring day. “); March 1, 1854 ("I hear the phoebe or spring note of the chickadee,”); March 10, 1852 ("Hear the phoebe note of the chickadee to-day for the first time. ") See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, the Chickadee in Winter

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,  February 9

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 ©  2009-2023