The miller now raises his gate and lets his pond run off.

May 7. 

Wednesday. Fresh easterly wind. 

2 P. M. — To bear-berry on Major Heywood road. 

In Deacon Hosmer’s barn meadows, hear the don’t don’t of a bullfrog. 

In the first hollow in the bank this side of Clamshell, where sand has been dug for the meadow, are a hundred or more bank swallows at 2 P. M. (I suspect I have seen them for some time) engaged in prospecting and digging their holes and circling about. It is a snug place for them,—though the upright portion of the bank is only four or five feet high, — a semi-circular recess facing the southeast. Some are within scratching out the sand, -- I see it cast out of the holes behind them, -- others hanging on to the entrance of the holes, others on the flat sandy space beneath in front, and others circling about, a dozen rods over the meadow. 

Theirs is a low, dry, grating twitter, or rather rattle, less metallic or musical than the vite vite and twittering notes of barn and white-bellied swallows. 

They are white-bellied, dark winged and tailed, with a crescent of white nearly around the lower part of the neck, and mouse-colored heads and backs. The upper and greater part of this bank is a coarse sliding gravel, and they build only in the perpendicular and sandy part (I sit and watch them within three or four rods) and close to the upper part of it. 

While I am looking, they all suddenly with one consent take to wing, and circle over the hillside and meadow, as if they chose to work at making their holes a little while at a time only. I find the holes on an average about a foot deep only as yet, some but a few inches. 

In the meanwhile I hear, through this fresh, raw east wind, the te-a-lea of myrtle-birds from the woods across the-river. I hear the evergreen-forest note close by; and hear and see many myrtle-birds, at the same time that I hear what I have called the black and white creeper’s note. Have I ever confounded them? 

Over the edge of Miles’s mill-pond, now running off, a bumblebee goes humming over the dry brush. I think I saw one on the 5th also. 

Miles began last night to let the water run off. The pond falls about three inches in twenty-four hours. The brook below is full of fishes, -—suckers, pouts, eels, trouts, -— endeavoring to get up, but his dam prevents. 

This morning his young man killed a number of pouts and eels and suckers with a shovel. Here he comes now, at 4 P. M., with a spear, and raises the gate and waits a few moments for the water, which was two or three feet deep just below the mill, to run off; and then I see a good-sized trout, four or five pouts, and several suckers, and one eel still making their way upward, though the water hardly covers their backs. They do not turn and go down the stream with the water which is thus suddenly and rapidly let off. 

Meanwhile this young man picks out half a dozen pouts, eels, and suckers with his spear. Twenty rods down the brook I saw many more suckers trying to make their way up. They found it difficult now to get over the bars where the water was very shallow, and were some times confined to the hollows between. I saw two or three in company trying to squeeze through a narrow passage under some alder boughs, which was blocked up by two spotted tortoises; and one large eel squirming directly over an indifferent wood turtle, concluding seemed unwilling to turn and go down the brook, and for the most part would come so near in the shallow water that they could easily be struck with the spear. 

The water thus suddenly let off, there were many spotted and wood tortoises seen crawling about on the bottom. 

One little snapping (making the fifth of its species here), three and a half inches long, going down a few rods below the dam. This, like the larger ones, going down the brook. Where to? and why? He can not be old enough to breed yet, and it is too early to be laying at the desert. 

This young snapping turtle was very strong-scented. Its tail appeared particularly long, as long as its shell, and very tapering, and very distinctly and sharply keeled. The first half-dozen of its dorsal serrations were very prominent and sharp, and its bill was very sharp also. It had four sharp points on each side of its shell behind, and I noticed that it swam better than other kinds of tortoises. Its head was as large as that of an ordinary wood tortoise. There were tracks of other turtles on the sandy bank.

The young man said that the eels came along as many as three in an hour in the night, and this morning there were a great many of them about the wheel. Last fall (this dam being made late in the fall), they found in the hollow under the wheel which they bailed out sixteen trout which weighed eight pounds.

It is surprising how many fishes will run up and breed in such a little brook as this. The fishes generally would conceal themselves in the mud under a projecting bank, or in some deep hole in the sand in mid-channel which communicated with the mud beneath. One of those larger snapping turtles seized the one I had by the head and they braced and struggled awhile. 

The miller now raises his gate and lets his pond run off. Do they not generally earlier? 

For a week the road has been full of cattle going up country.

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

This dam being made late in the fall. . . . See  April 28, 1856 ("I began to survey the meadow there early, before Miles’s new mill had been running long this Monday morning and flooded it, but a great stream of water was already rushing down the brook, and it almost rose over our boots in the meadow before we had done.”); April 25, 1856 ("Warren Miles had caught three more snapping turtles since yesterday, at his mill, . . . These turtles have been disturbed or revealed by his operations.”); April 24 1856 (Warren Miles at his new mill tells me eels can’t get above his mill now, in the spring.”); February 28, 1856 ("Miles is repairing the damage done at his new mill by the dam giving way.”)

I hear the evergreen-forest note close by; and hear and see many myrtle-birds, at the same time that I hear what I have called the black and white creeper’s note. Have I ever confounded them? See May 6, 1855 ("The er er twe, ter ter twe, evergreen-forest note."); May 11, 1854 ("Hear the evergreen-forest note"); May 15, 1858 ("Hear the evergreen-forest note");  June 1, 1854 ("Hear my evergreen-forest note, sounding rather raspingly as usual, where there are large oaks and pines mingled. It is very difficult to discover now that the leaves are grown, as it frequents the tops of the trees. But I get a glimpse of its black throat and, I think, yellow head "); July 10 1854 ("Evergreen-forest note, I think, still.") and May 30, 1855 ("In the thick of the wood between railroad and Turnpike, hear the evergreen forest note, and see probably the bird,-- black throat, greenish-yellow or yellowish-green head and back, light-slate (?) wings with two white bars. Is it not the black-throated green warbler?”).

For a week the road has been full of cattle going up country. See May 6, 1855 ("Road full of cattle going up country.”);  May 8, 1854 ("I hear the voices of farmers driving their cows past to their up-country pastures now."); May 10, 1852 ("This Monday the streets are full of cattle being driven up-country, — cows and calves and colts.")