Thursday, February 23, 2017

I have seen signs of the spring.

February 23. 

 P. M. — See two yellow-spotted tortoises in the ditch south of Trillium Wood. 

 You saunter expectant in the mild air along the soft edge of a ditch filled with melted snow and paved with leaves, in some sheltered place, yet perhaps with some ice at one end still, and are thrilled to see stirring amid the leaves at the bottom, sluggishly burying themselves from your sight again, these brilliantly spotted creatures. There are commonly two, at least. 

 The tortoise is stirring in the ditches again. In your latest spring they still look incredibly strange when first seen, and not like cohabitants and contemporaries of yours. 

 What mean these turtles, these coins of the muddy mint issued in early spring? The bright spots on their backs are vain unless I behold them. The spots seem brighter than ever when first beheld in the spring, as does the bark of the willow. 

 I have seen signs of the spring. I have seen a frog swiftly sinking in a pool, or where he dimpled the surface as he leapt in. I have seen the brilliant spotted tortoises stirring at the bottom of ditches. I have seen the clear sap trickling from the red maple.

 H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 23, 1857

 The bright spots on their backs are vain unless I behold them. See February 20, 1857 ("What is the relation between a bird and the ear that appreciates its melody, to whom, perchance, it is more charming and significant than to any else? Certainly they are intimately related, and the one was made for the other.")

Two yellow-spotted tortoises in the ditch. See March 22, 1853 ("The Emys guttata is first found in warm, muddy ditches.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Yellow-Spotted Turtle (Emys guttata)

A frog swiftly sinking in a pool, or where he dimpled the surface as he leapt in. See See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Signs of the Spring: frogs and turtles stirring

The clear sap trickling from the red maple. See February 21, 1857 ("Am surprised to see this afternoon a boy collecting red maple sap from some trees behind George Hubbard's. It runs freely. The earliest sap I made to flow last year was March 14th . . .The river for some days has been open and its sap visibly flowing, like the maple. ")

I have seen signs of the Spring. See 
January 12, 1855 ("Perhaps what most moves us in winter is some reminiscence of far-off summer. How we leap by the side of the open brooks! What beauty in the running brooks! What life! What society! The cold is merely superficial; it is summer still at the core, far, far within. It is in the cawing of the crow, the crowing of the cock, the warmth of the sun on our backs")
Walden, Spring ("One attraction in coming to the woods to live was that I should have leisure and opportunity to see the spring come in. The ice in the pond at length begins to be honey-combed, and I can set my heel in it as I walk. Fogs and rains and warmer suns are gradually melting the snow; the days have grown sensibly longer; and I see how I shall get through the winter without adding to my wood-pile, for large fires are no longer necessary. II am on the alert for the first signs of spring, to hear the chance note of some arriving bird, or the striped squirrel’s chirp, for his stores must be now nearly exhausted, or see the woodchuck venture out of his winter quarters.")   
January 22, 1859 ("Perhaps the caterpillars, etc., crawl forth in sunny and warm days in midwinter when the earth is bare, and so supply the birds, and are ready to be washed away by a flow of water! I find thus a great variety of living insects now washed out. Four kinds of caterpillars, and also the glow-worm-like creature so common, grasshoppers, crickets, and many bugs,. . . spiders, and snow-fleas. A sudden thaw is, then, a great relief to crows and other birds that may have been put to it for food.")   
January 22, 1860 (""I see some insects, of about this form
 
on the snow) 
January 23, 1854 (" The increased length of the days is very observable of late.")  
January 23, 1855 ("The radical leaves of the shepherd’s-purse, seen in green circles on the water-washed plowed grounds, remind me of the internal heat and life of the globe, anon to burst forth anew")
January 25, 1853 (" There is something springlike in this afternoon . . . The earth and sun appear to have approached some degrees") 
January 25, 1855 (" For a week or two the days have been sensibly longer, and it is quite light now when the five-o’clock train comes in ")  
January 29, 1852 ("The green mosses on the rocks are evidently nourished and kept bright by the snows lying on them a part of the year.")  
January 30, 1860 ("There are certain sounds invariably heard in warm and thawing days in winter, such as the crowing of cocks, the cawing of crows, and sometimes the gobbling of turkeys. ")  
January 31, 1854 ("The wind is more southerly, and now the warmth of the sun prevails, and is felt on the back. The snow softens and melts. ") 
February 1, 1857 ("Thermometer at 42°.") 
February 2, 1854 ("Already we begin to anticipate spring, and this is an important difference between this time and a month ago. ")  
 February 2, 1854 ("There are a few greenish radical leaves to be seen, — primrose and johnswort, strawberry, etc., and spleenwort still green in the clefts")  
February 4, 1852 (".Now the white pine are a misty blue; anon a lively, silvery light plays on them, and they seem to erect themselves unusually.") 
February 6, 1857 ("Thermometer at noon 52°.")   
February 6, 1853  ("Observed some buds on a young apple tree, partially unfolded at the extremity and apparently swollen. Probably blossom-buds.") 
February 6, 1856  ("The down is just peeping out from some of the aspen buds") 
February 7, 1857 ("The thermometer was at 52° when I came out at 3 p.m. . . . It is so warm that I am obliged to take off my greatcoat and carry it on my arm.")   
February 7, 1858 ("Little mounds or tufts of yellowish or golden moss in the young woods look like sunlight on the ground 
February 8, 1856 ("The snow is soft, and the eaves begin to run as not for many weeks.") 
February 8, 1857  ("It is exciting to walk over the moist, bare pastures, though slumping four or five inches, and see the green mosses again. ") 
 February 8, 1857 ("the softened air of these warm February days which have broken the back of the winter")  
February 8. 1860 ("40°and upward may be called a warm day in the winter. We have had much of this weather for a month past, reminding us of spring.") 
February 8, 1860 ("About an old boat frozen in, I see a great many little gyrinus-shaped bugs swimming about in the water above the ice") 
 February 8, 1860  ("There is a peculiarity in the air when the temperature is thus high and the weather fair, at this season, which makes sounds more clear and pervading, as if they trusted themselves abroad further in this genial state of the air.")   
.February 8, 1860 ("February may be called earine (springlike)") 
February 9, 1851 ("The last half of January was warm and thawy. The swift streams were open, and the muskrats were seen swimming and diving and bringing up clams, leaving their shells on the ice. We had now forgotten summer and autumn, but had already begun to anticipate spring. ")  
February 9, 1854 ("The chickadees flew to me, as if glad to see me . . . I heard one wiry phe-be.")    
.February 9, 1854 ("There is a peculiar softness and luminousness in the air this morning, perhaps the light being diffused by vapor. It is such a warm, moist, or softened, sunlit air as we are wont to hear the first bluebird's warble in.") 
 February 9, 1854 ("The voices of the school-children sound like spring") 
February 9, 1854 (" The sun is reflected from a hundred rippling sluices of snow-water finding its level in the fields")  
 February 9, 1856 ("I hear a phoebe note from a chickadee.") 
 February 11, 1853 ("Saw a large wood tortoise stirring in the Mill Brook.") 
February 12, 1854 (""On those parts of the hill which are bare, I see the radical leaves of the butter cup, mouse-ear, and the thistle) 
February 12, 1855 ("The eaves run fast on the south side of houses, and, as usual in this state of the air, the cawing of crows at a distance")    
February 12, 1856 (" Heard the eaves drop all night. The thermometer at 8.30 A. M., 42° . . . How different the sunlight over thawing snow from the same over dry, frozen snow! The former excites me strangely, and I experience a springlike melting in my thoughts.") 
February 12, 1860  ("That dark-eyed water, especially when I see it at right angles with the direction of the sun, is it not the first sign of spring? . . .When I see the water exposed in midwinter, it is as if I saw a skunk or even a striped squirrel out. ")  
 February 13, 1851 ("Saw in a warm, muddy brook in Sudbury, quite open and exposed, the skunk-cabbage spathes above water. The tops of the spathes were frost- bitten, but the fruit sound. There was one partly expanded. The first flower of the season.") 
 February 14, 1854 ("These birds are all feeding and flitting along together . . . I cannot but think that this sprightly association and readiness to burst into song has to do with the prospect of spring, — more light and warmth and thawing weather.")  
 February 14, 1854 ("The distant crowing of cocks and the divine harmony  of the telegraph, — all spring-promising sounds. ")  
February 14, 1857 ("It is a fine, somewhat springlike day.")    
February 15, 1855 ("It is so long since I have heard it, that the steady, soaking, rushing sound of the rain on the shingles is musical. The fire needs no replenishing, and we save our fuel. It seems like a distant forerunner of spring.") 
February 16, 1854 (" See two large hawks circling over the woods by Walden, hunting, — the first I have seen since December 15th")   
February 16, 1855 (""It is pleasant to see elsewhere, in fields and on banks, so many green radical leaves only half killed by the winter. ) 
February 16, 1856 ("I hear the eaves running before I come out, and our thermometer at 2 P. M. is 38°.The sun is most pleasantly warm on my cheek; the melting snow shines in the ruts; the cocks crow more than usual in barns; my greatcoat is an incumbrance.") 
 February 17, 1857  ("TThermometer at 1 p.m., 60°. The river is fairly breaking up, and men are out with guns after muskrats") .
 February 17, 1855 (" Hear this morning, at the new stone bridge, from the hill, that singular springlike note of a bird which I heard once before one year about this time (under Fair Haven Hill) . . . Can it be a jay? or a pigeon woodpecker? Is it not the earliest springward note of a bird?")  
February 18, 1854 ("I begin to think that my wood will last.")    
February 18, 1854 ("I  see on ice by the riverside, front of N. Barrett's, very slender insects a third of an inch long, with grayish folded wings reaching far behind and two antennæ. Somewhat in general appearance like the long wasps")  
February 18, 1855  (" Now for the first time decidedly there is something spring-suggesting in the air and light. Though not particularly warm, the light of the sun (now travelling so much higher) on the russet fields, —the ground being nearly all bare, —and on the sand and the pines, is suddenly yellower. It is the earliest day-breaking of the year. ")  
February 18, 1855 (" I listen ever for something springlike in the notes of birds, some peculiar tinkling notes. ")    
February 18, 1857 ("Hear a fly buzz amid some willows. Thermometer at 1 p.m., 65. ")
February 18, 1857 (" When I step out into the yard I hear that earliest spring note from some bird, perhaps a pigeon woodpecker (or can it be a nuthatch, whose ordinary note I hear?), the rapid whar whar, whar whar, whar whar, which I have so often heard before any other note.")  
February 19, 1852 ("The lengthening of the days, commenced a good while ago, is a kind of forerunner of the spring.")
February 19, 1857 (" Some willow catkins have crept a quarter of an inch from under their scales and look very red, probably on account of the warm weather")  
 February 20, 1855 ("I see from my window the bright-blue water here and there between the ice and on the meadow.") 
February 20, 1860 ("I see now, in the ruts in sand on hills in the road, those interesting ripples which I only notice to advantage in very shallow running water, a phenomenon almost, as it were, confined to melted snow running in ruts in the road in a thaw") 
February 21, 1855 ("We now notice the snow on the mountains, because on the remote rim of the horizon its whiteness contrasts with the russet and darker hues of our bare fields ") 
February 21, 1855 ("I see the peculiar softened blue sky of spring over the tops of the pines, and, when I am sheltered from the wind, I feel the warmer sun of the season reflected from the withered grass and twigs")   
February 21, 1855( "I realize what was incredible to me before, that there is a new life in Nature beginning to awake, that her halls are being swept and prepared for a new occupant.") 
February 21, 1855 ("It is whispered through all the aisles of the forest that another spring is approaching. The wood mouse listens at the mouth of his burrow, and the chickadee passes the news along.") 
February 21, 1857  (" Am surprised to see this afternoon a boy collecting red maple sap from some trees behind George Hubbard's. It runs freely. The earliest sap I made to flow last year was March 14th . . .The river for some days has been open and its sap visibly flowing, like the maple")   
February 22, 1852 ("usnea are so expanded and puffed out with light and life, with their reddish or rosaceous fruit, it is a true lichen day.")
February 22, 1855 (" The westerly wind is rather raw, but in sheltered places it is deliciously warm. ") 
February 23, 1856 ("It is inspiriting to feel the increased heat of the sun reflected from the snow.")    
February 23, 1860 ("I walk over the moist Nawshawtuct hillside and see the green radical leaves of the buttercup, shepherd's purse (circular), sorrel, chickweed, cerastium, etc., revealed. ")
February 23, 1860 ("About 4 P. M. a smart shower, ushered in by thunder and succeeded by a brilliant rainbow "); 
February 24, 1852  ("I am reminded of spring by the quality of the air. The cock-crowing and even the telegraph harp prophesy it") 
February 24, 1852  ("I now hear at a distance the sound of the laborer's sledge on the rails. The very sound of men's work reminds, advertises, me of the coming of spring.")
February 24, 1852 ("Observe the poplar's swollen buds and the brightness of the willow's bark. It is a natural resurrection, an experience of immortality..") 
February 24, 1855 ("The brightening of the willows or of osiers, —that is a season in the spring, showing that the dormant sap is awakened . . .  I remember it as a prominent phenomenon affecting the face of Nature, a gladdening of her face. You will often fancy that they look brighter before the spring has come, and when there has been no change in them")
February 24, 1857 ("I have seen the probings of skunks for a week or more. . . . They are very busy these nights")   
 February 24, 1857  ("As I cross from the causeway to the hill, thinking of the bluebird, I that instant hear one's note from deep in the softened air. It is already 40°, and by noon is between 50° and 60°. As the day advances I hear more bluebirds and see their azure flakes settling on the fence-posts. Their short, rich, crispy warble curls through the air..") 
 February 24, 1857 (" I walk without a greatcoat. A chickadee with its winter lisp flits over, and I think it is time to hear its phebe note, and that instant it pipes it forth.") 
February 25, 1856 ("Am surprised to see some little minnows only an inch long in an open place in Well Meadow Brook")
February 25, 1857 ("The flies buzz out of doors ")
February 25, 1857 ("The thermometer is at 65° at noon") 
February 25, 1859 ("I heard this morning a nuthatch on the elms in the street; and so their gnah gnah is a herald of the spring. ") 
February 25, 1860 ("For a day or two past I have seen in various places the small tracks apparently of skunks. They appear to come out commonly in the warmer weather in the latter part of February.") 
February 25, 1860 ("I noticed yesterday in the street some dryness of stones at crossings and in the road and sidewalk here and there, and even two or three boys beginning to play at marbles, so ready are they to get at the earth.") 
February 26, 1851 ("See five red-wings and a song sparrow(?) this afternoon")  
February 26, 1857 ("I saw Mrs. Brooks's spiraeas to-day grown half an inch (!!), whose starting I heard of on the 18th")   
February 26, 1857 ("Paint the bottom of my boat.")
February 27. 1852 ("The buds of the aspen show a part of their down or silky catkins. ") 
February 27. 1852 ("The North Branch has burst its icy fetters. This restless and now swollen stream, flowing with with ice on either side, sparkles in the clear, cool air. . . . If rivers come out of their icy prison thus bright and immortal, shall not I too resume my spring life with joy and hope?")  
February 27, 1857 ("Before I opened the window this cold morning, I heard the peep of a robin, that sound so often heard in cheerless or else rainy weather, so often heard first borne on the cutting March wind or through sleet or rain, as if its coming were premature")
February 27, 1860 (" I had noticed for some time, far in the middle of the Great Meadows, something dazzlingly white . . .  I see it to be the white breast of a male sheldrake accompanied perhaps by his mate . . .This is the first bird of the spring that I have seen or heard of.")    
February 27, 1861 ("Walking down the Boston road under the hill this side Clark's, it occurs to me that I have just heard a bluebird. I stop and listen to hear it again, but cannot tell whither it comes.") 
February 28, 1857 ("At the Cliff, the tower-mustard, early crowfoot, and perhaps buttercup appear to have started of late. It takes several years' faithful search to learn where to look for the earliest flowers.")  
March 1, 1854 ("For some days past the surface of the earth, covered with water, or with ice where the snow is washed off, has shone in the sun as it does only at the approach of spring, methinks.")   
March 2, 1860 ("Two or three tufts of carex have shot up in Hosmer’s cold spring ditch and been frost-bitten.") 
March 5, 1857 ("See the tracks of a woodchuck in the sand-heap about the mouth of his hole, where he has cleared out his entry") 
March 5, 1859  ("This instant it occurs to me that this may be that earliest spring note which I hear, and have referred to a woodpecker! (This is before I have chanced to see a bluebird , blackbird , or robin in Concord this year.) It is the spring note of the nuthatch")  
March 6, 1852 ("Found three or four parmelias caperata in fruit on a white oak on the high river-bank between Tarbell's and Harrington’s.") 
March 6, 1855 ("The small gyrinus is circling in the brook") 
March 7, 1852 ("At 9 o'clock P.M to the woods by the full moon. It is rather mild to-night. I can walk without gloves. There is no snow on the trees. The ground is thinly covered with a crusted snow, through which the dead grass and weeds appear, telling the nearness of spring")  
March 7, 1853 ("What is the earliest sign of spring? The motion of worms and insects? The flow of sap in trees and the swelling of buds? Do not the insects awake with the flow of the sap? Bluebirds, etc., probably do not come till insects come out. Or are there earlier signs in the water? - the tortoises, frogs")  
March 7, 1855 ("I see many tadpoles of medium or full size in deep warm ditches in Hubbard’s meadow. They may probably be seen as soon as the ditches are open, thus earlier than frogs. At his bridge over the brook it must have been a trout I saw glance,—rather dark, as big as my finger.")   
March 5, 1857 ("See the tracks of a woodchuck in the sand-heap about the mouth of his hole, where he has cleared out his entry. ") 
March 7, 1859 ("I come out to hear a spring bird, the ground generally covered with snow yet and the channel of the river only partly open.  On the Hill I hear first the tapping of a small woodpecker.  ")
March 8, 1855 ("This morning I got my boat out of the cellar and turned it up in the yard to let the seams open before I calk it.  The blue river, now almost completely open, admonishes me to be swift. ")  
March 8, 1860 ("You cannot say that vegetation absolutely ceases at any season in this latitude; for there is grass in some warm exposures and in springy places, always growing more or less, and willow catkins expanding and peeping out a little further every warm day from the very beginning of winter, and the skunk cabbage buds being developed and actually flowering sometimes in the winter, and the sap flowing [in] the maples in midwinter in some days,. . .There is something of spring in all seasons. ") 
March 10, 1853 (" The alder's catkins — the earliest of them — are very plainly expanding, or, rather, the scales are loose and separated, and the whole catkin relaxed. ")  
March 10, 1855 ("You are always surprised by the sight of the first spring bird or insect; they seem premature, and there is no such evidence of spring as themselves, so that they literally fetch the year about.  It is thus when I hear the first robin or bluebird or, looking along the brooks, see the first water-bugs out circling. But you think, They have come, and Nature cannot recede.") 
March 10, 1855 ("I go looking deeper for tortoises, when suddenly my eye rests on these black circling apple seeds in some smoother bay. .")
March 10, 1859 ("See in one place a small swarm of insects flying or gyrating, dancing like large tipulidae. The dance within the compass of a foot always above a piece of snow of the same size in the midst of bare ground.")
March 12, 1854 ("A new feature is being added to the landscape, and that is expanses and reaches of blue water.  . . .Toward night the water becomes smooth and beautiful. Men are eager to launch their boats and paddle over the meadows.")
March 14, 1858  (" I see a Fringilla hyemalis, the first bird, perchance, — unless one hawk, – which is an evidence of spring, though they lingered with us the past unusual winter, at least till the 19th of January. They are now getting back earlier than our permanent summer residents. It flits past with a rattling or grating chip, showing its two white tail-feathers. ") 
 March 15, 1854 ("Pleasant morning, unexpectedly. Hear on the alders by the river the lill lill lill lill of the first F. hyemalis, mingled with song sparrows and tree sparrows.")   
. March 15, 1860 ("Am surprised to hear, from the pool behind Lee's Cliff, the croaking of the wood frog. It is all alive with them, and I see them spread out on the surface. Their note is somewhat in harmony with the rustling of the now drier leaves. It is more like the note of the classical frog, as described by Aristophanes, etc. How suddenly they awake! yesterday, as it were, asleep and dormant, to-day as lively as ever they are. The awakening of the leafy woodland pools.")  
 March 16, 1854 (“ It is warm weather. A thunder-storm in the evening.”)  
March 17, 1857 (“No mortal is alert enough to be present at the first dawn of the spring") 
March 16, 1859   ("Launch my boat and sail to Ball's Hill. It is fine clear weather and a strong northwest wind.")  
 March 18, 1853 (" At Conantum Cliff the columbines have started and the saxifrage even,. . .These plants waste not a day, not a moment, suitable to their development.") 
March 18, 1860   ("Skunk-cabbage, now generally and abundantly in bloom all along under Clamshell . . .There is but one flower in bloom in the town, and this insect knows where to find it. You little think that it knows the locality of early flowers better than you.") 
March 19, 1858 ("I hear turkeys gobble. This too, I suppose, is a spring sound.")
March 21, 1853 ("On the warm, dry cliff, looking south over Beaver Pond, I am surprised to see a large butterfly, black with buff-edged wings, so tender a creature to be out so early, and, when alighted, opening and shutting its wings. What does it do these frosty nights? Its chrysalis must have hung in some sunny nook of the rocks.") 
March 21, 1853 ("Saw two more of those large black and buff butterflies. The same degree of heat brings them out everywhere. ") 
March 22, 1860  ("The phenomena of an average March ") 
March 23, 1856 ("I spend a considerable portion of my time observing the habits of the wild animals, my brute neighbors. By their various movements and migrations they fetch the year about to me. Very significant are the flight of geese. ") 
March 23, 1859   ("We hear the peep of one hylodes somewhere in this sheltered recess in the woods. And afterward, on the Lee side, I hear a single croak from a wood frog.  . . . Thus we sit on that rock, hear the first wood frog's croak,")
March 24, 1855 ("It is too cold to think of those signs of spring which I find recorded under this date last year. The earliest signs of spring in vegetation noticed thus far are the maple sap, the willow catkins, grass on south banks, and perhaps cowslip in sheltered places. Alder catkins loosened, and also white maple buds loosened. I am not sure that the osiers are decidedly brighter yet.")
See also  A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Signs of the Spring:
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Osier in Winter and early Spring
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, A Sunny Nook in Spring

*****

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 ©  2009-2024

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