9 A. M. —Up Assebet.
A still and warm but overcast morning, threatening rain.
I now again hear the song sparrow’s tinkle along the riverside, probably to be heard for a day or two, and a robin, which also has been heard a day or two.
The ground is almost completely bare, and but little ice forms at night along the riverside.
I meet Goodwin paddling up the still, dark river on his first voyage to Fair Haven for the season, looking for muskrats and from time to time picking driftwood—logs and boards, etc.— out of the water and laying it up to dry on the bank, to eke out his wood-pile with. He says that the frost is not out so that he can lay wall, and so he thought he go and see what there was at Fair Haven.
Says that when you hear a woodpecker’s rat-tat-tat-tat-tat on a dead tree it is a sign of rain.
While Emerson sits writing [in] his study this still, overcast, moist day, Goodwin is paddling up the still, dark river. Emerson burns twenty-five cords of wood and fourteen tons of coal; Goodwin perhaps a cord and a half, much of which he picks out of the river.
He says he’d rather have a boat leak some for fishing.
I hear the report of his gun from time to time for an hour, heralding the death of a muskrat and reverberating far down the river. Goodwin had just seen Melvin disappearing up the North River, and I turn up thither after him.
The ice-belt still clings to the bank on each side, a foot or more above the water, and is now fringed with icicles of various lengths, only an inch or two apart, where it is melting by day and dripping into the river. Being distinctly reflected, you think you see two, two feet apart, the water-line not being seen.
I land and walk half-way up the hill.
A red squirrel runs nimbly before me along the wall, his tail in the air at a right angle with his body; leaps into a walnut and winds up his clock.
The reindeer lichens on the pitch pine plain are moist and flacid.
I hear the faint fine notes of apparent nuthatches coursing up the pitch pines, a pair of them, one answering to the other, as it were like a vibrating watch-spring. Then, at a distance, that whar-whar whar-whar-whar-whar, which after all I suspect may be the note of the nuthatch and not a woodpecker.
And now from far southward coming on through the air, the chattering of blackbirds, —probably red-wings, for I hear an imperfect conqueree.
On the pitch pine plain, nearly the whole of a small turtle’s egg, by the side of its excavated nest.
Save with my boat the dead top of (apparently) a pine, divested of its bark and bleached. Before the bark fell off it was curiously etched by-worms in variously curved lines and half-circles, often with regular short recurving branches.
Pere Buteux, going on commission to the Attikamegues in 1651, describes a fall away up there, where a river falls into a sort of trough or cradle a hundred paces long.
“In this cradle the river boils (bouillonne) in such a fashion, that if you cast a stick (baston) into it, it remains some time without appearing, then all at once it elevates itself (il s’éléve en haut) to the height of two pikes, at forty or fifty paces from the place where you cast it in.”It is to be observed that in the old deed of the Hunt farm, written in 1701, though the whole, consisting of something more than one hundred and fifty acres, is minutely described in thirteen different pieces, no part is described as woodland or wood-lot, only one piece as partly unimproved. This shows how little account was made of wood. Mr. Nathan Brooks reminds me that not till recently, i. e. not till within forty years, have wood-lots begun to be taxed for anything like their full value.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 18, 1857
I now again hear the song sparrow’s tinkle along the riverside, probably to be heard for a day or two. See March 18, 1852 ("I hear the song sparrow's simple strain, most genuine herald of the spring.”); March 11, 1854 ("On Tuesday, the 7th, I heard the first song sparrow chirp, and saw it flit silently from alder to alder. This pleasant morning after three days' rain and mist, they generally forthburst into sprayey song from the low trees along the river. The developing of their song is gradual but sure, like the expanding of a flower. This is the first song I have heard."); March 27, 1857 ("But now chiefly there comes borne on the breeze the tinkle of the song sparrow along the river side”); March 18, 1858 (“Almost every bush has its song sparrow this morning, and their tinkling strains are heard on all sides.”). See also Henry Thoreau, A Book of the Seasons: the Song Sparrow (Fringilla melodia).
[Goodwin] says that when you hear a woodpecker’s rat-tat-tat-tat-tat on a dead tree it is a sign of rain. See March 18, 1853 ("The tapping of the woodpecker about this time.”); March 11, 1859 (“But methinks the sound of the woodpecker tapping is as much a spring note as any these mornings."); March 13, 1855 (“I hear the rapid tapping of the woodpecker from over the water.”); March 15, 1854 ("I hear that peculiar, interesting loud hollow tapping of a woodpecker from over the water.”) See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Pigeon Woodpecker (flicker).
That whar-whar whar-whar-whar-whar . . . may be the note of the nuthatch and not a woodpecker. See March 13, 1853 (“But what was that familiar spring sound from the pine wood across the river, a sharp vetter vetter vetter vetter,”); February 18, 1857 (" 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.”) ; March 17, 1857 (“It is only some very early still, warm, and pleasant morning in February or March that I notice that woodpecker-like whar-whar-whar-whar-whar-whar, earliest spring sound.”); March 5, 1859 ("I heard a white-bellied nuthatch on an elm within twenty feet, uttering peculiar notes and more like a song than I remember to have heard from it.. . .It was something like to-what what what what what, rapidly repeated, and not the usual gnah gnah; and this instant it occurs to me that this may be that earliest spring note which I hear, and have referred to a woodpecker! . . . It is the spring note of the nuthatch")
The slate-colored sparrow/dark-eyed junco. See March 20, 1852 ("And now, within a day or two, I have noticed the chubby slate-colored snowbird (Fringilla hyemalis?), and I drive the flocks before me on the railroad causeway as I walk. It has two white feathers in its tail.”); March 15, 1854 (“Hear on the alders by the river the lill lill lill lill of the first F. hyemalis,”)
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