Caught a croaking frog in some smooth water in the railroad gutter.

April 4. 

April 4;, 2017

Saturday. Walk down the shore of the river. 

A Dutchman pushes out in his skiff after quahogs. He also took his eel-spear, thinking to try for eels if he could not get quahogs, for, owing to the late cold weather, they might still be buried in the mud. I saw him raking up,the quahogs on the flats at high (?) tide, in two or three feet of water. He used a sort of coarse, long-pronged hoe. Keeps anchoring on the flats and searches for a clam on the bottom with his eye, then rakes it up and picks it off his rake. 

Am not sure what kind of large gulls I see there, some more white, some darker, methinks, than the herring gull.

R. tells me that he found dead in his piazza the south side of his house, the 23d of last January, the snow being very deep and the thermometer -12° at sunrise, a warbler, which he sent to Brewer. I read Brewer’s note to him, in which he said that he took it to be the Sylvicola coronata and would give it to the Natural History Society, thinking it remarkable that it was found at that time. B. says that he discovered “for the first time its nest in the heart of Nova Scotia near Parrsboro mountains [I think last season]. It was the only new egg of that trip. Yet I felt well repaid, for ‘no other white man had ever before seen that egg to know it,’ as Audubon says of another species.” 

Caught a croaking frog in some smooth water in the railroad gutter. Above it was a uniform (perhaps olive?) brown, without green, and a yellowish line along the edge of the lower jaws. It was, methinks, larger than a common Rana palustris. 

Nearby was its spawn, in very handsome spherical masses of transparent jelly, two and a half to three inches in diameter, suspended near the surface of some weed, as goldenrod or aster, and consisting of globules about a third of an inch in diameter, with a black or dark centre as big as a large shot. Only these black centres were visible at a little distance in the water, and so much the more surprising and interesting is the translucent jelly when you lift it to the light. It even suggested the addition of cream and sugar, for the table. Yet this pool must have been frozen over last night! What frog can it be?

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 4, 1857

Caught a croaking frog . . . larger than a common Rana palustris. What frog can it be? See April 5, 1858 (“I go to the meadow at the mouth of the Mill Brook to find the spawn of the R. halecina. They are croaking and coupling there by thousands") and note to April 3, 1858 (Resolved to identify this frog, one or two of whose heads I could already see above the surface with my glass, I picked my way to the nearest pool. . . .They were the R. halecina. . . .This, I think, is the first frog sound I have heard from the river meadows or anywhere, except the croaking leaf-pool frogs and the hylodes.") See also the 10 frog species in Massachusetts. (Mass Audubon) (HDT’s halecina is the northern leopard frog,)

The Sylvicola coronata:  Possibly Sylvia coronata the Yellow-crowned or Yellow-rumped Warbler, Dendroica coronata [Eastern Myrtle Warbler]. now Setophaga coronata