I hear the croaking frogs

April 5. 

Sunday. 

Arthur R. has been decking a new Vineyard boat which he has bought, and making a curb about the open part.  

P. M. —-Walked round by the ruins of the factory. See in many places the withered leaves of the aletris in rather low ground, about the still standing withered stems. It was well called husk-root by the squaw. 

Arthur says that he just counted, at 9.30 P. M., twenty toads that had hopped out from under the wall on to the sidewalk near the house. This, then, is apparently the way with the toads. They very early hop out from under walls on to sidewalks in the warmer nights, long before they are heard to ring, and are often frozen and then crushed there. Probably single ones ring earlier than I supposed. 

I hear the croaking frogs at 9.30 P. M., also the speed speed over R.’s meadow, which I once referred to the snipe, but R. says is the woodcock, whose other strain he has already heard.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 5, 1857



See in many places the withered leaves of the aletris . . . See June 26, 1856 (I had been expecting to find the aletris about New Bedford . . ."')

Frozen toads. . . .Probably single ones ring earlier than I supposed. See April 5, 1860 ("I hear, a very faint distant ring of toads, which, though I walk and walk all the afternoon, I never come nearer to.");See also  April 2, 1857 ("On the sidewalk in Cambridge I see a toad, which apparently hopped out from under a fence last evening, frozen quite hard in a sitting posture.");  April 6, 1860 ("A toad has been seen dead on the sidewalk, flattened.")

I hear the croaking frogs. See March 31, 1857 ("The dry croaking and tut tut of the frogs (a sound which ducks seem to imitate, a kind of quacking...) is plainly enough down there in some pool in the woods, but the shrill peeping of the hylodes locates itself nowhere in particular. . ."); April 8, 1852 ("To-day I hear the croak of frogs in small pond-holes in the woods,");  April 13, 1855 ("The small croaking frogs are now generally heard in all those stagnant ponds or pools in woods floored with leaves, which are mainly dried up in the summer.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Wood Frog (Rana sylvatica)

I hear the speed speed over R.’s meadow, which I once referred to the snipe, but R. says is the woodcock. See April 5, 1855 ("Scare up a snipe close to the water’s edge ") See also March 28, 1854 ("See this afternoon either a snipe or a woodcock."); I. April 22, 1860 ("It is evident that we very often come quite near woodcocks and snipe thus concealed on the ground, without starting them and so without suspecting that they are near.") and A Book of Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The American Woodcock