How many water-bugs make a quorum?

January 24. 

Sunday. P. M. — Nut Meadow Brook. 

The river is broadly open, as usual this winter. You can hardly say that we have had any sleighing at all this winter, though five or six inches of snow lay on the ground five days after January 6th. But I do not quite like this warm weather and bare ground at this season. What is a winter without snow and ice in this latitude? The bare earth is unsightly. This winter is but unburied summer.

At that gully or ravine in the Clamshell bank, methinks the sides fall away faster in the winter; and such a winter as this, when the ground is bare, [faster] than ever. The subsoil and sand keeps freezing and thawing, and so bursts off, and the larger stones roll down on each side and are collected in a row at the bottom, so that there will be a sort of wall there of stones as big as a hen's egg propped up and finally covered with sand.

The inside of the swallow-holes there appears quite firm yet and regular, with marks where it was pecked or scratched by the bird, and the top is mottled or blotched, almost as if made firm in spots by the saliva of the bird. There is a low oven-like expansion at the end, and a good deal of stubble for the nest. I find in one an empty black cherry stone and the remains of a cricket or two. Probably a mouse left them there.

I see two of those black and red-brown fuzzy caterpillars in a mullein leaf on this bare edge-hill, which could not have blown from any tree, I think. They apparently take refuge in such places. One on the railroad causeway where it is high, in the open meadow.

I see a couple of broken small turtle eggs here which have been trodden out of the banks by cows going to drink in the river.

At Hosmer's tub spring a small frog is active!

At Nut Meadow Brook the small-sized water-bugs are as abundant and active as in summer. I see forty or fifty circling together in the smooth and sunny bays all along the brook. This is something new to me. What must they think of this winter? It is like a child waked up and set to playing at midnight. Methinks they are more ready to dive to the bottom when disturbed than usual. At night, of course, they dive to the bottom and bury themselves, and if in the morning they perceive no curtain of ice drawn over their sky, and the pleasant weather continues, they gladly rise again and resume their gyrations in some sunny bay amid the alders and the stubble. I think that I never noticed them more numerous, but the fact is I never looked for them so particularly. But I fear for their nervous systems, lest this be too much activity, too much excitement. The sun falling thus warmly for so long on the open surface of the brook tempts them upward gradually, till there is a little group gyrating there as in summer. What a funny way they have of going to bed! They do not take a light and retire up-stairs; they go below. Suddenly it is heels up and heads down, and they go down to their muddy bed and let the unresting stream flow over them in their dreams. They go to bed in another element. What a deep slumber must be theirs, and what dreams, down in the mud there! So the insect life is not withdrawn far off, but a warm sun would soon entice it forth. Sometimes they seem to have a little difficulty in making the plunge. Maybe they are too dry to slip under. I saw one floating on its back, and it struggled a little while before it righted itself. Suppose you were to plot the course of one for a day; what kind of a figure would it make? Probably this feat too will one day be performed by science, that maid of all work. I see one chasing a mote, and the wave the creature makes always causes the mote to float away from it. I would like to know what it is they communicate to one another, they who appear to value each other's society so much. How many water-bugs make a quorum? How many hundreds does their Fourier think it takes to make a complete bug? Where did they get their backs polished so? They will have occasion to remember this year, that winter when we were waked out of our annual sleep! What is their precise hour for retiring?

I see stretching from side to side of this smooth brook, where it is three or four feet wide, apparently an in visible waving line like a cobweb, against which the water is heaped up a very little. This line is constantly swayed to and fro, as by the current or wind bellying forward here and there. I try repeatedly to catch and break it with my hand and let the water run free, but still, to my surprise, I clutch nothing but fluid, and the imaginary line keeps its place. Is it the fluctuating edge of a lighter, perhaps more oily, fluid, overflowing a heavier? I see several such lines. It is somewhat like the slightest conceivable smooth fall over a dam. I must ask the water-bug that glides across it.

Ah, if I had no more sins to answer for than a water bug! They are only the small water-bugs that I see. They are earlier in the spring and apparently hardier.

I walked about the long pond-hole beyond the wooded moraine. There are prinos bushes with much moss on them, such as grows on the button-bush around. There is considerable rattlesnake grass there, which, with its drooping end above the ice, reminds me of wild rice meadows.

 On every old oak stump the ends of the pores are the prominent part, while only the scale-like silver ray is left between their circles.

The sprouts of the canoe birch are not reddish like the white, but a yellowish brown. The small white begin to cast off their red cuticle the third or fourth year and reveal a whitish one.

The poison sumach, with its recurved panicles of pale-greenish fruit massed together in profusion at the base of last year's stout blunt twigs, is very interesting and handsome. It is one of the chief ornaments of the swamps, dry and durable, befitting the season, and always attracts me. It might be the symbol of a vigorous swamp. The wood is very brittle to split down in the forks, and, just broken, has a strong, some what liquorice-like scent. I do not know that any bird eats them.

I see a few fishes dart in the brooks.

Between winter and summer there is, to my mind, an immeasurable interval.

As, when I pry into the old bank swallows’ holes to-day, – see the marks of their bills and even whole eggs left at the bottom, – it affects me as the phenomena of a former geological period. Yet perchance the very swallow which laid those eggs will revisit this hole next spring. The upper side of his gallery is a low arch, quite firm and durable.

Like the water-bugs the dormant buds and catkins which overhang the brook might be waked up in midwinter, but these bugs are much the most susceptible to the genial influences.

In fact, there was a succession of these invisible cables or booms stretched across the stream, though it ran quite swiftly.

I noticed at Walden yesterday that, when the ice cracked, one part was frequently left an eighth of an inch, perhaps, higher than another, and afterward frozen to it in this position. You could both see and with your feet feel the inequality.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 24, 1858

At Nut Meadow Brook the small-sized water-bugs are as abundant and active as in summer. See January 30, 1860 ("The small water-bugs are gyrating abundantly in Nut Meadow Brook.") See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, the Water-bug (Gyrinus) and  Skaters (Hydrometridae)

I see two of those black and red-brown fuzzy caterpillars in a mullein leaf on this bare edge-hill, which could not have blown from any tree, I think. They apparently take refuge in such places. See January 5, 1858 ("I see one of those fuzzy winter caterpillars, black at the two ends and brown-red in middle, crawling on a rock by the Hunt's Bridge causeway. "); January 8, 1857 ("I picked up on the bare ice of the river, opposite the oak in Shattuck's land, on a small space blown bare of snow, a fuzzy caterpillar, black at the two ends and red-brown in the middle, rolled into a ball . . .”); March 5, 1854 ("See a small blackish caterpillar on the snow. Where do they come from? "); March 8, 1855 ("I see of late more than before of the fuzzy caterpillars, both black and reddish-brown.”);