The female flowers of the alder are now very pretty when seen against the sun.

April 17.

P. M. – Via Assabet to Coral Rock. 

See several kingfishers. Red-wings still in flocks, and crow blackbirds feeding amid leaves by Assabet side, half a dozen together. 

The female flowers of the alder are now very pretty when seen against the sun, bright-crimson. 

I take up a wood turtle on the shore, whose sternum is covered with small ants. 

The sedge is shooting up in the meadows, erect, rigid, and sharp, a glaucous green unlike that of the grass on banks. 

The linnaea-like plant turns out to be golden saxifrage. Its leaf is the same form, but smooth and not shrubby. 

The Rana halecina spawn in tumbler begins to struggle free of the ova, but it is not so much developed as the R. sylvatica. Some of the first may be a little more forward in the meadows. I see some to-day, probably this kind, flatted out, though I do not see the frog. It made the same sound, however. The R. sylvatica is probably generally the earliest.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 17, 1858

The female flowers of the alder are now very pretty when seen against the sun, bright-crimson. See April 8, 1859 ("The fertile flowers are an interesting bright crimson in the sun.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Alders

I take up a wood turtle on the shore, whose sternum is covered with small ants.  See. April 17, 1859 ("A wood tortoise on bank; first seen."); see also. April 6, 1855 (" I see a large wood tortoise just crawled out upon the bank, with three oval, low, bug-like leeches on its sternum."); May 7, 1858 ("I see a wood tortoise by the river there, half covered with the old withered leaves. Taking it up, I find that it must have lain perfectly still there for some weeks,") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Wood Turtlw (Emys insculpta)