The river is low. The meadows dry.

April 7. 

A cold and gusty, blustering day. We put on greatcoats again. 

April 7, 2018

P. M. — Down the Great Meadows. 

The river is low, even for summer. The ground about the outmost willow at my boat's place is high and dry. I cross the meadows and step across the Mill Brook near Mrs. Ripley's. 

You hear no stertorous sounds of the Rana halecina this cold and blustering day, unless a few when you go close to their breeding places and listen attentively. Scarcely one has his head out of water, though I see many at the bottom. I wear india-rubber boots and wade through the shallow water where they were found. 

In a shallow sheet of water on the meadow, with a grassy bottom, the spawn will commonly all be collected in one or two parcels in the deepest part, if it is generally less than eight or ten inches deep, to be prepared for a further fall. You will also find a little here and there in weedy ditches in the meadow. One of the first-named parcels will consist of even a hundred separate deposits about three or four inches in diameter crowded together. 

The frogs are most numerous to-day about and beneath the spawn. 

Each little mass of ova is pretty firmly attached to the stubble, – not accidentally,  but designedly and effectually, — and when you pull it off, leaves some of the jelly adhering to the stubble. If the mass is large it will run out of your hand this side or that, like a liquid, or as if it had life, — like “sun squall.” It is not injured by any ordinary agitation of the water, but the mass adheres well together. It bears being carried any distance in a pail. When dropped into the water again, it falls wrong side up, showing the white sides of the cores or yolks (?). 

On the Great Meadows, I stand close by two coupled. The male is very much the smallest, an inch, at least, the shortest, and much brighter-colored. The line, or “halo” (?), or margin about its blotches is a distinct yellow or greenish yellow. The female has a distended paunch full of spawn. 

Snipes rise two or three times as I go over the meadow. 

The remarkable spawn of the 3d, just below the Holt (?), does not show its cylindrical form so well as before; appears to have been broken up considerably, perhaps by creatures feeding on it. 

I see the remains of a duck which has died on this meadow, and the southeast edge of the meadow is strewn with the feathers of the water-fowl that plumed themselves here before the water went down. 

There is no water anywhere on these meadows now — except the one or two permanent pools — which I cannot walk through in my boots. 

Where they have been digging mud the past winter in Beck Stow's Swamp, I perceive that the crust, for one foot deep at least, consists chiefly, or perhaps half of it, — the rest mainly sphagnum, - of the dead and fallen stems of water andromeda which have accumulated in course of time. 

I brought home the above two kinds of spawn in a pail. Putting some of the Rana halecina spawn in a tumbler of water, I cannot see the gelatinous part, but only the dark or white cores, which are kept asunder by it at regular intervals. 

The other (probably fish) spawn is seen to be arranged in perfect hexagons; i. e., the ova so impinge on each other; but where there is a vent or free side, it is a regular arc of a circle. Is not this the form that spheres pressing on each other equally on all sides assume? I see the embryo, already fish-like (?), curved round the yolk, with a microscope.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 7, 1858

The river is low, even for summer. See April 6, 1858 ("They with whom I talk do not remember when the river was so low at this season.") Compare April 8, 1856 ("River had risen so since yesterday I could not get under the bridge, but was obliged to find a round stick and roll my boat over the road.”)

You hear no stertorous sounds of the Rana halecina this cold and blustering day. Compare April 3, 1858 (" This might be called the Day of the Snoring Frogs, or the Awakening of the Meadows.") and see note to April 7, 1860 ("This is the Rana halecina day, — awakening of the meadows. — though not very warm.")

I see the embryo, already fish-like (?), curved round the yolk, with a microscope. See April 3, 1858 ("When returning , we discovered , on the south side of the river , just at the old crossing - place from the Great Meadows , north of the ludwigia pool , a curious kind of spawn . It was white , each ovum about as big as a robin - shot or larger , with mostly a very minute white core , no black core , and these were agglutinated together in the form of zigzag hollow cylinders , two or three inches in di ameter and one or two feet long"); April 14, 1858 ("with his microscope I see the heart beating in the embryo fish and the circulations distinctly along the body."); April 16, 1858 ("For more than a week the embryos have been conspicuously active, hardly still enough to be observed with a microscope. Their tails, eyes, pectoral fins, etc., were early developed and conspicuous. They keep up a regular jerking motion as they lie curved in the egg,. . . ( Some are still in the egg on the 18th . )")