The rocks on the east side of Bateman’s Pond.

April 21. 

April 21, 2018

George Melvin says that Joshua Haynes once saw a perch depositing her spawn and the male following behind and devouring it! (?) Garlick in his book on pisciculture says that the perch spawn in May. 

Melvin says that those short-nosed brook pickerel are caught in the river also, but rarely weigh more than two pounds. 

The puddles have dried off along the road and left thick deposits or water-lines of the dark-purple anthers of the elm, coloring the ground like sawdust. You could collect great quantities of them. 

The arbor-vitae is apparently effete already. 

Ed. Hoar says he heard a wood thrush the 18th. 

P. M. — To Easterbrooks’s and Bateman’s Pond. 

The benzoin yesterday and possibly the 19th, so much being killed. It might otherwise have been earlier yet. 

Populus grandidentata some days at least. 

The Cornus florida flower-buds are killed. 

The rocks on the east side of Bateman’s Pond are a very good place for ferns. I see some very large leather apron umbilicaria there. They are flaccid and unrolled now, showing most of the olivaceous-fuscous upper side. This side feels cold and damp, while the other, the black, is dry and warm, notwithstanding the warm air. This side, evidently, is not expanded by moisture. It is a little exciting even to meet with a rock covered with these livid (?) green aprons, betraying so much life. Some of them are three quarters of a foot in diameter. What a growth for a bare rock!

April 21, 2018

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 21, 1858

The dark-purple anthers of the elm, coloring the ground like sawdust. See  April 13, 1859 (“The streets are strewn with the bud-scales of the elm”); April 15, 1852 (“The broad flat brown buds on Mr. Cheney's elm, containing twenty or thirty yellowish-green threads, surmounted with little brownish-mulberry cups, which contain the stamens and the two styles, -- these are just expanding or blossoming now.”); April 15, 1854 ("The arrival of the purple finches appears to be coincident with the blossoming of the elm, on whose blossom it feeds.”); April 16, 1856 (“Cheney’s elm shows stamens on the warm side pretty numerously.”);  April 24, 1852 ("he elms are now fairly in blossom.")

The arbor-vitae is apparently effete already. See April 20, 1857 ("Arbor-vitae? apparently in full bloom.”) 

Ed. Hoar says he heard a wood thrush the 18th. See  April 21, 1855 (“I hear at a distance a wood thrush. It affects us as a part of our unfallen selves.”); April 20, 1860 ("C. sees . . . some kind of thrush to-day, size of wood thrush, — he thought probably hermit thrush."): see also May 22, 1852 ("On my way to Plymouth, looked at Audubon in the State-House. The female (and male?) wood thrush spotted the whole length of belly; the hermit thrush not so.”); A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Signs of Spring: The Arrival of the Hermit Thrush and note to April 24, 1856 ("Behold my hermit thrush, with one companion, flitting silently through the birches.”)

The rocks on the east side of Bateman’s Pond are a very good place for ferns. See September 4, 1857 (“The sides of Cornus florida Ravine at Bateman’s Pond are a good place for ferns. ”);  November 2, 1857 (“A patch of polypody . . . in abundance on hillside between Calla Swamp and Bateman’s Pond ”)