A slight sea-turn, the wind coming cool and easterly this morning,

May 31. 

May 31,, 2018

A. M. – To Island.

Choke-cherry, a day or two.

Cornus florida, not yet for two or three days. I saw some in Connecticut with involucres much more rosaceous than ours.

A yellowbird’s nest of that grayish milkweed fibre, one egg, in alder by wall west of Indian burying(?)-ground.

P. M. — To Laurel Glen.

I see, running along on the flat side of a railroad rail on the causeway, a wild mouse with an exceedingly long tail. Perhaps it would be called the long-tailed meadow mouse. It has no white, only the feet are light flesh-color; but it is uniformly brown as far as I can see, — for it rests a long time on the rail within a rod, – but when I look at it from behind in the sun it is a very tawny almost golden brown, quite hand some. It finally runs, with a slight hop, — the tarsus of the hind legs being very long while the fore legs are short and its head accordingly low, – down the bank to the meadow.

I saw on the 29th white Viola pedata, and to-day a white V. cucullata.

There were severe frosts on the nights of the 28th and 29th, and now I see the hickories turned quite black, and in low ground the white oak shoots, though they do not show black in drying. Also many ferns are withered and black and some Prinos lavigatus tips, etc.

I find a chewink's nest with four eggs (fresh) on the side-hill at Jarvis’s wood-lot, twenty feet below wood-chuck’s hole at canoe birch. The nest is first of withered leaves, then stubble, thickly lined with withered grass and partly sheltered by dead leaves, shoved [?] up a huckleberry bush.

There was a slight sea-turn, the wind coming cool and easterly this morning, which at first I mistook for the newly leafing deciduous trees investing the evergreens, which is a kind of sea-turn in harmony with the other. I remember that the stage-drivers riding back and forth daily from Concord to Boston and becoming weather-wise perforce, often meeting the sea-breeze on its way into the country, were wont to show their weather wisdom by telling anxious travellers that it was nothing but a sea-turn.

At 5 P.M., go to see a gray squirrel's nest in the oak at the Island point. It is about fifteen feet from the ground, – the entrance, — where a limb has been broken off, and the tree is hollow above and below. One young one darted past downward under my face, with the speed of a bird. There is much short brown dung about, and a smell of urine, and the twigs around have been gnawed.

Does not the voice of the toad along the river sound differently now from what it did a month ago? I think it is much less sonorous and ringing, a more croaking and inquisitive or qui vive sound. Is it not less prolonged also?


H. D. Thoreau, Journal, May 31, 1858

Cornus florida, not yet. See June 4, 1858 ("I find the Cornus florida out in my pitcher when I get home June 4th, though it was not out on Island May 31st, and it is well out on Island when I look June 6th. I will say, therefore, that it opened June 3d."); See also May 22, 1856 ("The Cornus florida does not bloom this year."); May 25, 1855 ("Cornus florida, no bloom. Was there year before last? Does it not flower every other year?”)

A yellowbird’s nest of that grayish milkweed fibre. See  May 31, 1855 ("See a yellowbird building a nest on a white oak on the Island. She goes to a fern for the wool."); See also January 19, 1856 ("Knocked down the bottom of that summer yellow bird’s nest made on the oak at the Island last summer. It is chiefly of fern wool and also, apparently, some sheep’s wool (?), with a fine green moss (apparently that which grows on button-bushes) inmixed, and some milkweed fibre, and all very firmly agglutinated together.") and A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau The Summer Yellowbird

A wild mouse with an exceedingly long tail. Perhaps it would be called the long-tailed meadow mouse. [Likely the jumping mouse] See December 13, 1852 ("I observed a mouse . . . reddish brown above and cream-colored beneath . . . I think it must be the Gerbillus Canadensis, See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Wild Mouse

I saw on the 29th white Viola pedata, and to-day a white V. cucullata. See May 18, 1857 ("Pratt has found perfectly white Viola pedata behind Easterbrook place, and cultivated them, but now lost them.") A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Violets

There were severe frosts on the nights of the 28th and 29th, and now I see the hickories turned quite black. See May 31, 1854 ("Cold weather. "); May 31, 1856 ("It has been very cold for two or three days, and to-night a frost is feared. The telegraph says it snowed in Bangor to-day. The hickory leaves are blackened by blowing in the cold wind.”); See also May 21, 1855 (“[C]old weather, indeed, from the 20th to 23d inclusive. Sit by fires, and sometimes wear a greatcoat and expect frosts.”); May 22, 1859 (“”I see that by the very severe frost of about the 15th, or full of the moon, a great many leaves were killed. . . which now show brown or blackish.")

I find a chewink's nest with four eggs. See June 1, 1856 ("A chewink’s nest a rod and a half south of Walden road, opposite Goose Pond path, under a young oak, covered by overarching dry sedge; four eggs, pretty fresh. I am pretty sure the bird uttered the unusual hoarse and distressed note while I was looking at them. "); See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Chewink (Rufous-sided Towhee)

There was a slight sea-turn, the wind coming cool and easterly this morning. See April 30, 1856 ("At one o’clock there was the usual fresh easterly wind and sea-turn , and before night it grew quite cold for the season. The regularity of the recurrence of this phenomenon is remarkable . . . Early in the afternoon, or between one and four, the wind changes . . . and a fresh cool wind from the sea produces a mist in the air.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Sea-turn

Go to see a gray squirrel's nest See note to June 1, 1860 ("This makes three gray squirrels' nests that I have seen and heard of (seen two of them) this year, made thus of leaves and sticks open in the trees, and I hear of some more similar ones found in former years, so that I think this mode of nesting their young may be the rule with them here")

Does not the voice of the toad along the river sound differently now from what it did a month ago? See May 31, 1860 ("Hear the sprayey note of toads now more than ever, after the rain."); See also  May 13, 1860 ("It is so warm that I hear the peculiar sprayey note of the toad generally at night."); May 16, 1853 ("Nature’appears to have passed a crisis. . . . The sprayey dream of the toad has a new sound."); May 19, 1854 ("I hear the sprayey-note frog now at sunset."); May 25, 1859 ("Hear within a day or two what I call the sprayey note of the toad, different and later than its early ring.") and A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, The Ring of Toads

May 31. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, May 31

The voice of the toad

first heard a month ago sounds

differently now.

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The voice of the toad

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau

"A book, each page written in its own season,

out-of-doors, in its own locality.”

~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx © 2009-2024