By boat to Holden Swamp.

May 4. 

Camel’s Hump

May 4, 2015

The Salix pedicellaris by railroad, apparently not for two or three days. 

The Missouri currant, probably to-day. 

P. M. — By boat to Holden Swamp. 

To go among the willows now and hear the bees hum is equal to going some hundreds of miles southward toward summer. 

I see along the sides of the river, i. e., where the bottom is permanently covered, what I have heretofore called the oat spawn, attached to old pontederia stems, etc., now some foot or eighteen inches under the surface. It is not black and white, like that of the Rana halecina, sylvaltica, and palustris, which I cannot distinguish from one another, but a pale brown or fawn-color. Some is pretty fresh or recently laid, others already flatted out. Hence, from comparison with my earlier sylvatica and halecina spawn, I judge that it may have been laid ten days. [Is it not that of the R. fontinalis?]

At Clamshell Shore, I see a clam lying up with open valves. 

Salix pedicellaris at Holden's Swamp, staminate, out apparently two days. - 

It is still warmer than May 1st, yet I hear the stertorous tut tut tut of hardly so many frogs (R. palustris chiefly, I suppose) as then. As with the halecina, it is the first sudden heats that excite them most, me thinks. 

I find hopping in the meadow a Rana halecina, much brighter than any I have seen this year. There is not only a vivid green halo about each spot, but the back is vivid light-green between the spots. I think this was not the case with any of the hundreds I saw a month ago!! Why?? The brassy lines along the sides of the back are narrower (only about one sixteenth of an inch) and more prominent than the more fawn-colored lines of the R. palustris. In this one, which I carry home and compare with the palustris, there is a large spot on each orbit, but none on the top of the head in front. It is all white beneath, except a tinge of greenish yellow on the abdomen. 

Witherell speaks of the R. palustris as the yellow legged frog, very properly. 

See several bullfrogs along the river, but silent. 

I go into Holden Swamp to hear warblers. See a little blue butterfly (or moth) — saw one yesterday — fluttering about over the dry brown leaves in a warm place by the swamp-side, making a pleasant contrast. From time to time have seen the large Vanessa Antiopa resting on the black willows, like a leaf still adhering.

As I sit there by the swamp-side this warm summery afternoon, I hear the crows cawing hoarsely, and from time to time see one flying toward the  top of a tall white pine. At length I distinguish a hen-hawk perched on the top. The crow repeatedly stoops toward him, now from this side, now from that, passing near his head each time, but he pays not the least attention to it. 

I hear the weese wese wese of the creeper continually from the swamp. It is the prevailing note there. And methought I heard a redstart's note (?), but oftener than the last I heard the tweezer note, or screeper note, of the particolored warbler, bluish above, yellow or orange throat and breast, white vent, and white on wings, neck above yellowish, going restlessly over the trees — maples, etc. — by the swamp, in creeper fashion, and as you may hear at the same time the true creeper's note without seeing it, you might think it uttered the creeper's note also. 

The red-wings, though here and there in flocks, are apparently beginning to build. I judge by their shyness and alarm in the bushes along the river and their richer, solitary warbling. 

Coming back, I talk with Witherell at William Wheeler's landing. He comes pushing Wheeler's square ended boat down-stream with a fish-spear. Says he caught a snapping turtle in the river May 1st. He sits on the side of my boat by the shore a little while, talking with me. There is a hole in the knee of his pants as big as your hand, and he keeps passing his hand over this slowly, to hide his bare skin, which is sun burnt and the color of his face, though the latter is reddened by rum, of which his breath smells. But how intimate he is with mud and its inhabitants. 

He says he caught a large pickerel the other night with spawn in it yet; that Henry Bigelow put many little trout into that round pond (Green Pond he calls it) on the Marlborough road, which Elbridge Haynes caught a few years after, weighing two or three pounds apiece. A man told him that he saw a trout weighing about a pound and a half darting at a pickerel, and every time he darted he took a bit off a fin, and at last the man walked in and caught the pickerel, and it weighed five pounds. This was in Spectacle Pond in Littleton. 

A fisherman told him once that the common eel “gendered” into the river clam, and the young fed on the clam till they were big enough to get other food, and hence you found so many dead clams in the river. 

I asked him if he knew what fish made the stone-heaps in the river. He said the lamprey eel. He saw one making one last spring about this time, as he was going across the fields by the river near Tarbell's to get seed corn. It was a single lamprey piling up the stones. He used to see thousands of them where he lived a boy, where the lead pipe factory was. 

Agassiz says in his Introduction (page 175), “I have known it [the Chelonara serpentina] snapping in the same fierce manner [which somebody else had described at a later period when it was very young] as it does when full grown, at a time it was still a pale almost colorless embryo, wrapped up in its foetal envelopes, with a yolk larger than itself hanging from its sternum, three months before hatching.”

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, May 4, 1858

The crow repeatedly stoops toward him, now from this side, now from that, passing near his head each time, but he pays not the least attention to it. See May 13, 1860 ("See two crows pursuing and diving at a hen-hawk very high in the air over the river. [H]e merely winks, as it were, bends or jerks his wings slightly as if a little startled. but never ceases soaring. nor once turns to pursue or shake them off.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the American Crow

I heard the tweezer note, or screeper note, of the particolored warbler. See  May 13, 1860 ("At Holden Swamp, hear plenty of parti-colored warblers (tweezer-birds) and redstarts."); May 18, 1856 ("A Sylvia Americana, — parti-colored warbler, — in the Holden Wood, sings a, tshrea tshrea tshrea, tshre’ tshritty tshrit’.”)  See note to May 13, 1856 (“At the swamp, hear the yorrick of Wilson’s thrush; the tweezer-bird or Sylvia Americana. Also the oven-bird sings.”) See also A Book of Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, the parti-colored warbler (Sylvia Americana)