Southeast wind with clouds hummingbird in the garden I suspect a storm.

September 15.

September 15, 2018

I have not seen not heard a bobolink for some days at least, numerous as they were three weeks ago, and even fifteen days. They depart early. 

I hear a nuthatch occasionally, but it reminds me of winter. 

P. M. — To Walden. I paddle about the pond, for a rarity. 

The eriocaulon, still in bloom there, standing thinly about the edge, where it is stillest and shallowest, in the color of its stern and radical leaves is quite in harmony with the glaucous water. Its radical leaves and fine root-fibres form a peculiar loose but thick and continuous carpet or rug on the sandy bottom, which you can lift up in great flakes, exposing the fine white beaded root-fibres. This evidently affords retreats for the fishes, musquash, etc., etc., and you can see where it has been lifted up into galleries by them. 

I see one or two pickerel poised over it. They, too, are singularly greenish and transparent, so as not to be easily detected, only a little more yellowish than the water and the eriocaulon; ethereal fishes, not far from the general color of heart-leaf and target-weed, unlike the same fish out of water.  

I notice, as I push round the pond close to the shore, with a stick, that the weeds are eriocaulon, two or three kinds of potamogeton, — one with a leaf an inch or two long, one with a very small, floating leaf, a third all immersed, four or five inches high and yellowish-green (this (vide press) is apparently an immersed form of P. hybridus),— target-weed, heart-leaf, and a little callitriche. There is but little of any of them, however, in the pond itself. 

It is truly an ascetic pond, and lives very sparingly on vegetables at any rate. 

I gather quite a lot of perfectly fresh high blueberries overhanging the south side, and there are many green ones among them still. They are all shrivelled now in swamps commonly. 

The target-weed still blooms a little in the Pout’s Nest, though half the leaves have turned a reddish orange, are sadly eaten, and have lost nearly all their gelatinous coating. But perfect fresh green leaves have expanded and are still expanding in their midst. The whole pool is covered, as it were, with one vast shield of reddish and green scales. As these leaves change and decay, the firmer parts along the veins retain their life and color longest, as with the heart-leaf. The leaves are eaten in winding lines about a tenth of an inch wide, scoring them all over in a curious manner, and also in spots. These look dark or black because they rest on the dark water. 

Looking closely, I am surprised to find how many frogs, mostly small, are resting amid these target leaves,  with their green noses out. Their backs and noses are exactly the color of this weed. They retreat, when disturbed, under this close shield. It is a frog’s paradise. 

I see, in the paths, pitch pine twigs gnawed off, where no cones are left on the ground. Are they gnawed off in order to come at the cones better? 

I find, just rising above the target-weed at Pout’s Nest, Scirpus subterminalis, apparently recently out of bloom. The culms two to three feet along, appearing to rise half an inch above the spikes. The long, linear immersed leaves coming off and left below. 

At entrance of the path (on Brister’s Path) near Staples and Jarvis found, apparently the true Danthonia spicata, still green. It is generally long out of bloom and turned straw-color. I will call the other (which I had so named), of Hosmer’s meadow, for the present, meadow oat grass, as, indeed, I did at first. 

A hummingbird in the garden. There is a southeast wind, with clouds, and I suspect a storm brewing. It is very rare that the wind blows from this quarter.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 15, 1858

I hear a nuthatch occasionally, but it reminds me of winter.  See October 20, 1856 (“Think I hear the very faint gnah of a nuthatch. Thus, of late, when the season is declining, many birds have departed, and our thoughts are turned towards winter . . . the nuthatch is heard again”); November 26, 1860 ("I hear the faint note of a nuthatch . . .a phenomenon of the late fall or early winter; for we do not hear them in summer that I remember. ...”); December 1, 1857 ("I thus always begin to hear this bird on the approach of winter, as if it did not breed here, but wintered here.”). See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Nuthatch

I see one or two pickerel, singularly greenish and transparent ethereal fishes. See July 12, 1854 ("Observe a pickerel in the Assabet, about a foot long, headed up stream, quasi-transparent (such its color), with darker and lighter parts contrasted, very still while I float quite near ..”)   See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Pickerel

I gather quite a lot of perfectly fresh high blueberries overhanging the south side. See September 5, 1858  ("I find many high blueberries, quite fresh, overhanging the south shore of Walden.”)

There is a southeast wind, with clouds, and I suspect a storm brewing. It is very rare that the wind blows from this quarter. See September, 16, 1858 ("A southeast storm. . . . The trees are unprepared to resist a wind from this quarter. "); see also March 24, 1860 ("During the year the wind [at Cambridge] was southwest 130 days, northwest 87, northeast 59, south 33, west 29, east 14, southeast 10, north 3 days.")

I hear a nuthatch 

occasionally but it 

 reminds of winter. 

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,  A hummingbird in the garden. 

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