The maples about Walden are quite handsome now.

October 3. 

One brings me this morning a Carolina rail alive, this year’s bird evidently from its marks. He saved it from a cat in the road near'the Battle-Ground. On being taken up, it peeked a little at first, but was soon quiet. It staggers about as if weak on my window sill and pecks at the glass, or stands with its eyes shut, half asleep, and its back feathers hunched up. Possibly it is wounded. I suspect it may have been hatched here. Its feet are large and spreading, qualifying it to run on mud or pads. Its crown is black, but chin white, and its back feathers are distinctly edged with white in streaks. 

I compare my hazelnuts gathered some time ago. The beaked are pointed nuts, while the common are blunt; and the former are a much paler brown, also have a yellower and much sweeter meat. 

A fringed gentian, plucked day before yesterday, at length, this forenoon, untwists and turns its petals partially, in my chamber.

Have noticed a very brilliant scarlet blackberry patch within a week. 

The red maples which changed first, along the river, are now faded and partly fallen. They look more pink. But others are lit, and so there is more color than before. Some particular maple among a hundred will be of a peculiarly bright and pure scarlet, and, by its difference of tint and intenser color, attract our eyes even at a distance in the midst of the crowd. Looking all around Fair Haven Pond yesterday, where the maples were glowing amid the evergreens, my eyes invariably rested on a particular small maple of the purest and intensest scarlet. 

P. M. — Paddle about Walden. 

As I go through the Cut, I discover a new locality for the crotalaria, being attracted by the pretty blue-black pods, now ripe and dangling in profusion from these low plants, on the bare sandy and gravelly slope of the Cut. The vines or plants are but half a dozen times longer (or higher) than the pods. It was the contrast of these black pods with the yellowish sand which betrayed them.

How many men have a fatal excess of manner! There was one came to our house the other evening, and behaved very simply and well till the moment he was passing out the door. He then suddenly put on the airs of a well-bred man, and consciously described some are of beauty or other with his head or hand. It was but a slight flourish, but it has put me on the alert. 

It is interesting to consider how that crotalaria spreads itself, sure to find out the suitable soil. One year I find it on the Great Fields and think it rare; the next I find it in a new and unexpected place. It flits about like a flock of sparrows, from field to field. 

The maples about Walden are quite handsome now. Standing on the railroad, I look across the pond to Pine Hill, where the outside trees and the shrubs scattered generally through the wood glow through the green, yellow, and scarlet, like fires just kindled at the base of the trees, — a general conflagration just fairly under way, soon to envelop every tree. The hillside forest is all aglow along its edge and in all its cracks and fissures, and soon the flames will leap upward to the tops of the tallest trees. About the pond I see maples of all their tints, and black birches (on the southwest side) clear pale yellow; and on the peak young chestnut clumps and walnuts are considerably yellowed. 

I hear, out toward the middle, or a dozen rods from me, the plashing made apparently by the shiners, — for they look and shine like them, — leaping in schools on the surface. Many lift themselves quite out for a foot or two, but most rise only part way out, — twenty black points at once. There are several schools indulging in this sport from time to time as they swim slowly along. This I ascertain by paddling out to them. Perhaps they leap and dance in the water just as gnats dance in the air at present. I have seen it before in the fall. Is it peculiar to this season? 

Hear a hylodes peeping on shore. 

A general reddening now of young and scrub oaks. Some chinquapin bright-red. 

White pines fairly begin to change. 

The large leaves of some black oak sprouts are dark-purple, almost blackish, above, but greenish beneath. 

See locust leaves all crisped by frost in Laurel Glen Hollow, but only part way up the bank, as on the shore of a lake.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, October 3, 1858

A Carolina rail alive. Its crown is black, but chin white, and its back feathers are distinctly edged with white in streaks. Compare September 18, 1858 ("In R. Virginianus. . . the crown and whole upper parts are black, streaked with brown; the throat, breast, and belly, orange-brown; sides and vent, black tipped with white; legs and feet, dark red-brown; none of which is true of the R. Carolinus.")

The beaked are pointed nuts, while the common are blunt. See September 9, 1858 ("I find an abundance of beaked hazelnuts at Blackberry Steep, one to three burs together, but, gathering them, I get my fingers full of fine shining bristles, while the common hazel burs are either smooth or covered with a softer glandular down; i. e., its horns are brazen tipped.")

A fringed gentian, plucked day before yesterday, at length, this forenoon, untwists and turns its petals partially, in my chamber.See October 1, 1858 ("The fringed gentians are now in prime. . . .They who see them closed, or in the afternoon only, do not suspect their beauty.")

Have noticed a very brilliant scarlet blackberry patch within a week. See September 23, 1854 ("Low blackberry vines generally red. "); September 25, 1854 ("I am detained by the very bright red blackberry leaves strewn along the sod")

Some particular maple among a hundred will be of a peculiarly bright and pure scarlet, and, by its difference of tint and intenser color, attract our eyes even at a distance in the midst of the crowd. See September 25, 1857 (“A single tree becomes the crowning beauty of some meadowy vale and attracts the attention of the traveller from afar.”); September 26, 1854 ("Some single red maples are very splendid now, the whole tree bright-scarlet against the cold green pines; now, when very few trees are changed, a most remarkable object in the landscape; seen a mile off. "); September 27, 1855 ("Some single red maples now fairly make a show along the meadow. I see a blaze of red reflected from the troubled water.");  September 27, 1857 (“At last, its labors for the year being consummated and every leaf ripened to its full, it flashes out conspicuous to the eye of the most casual observer, with all the virtue and beauty of a maple, – Acer rubrum.”); October 8, 1852 (“Nothing can exceed the brilliancy of some of the maples which stand by the shore and extend their red banners over the water.”);)

I discover a new locality for the crotalaria, being attracted by the pretty blue-black pods, now ripe and dangling in profusion from these low plants, on the bare sandy and gravelly slope of the Cut. See October 3, 1856 ("I detect the crotalaria behind the Wyman site, by hearing the now rattling seeds in its pods as I go through the grass, like the trinkets about an Indian's leggins, or a rattlesnake.")

 White pines fairly begin to change. See October 3, 1852 ("The pine fall, i.e. change, is commenced, and the trees are mottled green and yellowish."); October 3, 1856 ("The white pines are now getting to be pretty generally parti-colored, the lower yellowing needles ready to fall.") See also November 9, 1850 (" I expect to find that it is only for a few weeks in the fall after the new leaves have done growing that there are any yellow and falling, — that there is a season when we may say the old pine leaves are now yellow, and again, they are fallen."); See also Henry Thoreau, A Book of the Seasons,
Thw Pine Fall