Can you ever be sure that you have heard the very first wood frog in the township croak?

March 24. 

P. M. — Down railroad. Southeast wind. 

Begins to sprinkle while I am sitting in Laurel Glen, listening to hear the earliest wood frogs croaking. I think they get under weigh a little earlier, i. e., you will hear many of them sooner than you will hear many hylodes. Now, when the leaves get to be dry and rustle under your feet, dried by the March winds, the peculiar dry note, wurrk wurrk wur-r-r-k wurk of the wood frog is heard faintly by ears on the alert, borne up from some unseen pool in a woodland hollow which is open to the influences of the sun. 

It is a singular sound for awakening Nature to make, associated with the first warmer days, when you sit in some sheltered place in the woods amid the dried leaves. How moderate on her first awakening, how little demonstrative! You may sit half an hour before you will hear another. You doubt if the season will be long enough for such Oriental and luxurious slowness. But they get on, nevertheless, and by to-morrow, or in a day or two, they croak louder and more frequently. 

Can you ever be sure that you have heard the very first wood frog in the township croak? Ah! how weather-wise must he be! There is no guessing at the weather with him. He makes the weather in his degree; he encourages it to be mild. The weather, what is it but the temperament of the earth? and he is wholly of the earth, sensitive as its skin in which he lives and of which he is a part. His life relaxes with the thawing ground. 

He pitches and tunes his voice to chord with the rustling leaves which the March wind has dried. Long before the frost is quite out, he feels the influence of the spring rains and the warmer days. His is the very voice of the weather. He rises and falls like quicksilver in the thermometer. 

You do not perceive the spring so surely in the actions of men, their lives are so artificial. They may make more fire or less in their parlors, and their feelings accordingly are not good thermometers. 

The frog far away in the wood, that burns no coal nor wood, perceives more surely the general and universal changes. 

In the ditch under the west edge of Trillium Wood I see six yellow-spot turtles. They surely have not crawled from far. Do they go into the mud in this ditch? A part of the otherwise perfectly sound and fresh-looking scales of one has been apparently eaten away, as if by a worm. 

There sits also on the bank of the ditch a Rana fontinalis, and it is altogether likely they were this species that leaped into a ditch on the 10th. This one is mainly a bronze brown, with a very dark greenish snout, etc., with the raised line down the side of the back. This, methinks, is about the only frog which the marsh hawk could have found hitherto. 

Returning, above the railroad causeway, I see a flock of goldfinches, first of spring, flitting along the cause way-bank. They have not yet the bright plumage they will have, but in some lights might be mistaken for sparrows. There is considerable difference in color between one and another, but the flaps of their coats are black, and their heads and shoulders more or less yellow. They are eating the seeds of the mullein and the large primrose, clinging to the plants sidewise in various positions and pecking at the seed-vessels. Wilson says, "In the month of April they begin to change their winter dress, and, before the middle of May, appear in brilliant yellow.” 

C. sees geese go over again this afternoon. How commonly they are seen in still rainy weather like this! He says that when they had got far off they looked like a black ribbon almost perpendicular waving in the air.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 24, 1859

I am sitting in Laurel Glen, listening to hear the earliest wood frogs croaking. See March 23, 1959 ("We hear the peep of one hylodes somewhere in this sheltered recess in the woods. And afterward, on the Lee side, I hear a single croak from a wood frog. "); March 26, 1860 (“The wood frog [first] may be heard March 15, as this year, or not till April 13, as in '56,”); March 31, 1857 (“As I rise the east side of the Hill, I hear the distant faint peep of hylodes and the tut tut of croaking frogs from the west of the Hill.”) and note to May 6, 1858 (the frogs of Massachusetts). Compare March 31, 1855 (“I go listening for the croak of the first frog, or peep of a hylodes . . . I listen in vain to hear a frog”). See alsoA Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Signs of the Spring: Frogs, and Turtles Stirring

In the ditch under the west edge of Trillium Wood I see six yellow-spot turtles. See March 26, 1860 (“The yellow-spotted tortoise may [first]be seen February 23, as in '57, or not till March 28, as in '55”); February 23, 1857 "See two yellow-spotted tortoises in the ditch south of Trillium Wood. . . . The spots seem brighter than ever when first beheld in the spring, as does the bark of the willow. I have seen signs of the spring. . . . the brilliant spotted tortoises stirring at the bottom of ditches.”);
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Signs of the Spring: Frogs, and Turtles Stirring

I see a flock of goldfinches, first of spring, flitting along the cause way-bank. See April 7, 1855 (“See thirty or forty goldfinches in a dashing flock, in all respects (notes and all) like lesser redpolls, on the trees by Wood’s Causeway and on the railroad bank. There is a general twittering and an occasional mew.”); April 19, 1858 ("Along the wall under the Middle Conantum Cliff, I saw many goldfinches, male and female, the males singing in a very sprightly and varied manner, sitting still on bare trees. Also uttered their watery twitter and their peculiar mewing. See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Goldfinch

C. sees geese go over again this afternoon. How commonly they are seen in still rainy weather like this! See March 28, 1859 ("Perhaps it is this easterly wind which brings geese, as it did on the 24th."); March 10, 1854 ("We always have much of this rainy, drizzling, misty weather in early spring, after which we expect to hear geese."); March 14, 1854 ("See a large flock in disordered harrow flying more directly north or even northwest than usual. Raw, thick, misty weather.”) See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Signs of the Spring; Geese Overhead

March 24. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, March 24

Can you be sure that 

you have heard the first wood frog 

in the township croak?

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, The very first wood frog

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

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