April heat.

April 13. 

April 13,  2019

A little snow fell on the 11th with the rain, and on some very warm banks, the south sides of houses and hills, the grass looked quite green by contrast in spots. 

The streets are strewn with the bud-scales of the elm, which they, opening, have lost off, and their tops present a rich brown already. 

I hear a purple finch on one, and did I not hear a martin's rich warble also? [Probably a white-bellied swallow.] 

The birds are not so early now as I should have expected. Were they not deterred from coming north by the very strong and cold northwest wind, notwithstanding that the ground has been bare so long? 

The Salix purpurea will hardly open for five days yet.

2 P. M. — Paddle to Ball's Hill and sail back. 

I see the small botrychium fresh and yellow still, so it is as much an evergreen as any fern. 

It is pleasant and pretty warm. To-day is the awakening of the meadows now partly bare. I hear the stuttering note of probably the Rana halecina (see one by shore) come up from all the Great Meadow, especially the sedgy parts, or where the grass was not cut last year and now just peeps above the surface. 

There is something soothing and suggestive of halcyon days in this low but universal breeding-note of the frog. Methinks it is a more unmistakable evidence of warmer weather — of the warmest we have at this date — than almost anything else. The hylodes and wood frogs are other degrees on the thermometer of the season, indicating that the weather has attained a higher temperature than before and winter fairly ended, but this note marks what you may call April heat (or spring heat). 

I see no ducks on the meadows to-day, perhaps be cause there is so much less water and it is so fair.

Saw a great bird flying rather low and circling more or less over the Great Meadows, which I at first thought was a fish hawk, having a fair sight of it from Ball's Hill, but with my glass I saw that it was a gull, but, I should say, wholly slate-color and dark at that, — though there may have been small spots which made no impression of another color. It was at least as large, maybe larger than the herring gull. Was it the saddle back gull ? 

Is that a potamogeton, or a pontederia, or a sium, coming up so thickly now on the bottom of the river near the shore, especially on a grassy bottom, with two little roundish leafets becoming spatulate, and a seed triangular and pointed with one side more flat than the others ?

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 13, 1859

The streets are strewn with the bud-scales of the elm, which they, opening, have lost off, and their tops present a rich brown already. See April 13, 1852 ("The elm buds begin to show their blossoms."); April 21, 1858 (“The puddles have dried off along the road and left thick deposits or water-lines of the dark-purple anthers of the elm, coloring the ground like sawdust. You could collect great quantities of them.”)   See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Elms and the Purple Finch

To-day is the awakening of the meadows. See April 13, 1854 ("Heard now, at 5.30 P.M., that faint bullfrog like note from the meadows, er- er-er. "); April 13, 1856 ("As I go by the Andromeda Ponds, I hear the tut tut of a few croaking frogs, and at Well Meadow I hear once or twice a prolonged stertorous sound, as from river meadows a little later usually, which is undoubtedly made by a different frog from the first."); See also  April 3, 1858 (" This might be called the Day of the Snoring Frogs, or the Awakening of the Meadows.");  April 5, 1855 (“Hear from one half-flooded meadow that low, general, hard, stuttering tut tut tut of frogs,—the awakening of the meadow.”); April 9, 1853 (“The whole meadow resounds, probably from one end of the river to the other, this evening, with this faint, stertorous breathing. It is the waking up of the meadows.”) See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, the Leopard Frog (Rana Halecina) in Spring