Thursday, May 14, 2020

The rich colors and the rich and varied notes of the blackbirds surpass them all.




Saturday. 9 A. M.--To Wayland by boat. 

E. Wood has added a pair of ugly wings to his house, bare of trees and painted white, particularly conspicuous from the river. You might speak of the alar extent of this house, monopolizing so much of our horizon; but alas ! it is not formed for flight, after all. 

The water is considerably rough to-day, and higher than usual at this season. 

The black willows have started, but make no show of green. 

The button-bushes are yet apparently dead. 

The green buds of yellow lilies are bobbing up and down, already showing more or less yellow; this the most forward sign in the water. The great scalloped platters of their leaves have begun to show themselves on the surface, and the red round leaves of the white lily, now red above as well as below. 

A myriad of polygonums, potamogetons, and pontederias are pushing up from the bottom, but have not yet reached the surface. 

Dandelions and houstonias, etc., spot the meadows with yellow and white. 

The still dead-looking willows and button-bushes are alive with red-wings, now perched on a yielding twig, now pursuing a female swiftly over the meadow, now darting across the stream. No two have epaulets equally brilliant. Some are small and almost white, and others a brilliant vermilion. They are handsomer than the golden robin, methinks. 

The yellowbird, kingbird, and pewee, beside many swallows, are also seen. But the rich colors and the rich and varied notes of the blackbirds surpass them all. 

Passing Conantum under sail at 10 o’clock, the cows in this pasture are already chewing the cud in the thin shade of the apple trees, a picture of peace, already enjoying the luxury of their green pastures. 

I was not prepared to find the season so far advanced. 

The breeze which comes over the water, sensibly cooled or freshened by it, is already grateful. 

Suddenly there start up from the riverside at the entrance of Fair Haven Pond, scared by our sail, two great blue herons, — slate color rather, — slowly flapping and undulating, their projecting breast-bones very visible, — or is it possibly their necks bent back? — their legs stuck out straight behind. Getting higher by their flight, they straight come back to reconnoitre us. Land at Lee’s Cliff, where the herons have preceded us and are perched on the oaks, conspicuous from afar, and again we have a fair view of their flight. 

We find here, unexpectedly, the warmth of June. The hot, dry scent, or say warm and balmy, from ground amid the pitch pines carpeted with red needles, where a wiry green grass is springing up, reminds us of June and of wild pinks. 

Under the south side of the Cliff, vegetation seems a fortnight earlier than elsewhere. Not only the beautiful little veronicas (serpyllifolia) are abundantly out, and cowslips past their prime, columbines past prime, and saxifrage gone to seed, some of it, and dandelions, and the sod sparkling with the pure, brilliant, spotless yellow of cinquefoil, also violets and strawberries, but the glossy or varnished yellow of buttercups (bulbosus, also abundant, some days out) spots the hillside. 

The south side of these rocks is like a hothouse where the gardener has removed his glass. The air, scented with sweet briar, may almost make you faint in imagination. The nearer the base of the rock, the more forward each plant. 

The trees are equally forward, red and black; leaves an inch and a half long and shoots of three inches. The prospect from these rocks is early-June-like. You notice the tender light green of the birches, both white and paper, and the brown-red tops of the maples where their keys are. 

Close under the lee of the button-bushes which skirt the pond, as I look south, there is a narrow smooth strip of water, silvery and contrasting with the darker rippled body of the pond. Its edge, or the separation between this, which I will call the polished silvery border of the pond, and the dark and ruffled body, is not a straight line or film, but an ever-varying, irregularly and finely serrated or fringed border, ever changing as the breeze falls over the bushes at an angle more or less steep, so that this moment it is a rod wide, the next not half so much. Every feature is thus fluent in the landscape. 

Again we embark, now having furled our sail and taken to our oars. The air is clear and fine-grained, and as we glide by the hills I can look into the very roots of the grass amid the springing pines in their deepest valleys. The wind rises, but still it is not a cold wind. There is nothing but slate-colored water and a few red pads appearing at Lily Bay. 

After leaving Rice’s harbor the wind is with us again. What a fine tender yellow green from the meadow-grass just pushed up, where the sun strikes it at the right angle! How it contrasts with the dark bluish-green of that rye, already beginning to wave, which covers that little rounded hill by Pantry Brook! Grain waves earlier than grass. 

How flat the top of the muskrat’s head as he swims, and his back, even with it, and then when he dives he ludicrously shows his tail. They look gray and brown, rabbit, now. 

At Forget-me not Spring the chrysosplenium beds are very large, rich and deep, almost out of bloom. I find none of the early blackberry in bloom. It is mostly destroyed. Already we pluck and eat the sweet flag and detect small critchicrotches. The handsome comandra leaves also are prominent. 

In the woods which skirt the river near Deacon Farrar’s swamp, the Populus grandidentata, just expanding its downy leaves, makes silvery patches in the sun. It is abundant and truly silvery. 

The paper birch woods at Fair Haven present this aspect : there is the somewhat dense light green of aspens (tremuliformis) and paper birches in the foreground next the water, both of one tint, and occasionally a red maple with brownish-red top, with — equally advanced, aye, more fully expanded, intermixed or a little higher up-very tall and slender amelanchiers (Botryapium), some twenty-five feet high, on which no signs of fruit, though I have seen them on some; some silvery grandidentata, and red and black oaks (some yellowish, some reddish, green), and still reddish-white oaks, just starting; and green pines for contrast, showing the silvery under sides of their leaves or the edges of their dark stages (contrasting with their shaded under sides).
These are the colors of the forest-top, — the rug, looking down on it. 

Tufts of coarse grass  are in full bloom along the riverside, — little islets big enough to support a fisherman. 

Again we scare up the herons, who, methinks, will build hereabouts. They were standing by the water side. And again they alight farther below, and we see their light-colored heads erect, and their bodies at various angles as they stoop to drink. And again they flap away with their great slate-blue wings, necks curled up (?) and legs straight out behind, and, having attained a great elevation, they circle back over our heads, now seemingly black as crows against the sky,  crows with long wings, they might be taken for, — but higher and higher they mount by stages in the sky, till heads and tails are lost and they are mere black wavelets amid the blue, one always following close behind the other. They are evidently mated. It would be worth the while if we could see them oftener in our sky. 

Some apple trees are fairly out. 

What is that small slate-colored hawk with black tips to wings?

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, May 14, 1853


Red-wings, now perched on a yielding twig, now pursuing a female swiftly over the meadow, now darting across the stream. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Red-wing in  Early Spring

The Populus grandidentata, just expanding its downy leaves, makes silvery patches in the sun. See
May 10, 1853 ("The P. grandidentata which have flowered show no leaves yet; only very young ones, small downy leaves now"); May 13, 1852 (" The female Populus grandidentata, whose long catkins are now growing old, is now leafing out. The flowerless (male ?) ones show half-unfolded silvery leaves."); May 15, 1854 ("The large P. grandidentata by river not leafing yet.");  May 17, 1858 ("The Populus grandidentata now shows large, silvery, downy, but still folded, leafets.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Big-toothed Aspen (Populus grandidentata)

The yellowbird, kingbird, and pewee, beside many swallows, are also seen. See May 10, 1853 (" New days, then, have come, ushered in by the warbling vireo, yellowbird, Maryland yellow-throat, and small pewee, and now made perfect by the twittering of the kingbird and the whistle of the oriole amid the elms, which are but just beginning to leaf out, ")

It would be worth the while if we could see them oftener in our sky.  See April 22, 1852 ("It would affect our thoughts, deepen and perchance darken our reflections, if such huge birds flew in numbers in our sky. Have the effect of magnetic passes.")

What is that small slate-colored hawk with black tips to wings? See April 24, 1853 ("Marsh (?) hawk, with black tips of wings."); March 27, 1855 ("Marsh hawk, male. Slate-colored; beating the bush; black tips to wings and white rump."); October 18, 1855 ("A large brown marsh hawk comes beating the bush along the river, and ere long a slate-colored one (male), with black tips, is seen circling against a distant wood-side."); May 14, 1857 ("See a pair of marsh hawks, the smaller and lighter-colored male, with black tips to wings, and the large brown female") See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, the Marsh Hawk (Northern Harrier)

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