Now the abundance of dead weeds.

 

October 21.

Thursday P.M. To Second Division Brook and Ministerial Swamp.

Cerastium.

Apparently some flowers yield to the frosts, others linger here and there till the snow buries them.

Saw that the side flowering skull-cap was killed by the frost. If they grow in some nook out of the way of frosts they last so much the longer. Methinks the frost puts a period to a large class.

The goldenrods, being dead, are now a dingy white along the brooks (white fuzz dark brown leaves), together with rusty, fuzzy trumpet-weeds and asters in the same condition.

This is a remarkable feature in the landscape now the abundance of dead weeds. The frosts have done it. Winter comes on gradually.

The red maples have lost their leaves before the rock maple which is now losing its leaves at top first.

All the country over the frosts have come and seared the tenderer herbs along all brook sides. How unobserved this change until it has taken place.

The birds that fly at the approach of winter are come from the north.

Some time since I might have said some birds are leaving us, others, like ducks, are just arriving from the north, the herbs are withering along the brooks, the humming insects are going into winter quarters.

The deciduous trees are green but about four months in the year from June 1st to October 1st perhaps.

Polygonum articulaium lingers still.

Silvery cinquefoil, hedge-mustard, and clover.

I find caddis cases with worms in Second Division Brook.

And what mean those little piles of yellow sand on dark colored stones at the bottom of the swift running water kept together and in place by some kind of gluten and looking as if sprinkled on the stones one eighteenth of an inch in diameter.

These caddis worms just build a little case around themselves and sometimes attach a few dead leaves to disguise it and then fasten it slightly to some swaying grass stem or blade at the bottom in swift water and these are their quarters till next spring .

This reminds me that winter does not put his rude fingers in the bottom of the brooks.

When you look into the brooks you see various dead leaves floating or resting on the bottom and you do not suspect that some are the disguises which the caddis worms have borrowed.

Fresh Baeomyces roseus near Tommy Wheeler's.

The cotton woolly aphides on the alders.

Gilpin speaks of floats of timber on the river Wey in 1775 as picturesque objects. Thus in the oldest settled and civilized country there is a resemblance or reminiscence still of the primitive new country, and more or less timber never ceases to grow on the head waters of its streams and perchance the wild muskrat still perforates its banks. England may endure as long as she grows oaks for her navy. Timber rafts still annually come down the Rhine, like the Mississippi and St Lawrence. But the forests of England are thin for Gilpin says of the Isle of Wight in Charles II's time, "There were woods in the island so complete and extensive that it is said a squirrel might have travelled in several parts many leagues together on the tops of the trees."

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, October 21, 1852

Fresh Baeomyces roseus near Tommy Wheeler's. See April 3, 1859 ("We need a popular name for the baeomyces. C. suggests "pink mould" Perhaps "pink shot" or "eggs" would do.")

The cotton woolly aphides on the alders. See September 22, 1852 ("Large woolly aphides are now clustered close together on the alder stems") See also June 14, 1853 ("I observed the cotton of aphides on the alders yesterday and to-day. ");  October 29, 1855 ("I see many aphides very thick and long-tailed on the alders."); May 19, 1856 ("Woolly aphides on alder. "); November 10, 1858 ("Aphides on alder."); June 4, 1860 (Aphides on alders, which dirty your clothes with their wool as you walk."")

The red maples have lost their leaves before the rock maple which is now losing its leaves at top first. See October 21, 1858 ("The large sugar maples on the Common are in the midst of their fall to-day.")

The deciduous trees are green but about four months in the year. See October 28, 1852 ("Four months of the green leaf make all our summer, if I reckon from June 1st to October 1st, the growing season, and methinks there are about four months when the ground is white with snow. That would leave two months for spring and two for autumn.")