Pickerel of at least three different forms and color.

January 29.

To Walden.

Melvin calls the ducks which I saw yesterday sheldrakes; being small, then wood sheldrakes. [I judge from the plate they were velvet ducks, or white-winged coots.] He never shot any at this season.

Saw a woodcock last month; never before.

Killed a goshawk (which was eating a rabbit) and a cat owl lately.

Says I hear the cat owl.

Has got only three or four minks this year.

Never saw an otter track.

I saw a little grayish mouse frozen into Walden, three or four rods from the shore, its tail sticking out a hole. It had apparently run into this hole when full of water, as if on land, and been drowned and frozen. Headed downward, it was.

The ice is eight inches thick. It is full of short, faint, flake-like perpendicular cleavages, an inch or two broad, or varying somewhat from the perpendicular.

Melvin thinks that the "thundering" of the pond scares the pickerel.

Pickerel of at least three different forms and colors were lying on the ice of Walden this afternoon:

• first, a long and shallow kind most like those caught in the river, steel-colored with greenish or brownish lines, darker on the back and white beneath;

• second, a bright-golden fish with greenish reflections, remarkably deep, with a shorter head; both of these are mottled on the sides with an irregular network of dark-brown lines, often extending over the back, the meshes three fourths of an inch long, more or less, producing longitudinal stripes more or less distinct and continuous, very pure white beneath;

• third, shaped like the last, but peppered on the sides with small dark-brown or black spots, intermixed with a few faint blood-red ones, very much like a trout. The specific name of reticulatus would not describe this.

These are all very firm fish, and weigh more than their size promises.

The perch also, and indeed all the fishes which in habit this pond, are as much handsomer than ordinary, as the water is purer than that of other ponds.

Probably many ichthyologists would make new varieties, at least, of most of them..

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 29, 1853

 Melvin calls the ducks which I saw yesterday sheldrakes. January 28, 1853 ("See three ducks sailing in the river behind Prichard's this afternoon, black with white on wings, though these two or three have been the coldest days of the winter, and the river is generally closed."); See also March 6, 1853 ("Stedman Buttrick calls the ducks which we see in the winter, widgeons and wood sheldrakes.")

Melvin has got only three or four minks this year. See December 19, 1859 ("Farmer . . . saw but one mink-track in all his rides, and thinks that they are scarce this year."); March 13, 1859 ("Garfield . . . asked if I had seen any mink]. I said that I commonly saw two or three in a year. He said that he had not seen one alive for eight or ten years. [but] "I catch thirty or forty dollars' worth every winter.")

I saw a little grayish mouse frozen into Walden.  See January 7, 1860 ("I saw yesterday the track of a fox, and. .. on the just visible ground lay frozen a stale-looking mouse.")

Melvin thinks that the "thundering" of the pond scares the pickerel. See Walden ("The fishermen say that the "thundering of the pond" scares the fishes and prevents their biting.")

Mevin never saw an otter track. See January 21, 1853 (“I think it was January 20th that I saw that which I think an otter track in path under the Cliffs, — a deep trail in the snow, six or seven inches wide and two or three deep in the middle, as if a log had been drawn along, similar to a muskrat's only much larger, and the legs evidently short and the steps short, sinking three or four inches deeper still, as if it had waddled along.”);December 31, 1854 (“ On the edge of A. Wheeler’s cranberry meadow I see the track of an otter made since yesterday morning.”);December 6, 1856 (“The river was all tracked up with otters, from Bittern Cliff upward. Sometimes one had trailed his tail, apparently edge wise, making a mark like the tail of a deer mouse; sometimes they were moving fast, and there was an interval of five feet between the tracks.”);  February 8, 1857 (“The otter must roam about a great deal, for I rarely see fresh tracks in the same neighborhood a second time the same winter, though the old tracks may be apparent all the winter through.”) See also  April 6, 1855 ("It reminds me of an otter, which however I have never seen.");March 31, 1857 ("The existence of the otter, our largest wild animal, is not betrayed to any of our senses (or at least not to more than one in a thousand)!")  

Pickerel of at least three different forms and colors were lying on the ice of Walden this afternoon. See January 25, 1853 ("The pickerel of Walden!. . .I am always surprised by their rare beauty, as if they were a fabulous fish, . . . handsome as flowers and gems, golden and emerald, — a transcendent and dazzling beauty. . . they have, if possible, to my eye, yet rarer colors, like precious stones. It is surprising that . . . in this deep and capacious spring, . . . this great gold and emerald fish swims") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Pickerel

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,  January 29

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 ©  2009-2023