Saturday, April 10, 2021

A day in a life. April 10

 

 

 April 10, 1852 (“See ahead the waves running higher in the middle of the meadow, and here they get the full sweep of the wind and they break into whitecaps. ”). See April 10, 1856 ("I set out to sail, the wind northwest, but it is so strong, and I so feeble, that I gave it up. The waves dashed over into the boat and with their sprinkling wet me half through in a few moments.");April 14, 1856 ("I steer down straight through the Great Meadows, with the wind almost directly aft, feeling it more and more the farther I advance into them. They make a noble lake now. The boat, tossed up by the rolling billows, keeps falling again on the waves with a chucking sound which is inspiriting"); March 16, 1860 ("I make more boisterous and stormy voyages now than at any season. . . . I vastly increase my sphere and experience by a boat.")  See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Sailing

April 10, 1853 (The male red maple buds are about ready to open”). See April 1, 1860 ("The red maple buds are considerably expanded, and no doubt make a greater impression of redness.")

 April 10, 1854 (“The crimson stigmas of the white maple make handsome show”).. See March 29, 1853 ("The female flowers of the white maple, crimson stigmas from the same rounded masses of buds with the male, are now quite abundant. . . . The two sorts of flowers are not only on the same tree and the same twig and sometimes in the same bud, but also sometimes in the same little cup."); April 8, 1855 ("The crimson female stigmas also peeping forth. See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, White Maple Buds and Flowers

 April 10, 1855 (“As for the saxifrage, when I had given it up for to-day, having, after a long search in the warmest clefts and recesses, found only three or four buds which showed some white, I at length, on a still warmer shelf, found one flower partly expanded, and its common peduncle had shot up an inch”).. See April 8, 1858 ("At Lee's Cliff I find no saxifrage in bloom above the rock,. .. but on a few small warm shelves under the rocks the saxifrage makes already a pretty white edging along the edge of the grass sod [?] on the rocks; has got up three or four inches, and may have been out four or five days.") 

 April 10, 1855 (“At Lee’s the early sedge; one only sheds pollen. ”).See April 7, 1854 ("On the Cliff I find, after long and careful search, one sedge above the rocks, low amid the withered blades of last year, out, its little yellow beard amid the dry blades and few green ones, — the first herbaceous flowering I have detected. . . . It must have been so first either on the 5th or 6th.”)

 April 10, 1856 (“I set out to sail, the wind northwest, but it is so strong, and I so feeble, that I gave it up”).. . . . See April 10, 1852 ("We lay to in the lee of an island a little north of the bridge, where the surface is quite smooth, and the woods shelter us completely, while we hear the roar of the wind behind them, with an agreeable sense of protection, and see the white caps of the waves on either side.")

April 10, 1856 (“Our meadow looks as angry now as it ever can.”). See March 29, 1852 (“The water on the meadows looks very dark from the street. . . . There is more water and it is more ruffled at this season than at any other, and the waves look quite angry and black. ”) March 18, 1854 ("The white caps of the waves on the flooded meadow, seen from the window, are a rare and exciting spectacle, — such an angry face as our Concord meadows rarely exhibit.")

April 10, 1856 (“Went to look at the golden saxifrage in Hubbard’s Close .”)..  See April 12, 1855 ("Golden saxifrage out at Hubbard’s Close, -- one, at least, effete. It may have been the 10th.”); April 1, 1855 “(One of the earliest-looking plants in water is the golden saxifrage.”)[Golden-saxifrage (Chrysosplenium americanum), a native wetland and aquatic plant that frequents small streams and seepy areas in swamps and forests. The inconspicuous flowers are noticeable only for their eight brick-red anthers when it blooms in May.]

 April 10, 1859  (“Hear the first stuttering frog croak — probably halecina”)..:[Rana halecina (Lithobates pipiens – Northern Leopard Frog.] See   April 3, 1858 (“I stood perfectly still, and ere long they began to reappear one by one, and spread themselves out on the surface. They were the R. halecina. I could see very plainly the two very prominent yellow lines along the sides of the head and the large dark ocellated marks, even under water, on the thighs, etc. Gradually they begin to recover their voices, but it is hard to say at first which one of the dozen within twenty feet is speaking. . . .. Their note is a hard dry tut tut tut tut, not at all ringing like the toad’s, and produced with very little swelling or motion of the throat, but as much trembling of the whole body; and from time to time one makes that faint somewhat bullfrog-like er er er. Both these sounds, then, are made by one frog, and what I have formerly thought an early bullfrog note was this. This, I think, is the first frog sound I have heard from the river meadows or anywhere, except the croaking leaf-pool frogs and the hylodes. . . . 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 8, 1852 ("To-day I hear the croak of frogs in small pond-holes in the woods"); ; 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." );April 13, 1855 ("The small croaking frogs are now generally heard in all those stagnant ponds or pools in woods floored with leaves, which are mainly dried up in the summer.");  ; April 13, 1856 ("As I go by the Andromeda Ponds, I hear the tut tut of a few croaking frogs. . ."); April 15, 1855 ("That general tut tut tut tut, or snoring, of frogs on the shallow meadow heard first slightly the 5th. )

 April 10, 1859 (“This makes twenty-two days of windy weather.”) See April 6, 1859 ("For nineteen days, from the 19th of March to the 6th of April, both inclusive, we have had remarkably windy weather. For ten days of the nineteen the wind has been remarkably strong and violent . . .The last seven, including to-day, have all been windy, five of them remarkably so; wind from northwest."); April 8, 1859 ("We have had, most of the time, during this windy weather for a month past, when the wind was northwest, those peculiar brushy clouds which look as if a little snow or rain was falling in the northwest, but they prove to be wind chiefly.")

 April 10, 1860 (Cheney elm, many anthers shed pollen, probably 7th “”). See note to April 7, 1859 ("The Cheney elm looks as if it would shed pollen to-morrow,[no], and the Salix purpurea will perhaps within a week")

April 10, 1860 (“Salix purpurea apparently will not open for four or five days”).  See April 13, 1859  ("The Salix purpurea will hardly open for five days yet."); April 22, 1859 ("The Salix purpurea in prime, out probably three or four days; say 19th.")

 April 10, 1861 (“Purple finch”).  See  April 18, 1852 ("Observe all kinds of coincidences, as what kinds of birds come with what flowers."); April 7, 1859 ("The Cheney elm looks as if it would shed pollen to-morrow."); April 7, 1860 ("The purple finch, — if not before"); April 10, 1860 ("Cheney elm, many anthers shed pollen, probably 7th."); April 11, 1853 ("I hear the clear, loud whistle of a purple finch, somewhat like and nearly as loud as the robin, from the elm by Whiting's."); April 12, 1855 ("I hear a purple finch . . . on an elm, steadily warbling and uttering a sharp chip from time to time"); April 12, 1856 ("There suddenly flits before me . . . a splendid purple finch. Its glowing redness is revealed when it lifts its wings.");  April 13, 1852 ("The elm buds begin to show their blossoms."); April 15, 1856 ("The purple finch is singing on the elms about the house, together with the robins, whose strain its resembles, ending with a loud, shrill, ringing chili chilt chilt chilt."); April 15, 1854 ("The arrival of the purple finches appears to be coincident with the blossoming of the elm, on whose blossom it feeds"); See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Elms and the Purple Finch

 

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