To let the wind blow me also to other climes.

 

May 9. 

Tuesday.

To Boston and Cambridge.

Currant in garden, but ours may be a late kind.

Purple finch still here.

Looking at the birds at the Natural History Rooms, I find that I have not seen the crow blackbird at all yet this season.

Perhaps I have seen the rusty-black bird, though I am not sure what those slaty-black ones are, as large as the red-wings, nor those pure-black fellows, unless rusty blackbirds.

I think that my blackbirds of the morning of the 24th may have been cowbirds.

Sat on end of Long Wharf.

Was surprised to observe that so many of the men on board the shipping were pure countrymen in dress and habits, and the seaport is no more than a country town to which they come a-trading. I found about the wharves, steering the coasters and unloading the ships, men in farmer's dress.

As I watched the various craft successively unfurling their sails and getting to sea, I felt more than for many years inclined to let the wind blow me also to other climes.

Harris showed me a list of plants in Hovey's Magazine (I think for '42 or '43) not in Bigelow's Botany, -- seventeen or eighteen of them, among the rest a pine I have not seen, etc., etc., q. v.

Perla marginata

That early narrow curved-winged insect on ice and river which I thought an ephemera he says is a Sialis, or maybe rather a Perla. Thinks it the Donatia palmata I gave him. Says the shad-flies (with streamers and erect wings ) are ephemeræ. 

He spoke of Podura nivalis, I think meaning ours.

Planted melons.


H. D. Thoreau, Journal, May 9, 1854

I think that my blackbirds of the morning of the 24th may have been cowbirds. See April 24, 1854 ("Saw a black blackbird without red, with a purplish-green-black neck, and somewhat less than a red-wing, in company with two smaller slaty black females (?). Can they be rusty grackles?")

As I watched the various craft successively unfurling their sails and getting to sea, I felt more than for many years inclined to let the wind blow me also to other climes See December 25, 1853 ("When I go to Boston, I go naturally straight through the city down to the end of Long Wharf and look off")

That early narrow curved-winged insect on ice and river which I thought an ephemera he says is a Sialis, or maybe rather a Perla. See March 22, 1856 ("On water standing above the ice under a white maple, are many of those Perla (?) insects, with four wings, drowned, though it is all ice and snow around the country over. Do not see any flying, nor before this"); March 24, 1857 ("I see many of those narrow four-winged insects (perla?) of the ice now fluttering on the water like ephemerae. They have two pairs of wings indistinctly spotted dark and light."); March 17, 1858 ("As usual, I have seen for some weeks on the ice these peculiar (perla?) insects with long wings and two tails."); March 7, 1859 ("I also see — but their appearance is a regular early spring, or late winter, phenomenon — a great many of those slender black-bodied insects from one quarter to (with the feelers) one inch long, with six legs and long gray wings, two feelers before, and two forks or tails like feelers for convenience Perla."); March 3, 1860 ("I see one of those gray-winged (long and slender) perla-like insects by the waterside this afternoon.")

Says the shad-flies (with streamers and erect wings ) are ephemeræ. See May 1, 1854 ("The water is strewn with myriads of wrecked shad-flies, erect on the surface, with their wings up like so many schooners all headed one way.”); ;June 2, 1854 "The whole atmosphere over the river was full of shad-flies.. . . It was a great flight of ephemera"); June 9, 1854 (" The air is now full of shad-flies, and there is an incessant sound made by the fishes leaping for their evening meal.”); May 4, 1856 ("Shad-flies on the water, schooner-like."); June 8, 1856 (“My boat being by chance at the same place where it was in ’54, I noticed a great flight of ephemera”); June 9, 1856 ("Again, about seven, the ephemera came out, in numbers as many as last night, ... and the fishes leap as before.")  See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Insect Hatches in Spring 

May 9. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau: May 9

On end of Long Wharf

inclined to let the wind blow

me to other climes.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, Sat on end of Long Wharf.

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 ©  2009-2024

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