The geese of November.

November 11. 

Minott heard geese go over night before last, about 8 P. M. Therien, too, heard them “yelling like anything” over Walden, where he is cutting, the same evening. 

November 11, 2018

He cut down a tree with a flying squirrel on it; often sees them.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 11, 1854

Minott heard geese go over night before last, about 8 P. M. See November 8 , 1857 ("About 10 A.M. a long flock of geese are going over from northeast to southwest"); November 13, 1855 ("Seventy or eighty geese, in three harrows successively smaller, flying southwest—pretty well west—over the house. A completely overcast, occasionally drizzling forenoon. "); November 13, 1858 ("A large flock of geese go over just before night."); November 14, 1855 ("Minott hears geese to-day.""); November 18, 1854 (" Sixty geese go over the Great Fields, in one waving line, broken from time to time by their crowding on each other and vainly endeavoring to form into a harrow, honking all the while."); November 20, 1853 ("Methinks the geese are wont to go south just before a storm, and, in the spring, to go north just after one, say at the end of a long April storm.”); November 22, 1853 (“Geese went over yesterday, and to-day also.”); November 23, 1853 ("At 5 P. M. I saw, flying southwest high overhead, a flock of geese, and heard the faint honking of one or two. They were in the usual harrow form, . . . This is the sixth flock I have seen or heard of since the morning of the 17th , i . e . within a week ."); November 24, 1855 ("Geese went over on the 13th and 14th, on the 17th the first snow fell, and the 19th it began to be cold and blustering.”); November 25, 1852 ("At Walden. — I hear at sundown what I mistake for the squawking of a hen. . . but it proved to be a flock of wild geese going south"); November 30, 1857 ("The air is full of geese. I saw five flocks within an hour, about 10 A. M., containing from thirty to fifty each, and afterward two more flocks, making in all from two hundred and fifty to three hundred at least") See also A Book of Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Geese in Autumn

A tree with a flying squirrel on it; often sees them. See March 22, 1855 ("I observed a rotten and hollow hemlock stump about two feet high and six inches in diameter , and instinctively approached with my right hand ready to cover it . I found a flying squirrel in it , which , as my left hand had covered a small hole at the bottom , ran directly into my right hand ."); June 19, 1859 ("A flying squirrel's nest and young . . . Saw three young run out after the mother and up a slender oak. The young half-grown, very tender-looking and weak-tailed, yet one climbed quite to the top of an oak twenty-five feet high,") See also December 24, 1853 ("[Therien] said he often saw gray squirrels running about and jumping from tree to tree")

A flying squirrel's nest and young.

June 19. 

Sunday. P. M. — To Heywood Meadow and Well Meadow. 

June 19, 2020

In Stow's meadow by railroad, Scirpus Eriophorum, with blackish bracts, not long out. 

A flying squirrel's nest and young on Emerson's hatchet path, south of Walden, on hilltop, in a covered hollow in a small old stump at base of a young oak, covered with fallen leaves and a portion of the stump; nest apparently of dry grass. Saw three young run out after the mother and up a slender oak. The young half-grown, very tender-looking and weak-tailed, yet one climbed quite to the top of an oak twenty-five feet high, though feebly. Claws must be very sharp and early developed. The mother rested quite near, on a small projecting stub big as a pipe-stem, curled cross wise on it. Have a more rounded head and snout than our other squirrels. The young in danger of being picked off by hawks. 

Find by Baker Rock the (apparently) Carex Muhlenbergii gone to seed, dark-green, as Torrey says. Resembles the stipata. 

Blackbirds nest in the small pond there, and generally in similar weedy and bushy pond-holes in woods. 

The prevailing sedge of Heywood Meadow by Bartlett Hill-side, that which showed yellow tops in the spring, is the Carex stricta. On this the musquash there commonly makes its stools. A tall slender sedge with conspicuous brown staminate spikes. Also some C. lanuginosa with it. C. canescens, too, grows there, less conspicuous, like the others gone to seed. 

Scare up young partridges; size of chickens just hatched, yet they fly. The old one in the woods near makes a chuckling sound just like a red squirrel's bark, also mewing. 

Flies rain about my head. 

Notice green berries, — blueberries and huckleberries. 

Is that red-top, nearly out on railroad bank? 

Eriophorum polystachyon of Torrey, Bigelow, and Gray, the apparently broadish-leaved, but Gray makes the wool too long. In Pleasant and Well Meadow; at height. 

Carex polytrichoides in fruit and a little in flower, Heywood Meadow in woods and Spanish Meadow Swamp. 

Trisetum palustre (?), Well Meadow Head, in wet; apparently at height.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 19, 1859

The young half-grown climbed quite to the top of an oak twenty-five feet high, though feebly. See June 23, 1855 ("Hear of flying squirrels now grown."); March 23, 1855 ("It sprang off from the maple at the height of twenty-eight and a half feet, and struck the ground at the foot of a tree fifty and a half feet distant, measured horizontally.")

The prevailing sedge of Heywood Meadow by Bartlett Hill-side, that which showed yellow tops in the spring, is the Carex stricta.  See April 22, 1859 ("Within a few days I pricked my fingers smartly against the sharp, stiff points of some sedge coming up. At Heywood's meadow, by the railroad, this sedge, rising green and dense with yellow tips above the withered clumps, is very striking, suggesting heat, even a blaze, there.")

Scare up young partridges; size of chickens just hatched, yet they fly. See June 23, 1854 (" Disturb three different broods of partridges in my walk this afternoon in different places. One in Deep Cut Woods, big as chickens ten days old, went flying in various directions a rod or two into the hillside. Another by Heywood's meadow, the young two and a half inches long only, not long hatched, making a fine peep. Held one in my hand, where it squatted without winking. A third near Well Meadow Field. We are now, then, in the very midst of them. Now leading forth their young broods. ") See also A Book of Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Partridge.

Notice green berries, — blueberries and huckleberries. See June 6, 1852 ("The earliest blueberries are now forming as greenberries.”)

Is that red-top, nearly out on railroad bank? See July 13, 1860 ("First we had the June grass reddish-brown, and the sorrel red, of June; now the red-top red of July.")

I survey to a white oak called in ’91 “a small white oak.”

December 4. 

Surveying the Richardson Fair Haven lot. 

December 4, 2017

Rufus Morse, who comes to find his bounds on R., accounts for his deed being tattered by saying that some tame flying squirrels got loose and into a chest where he kept his papers and nibbled them, though the lid was not raised enough to get in a cent! They are so flat. 

I survey to a white oak called in ’91 “a small white oak.”

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 4, 1857

December 4. SeeA Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, December 4; A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, I love you like I love the sky

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 ©  2009-2022

I turn the porch light on. It is dark when I leave. The car is covered with frost. It’s 24°. Driving down the road there is fog. Everything is covered with frost. It is imperceptible when I begin to see the road from the light of the dawn. And now the mountains edged in pink against what is going to be clear blue sky. Turning the corner in East Middlebury a full moon in the northwest horizon. Frosty fields, shapely maples against the sky. The sun far to the south now appearing and disappearing behind the mountain.The rising sun casts long shadows over the whitened field. I breathe the frosty air.

 December 4, 2017

Felling the big elm, which must have been some fifty years old when the British marched into town.

January 21.

January 21, 2016

Four men, cutting at once, began to fell the big elm at 10 A. M., went to dinner at 12, and got through at 2.30 P. M. They used a block and tackle with five falls, fastened to the base of a button wood, and drawn by a horse, to pull it over the right way; so it fell without harm down the road. One said he pulled twenty turns. 

I measured it at 3 P. M., just after the top had been cut off. It was 15 feet to the first crotch. At 75 feet, the most upright and probably highest limb was cut off, and measured 27 inches in circumference. As near as I could tell from the twigs on the snow, and what the choppers said who had just removed the top, it was about 108 feet high. 

At 15 feet from the stump, it divided into two parts, about an equal size. One was decayed and broken in the fall, being undermost, the other (which also proved hollow) at its origin was 11' 4" in circumference. (The whole tree directly beneath this crotch was 9' 3"round.) 

This same limb branched again at 36' 8" from the stump, and there measured, just beneath the crotch, 14' 10" in circumference. At the ground the stump measured 8' 4" one way, 8' 3" another, 7' 6" another. 

It was solid quite through at butt (excepting 3 inches in middle), though some what decayed within, and I could count pretty well 105 rings, not including the hollow.  

There was a currant bush opposite the first crotch, in a large hole at that height, where probably a limb once broke off (making three there), and also a great many stones bigger than a hen’s egg, probably cast in by the boys. There was also part of an old brick with some clay, thirty or forty years within the tree at the stump, completely overgrown and cut through by the axe. 

I judged that there were at least seven cords then in the road, supposing one main limb sound, and Davis thought that the pile in the yard, from the limbs taken off last week, contained four more. 

He said that there were some flying squirrels within and upon it when they were taking off the limbs. There was scarcely any hollowness to be discovered.

It had grown very rapidly the first fifty years or so. You could see where there had once been deep clefts between different portions of the trunk at the stump, but the tree had afterward united and overgrown them, leaving some bark within the wood. 

In some places the trunk as it lay on the ground (though flatwise) was as high as a man’s head. 

This tree stood directly under the hill, which is some sixty feet high, the old burying hill continued, south of where the flagstaff was planted when the British marched into town. This tree must have been some fifty years old and quite sizable then. 

White, when taking off the limbs, said that he could see all over Sleepy Hollow, beyond the hill. There were several great wens on the trunk, a foot in diameter and nearly as much in height. 

The tree was so sound I think it might have lived fifty years longer; but Mrs. Davis said that she would not like to spend another such a week as the last before it was cut down. They heard it creak in the storm. One of the great limbs which reached over the house was cracked. The two main limbs proved hollow.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 21, 1856

Four men, cutting at once, began to fell the big elm. See January 19, 1856 ("Measure again the great elm in front of Charles Davis’s on the Boston road, which he is having cut down. . . .At the smallest place between the ground and the limbs, seven feet from the ground, it is fifteen feet and two inches in circumference; at one foot from the ground on the lowest side, twenty-three feet and nine inches."); January 22, 1856 ("Most were not aware of the size of the great elm till it was cut down. . . . I have attended the felling and, so to speak, the funeral of this old citizen of the town."); January 26, 1856 ("It was one hundred and thirty-two years old, or came up in the year 1724, just before Lovewell’s Fight.")

A redstart's nest

June 23 

June 23, 2015

Probably a redstart’s nest on a white oak sapling, twelve feet up, on forks against stem. Have it. See young redstarts about. 

Hear of flying squirrels now grown.


H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 23, 1855



Probably a redstart’s nest on a white oak sapling, twelve feet up. See young redstarts about. See June 23, 1858 ("A male redstart seen, and often heard. What a little fellow!")  See also June 6, 1855 ("On the Island I hear still the redstart—tsip tsip tsip tsip, tsit-i-yet, or sometimes tsip tsip tsip tsip, tse vet. A young male"); July 8, 1857 ("To Laurel Glen. . . . Hear apparently redstarts there, — so they must have nests near");  July 13, 1856 ("Saw and heard two or three redstarts at Redstart Woods, where they probably have nests ") See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, The American Redstart

Hear of flying squirrels now grown. See June 19, 1859 ("A flying squirrel's nest and young . . . Saw three young run out after the mother and up a slender oak. The young half-grown, very tender-looking and weak-tailed, yet one climbed quite to the top of an oak twenty-five feet high,")

The flight of the flying squirrel

March 23

Carry my flying squirrel back to the woods in my handkerchief. I place it, about 3.30 P. M., on the very stump I had taken it from. It immediately runs about a rod over the leaves and up a slender maple sapling about ten feet, then after a moment’s pause springs off and skims downward toward a large maple nine feet distant, whose trunk it struck three or four feet from the ground. 

This it rapidly ascends, on the opposite side from me, nearly thirty feet, and there clings to the main stem with its head downward, eyeing me. After two or three minutes’ pause I see that it is preparing for another spring by raising its head and looking off, and away it goes in admirable style, more like a bird than any quadruped I have dreamed of and far surpassing the impression I have received from naturalists’ accounts.

I mark the spot it started from and the place where it struck, and measure the height and distance carefully. 

It sprang off from the maple at the height of twenty-eight and a half feet, and struck the ground at the foot of a tree fifty and a half feet distant, measured horizontally. As the ground rose about two feet, the distance was to the absolute height as fifty and a half to twenty-six and a half, or it advanced about two feet for every one foot of descent.

Its flight was not a regular descent; it varied from a direct line both horizontally and vertically. Indeed it skimmed much like a hawk and part of its flight was nearly horizontal, and it diverged from a right line eight or ten feet to the right, making a curve in that direction. There were six trees from six inches to a foot in diameter, one a hemlock, in a direct line between the two termini, and these it skimmed partly round, and passed through their thinner limbs; did not as I could perceive touch a twig. It skimmed its way like a hawk between and around the trees. 

In order to perform all these flights, —to strike a tree at such a distance, etc., etc., —it is evident it must be able to steer.

H. D.  Thoreau, Journal, March 23, 1855

Carry my flying squirrel back to the woods in my handkerchief. I place it, about 3.30 P. M., on the very stump I had taken it from. See March 22, 1855 ("I observed a rotten and hollow hemlock stump about two feet high and six inches in diameter , and instinctively approached with my right hand ready to cover it . I found a flying squirrel in it , which , as my left hand had covered a small hole at the bottom , ran directly into my right hand ."); see also   June 19, 1859 ("A flying squirrel's nest and young . . . Saw three young run out after the mother and up a slender oak. The young half-grown, very tender-looking and weak-tailed, yet one climbed quite to the top of an oak twenty-five feet high,"). See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Flying Squirrel

The flying squirrel

skims and steers its way between 

and around the trees.  

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The flight of the flying squirrel

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 © 2009-2025

https://tinyurl.com/hdt-550323

In Howard's Meadow

June 29.

P. M. — To Walden. Very hot. 

The piper grass bloom in prime. 

Examined the flying squirrel's nest at the base of a small white [oak] or two (sprouts), four inches through, in a small old white oak stump, half open above, just below the level of the ground, composed of quite a mass of old withered oak leaves and a few fresh green ones, and the inside wholly of fine, dry sedge and sedge-like bark-fibres.  The upper side of the nest was half visible from above. It was eight or nine inches across. 

In it I found the wing of an Attacus luna, — and July 1st another wing near Second Division, which makes three between June 27th and July 1st.

At the railroad spring in Howard's meadow, I see two chestnut-sided warblers hopping and chipping as if they had a nest, within six feet of me, a long time. No doubt they are breeding near. Yellow crown with a fine dark longitudinal line, reddish-chestnut sides, black triangle on side of head, white beneath. 

River falls several inches.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 29, 1859

The flying squirrel's nest. See June 19, 1859 ("A flying squirrel's nest . . .south of Walden, on hilltop, in a covered hollow in a small old stump at base of a young oak")

I found the wing of an Attacus luna, three between June 27th and July 1st. See June 27, 1859 ("At the further Brister's Spring, under the pine, I find an Attacus luna, half hidden under a skunk-cabbage leaf, ")   See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, the Luna Moth (Attacus luna)