Like the mackerel sky

February 28. 

To Cambridge and Boston. 

FEBRUARY 28, 2019

Saw a mackerel in the market. The upper half of its sides is mottled blue and white like the mackerel sky, as stated January 19th, 1858 [sic].

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 28, 1859

See January 19, 1859 (“The sky is most wonderfully and beautifully mottled with evenly distributed cloudlets, of indescribable variety yet regularity in their form, suggesting fishes’ scales, with perhaps small fish-bones thrown in here and there. It is white in the midst, or most prominent part, of the scales, passing into blue in the crannies. Something like this blue and white mottling, methinks, is seen on a mackerel, and has suggested the name. ”)

A walk on the beach

July 11

See young piping plover running in a troop on the beach like peetweets.

Patches of shrub oaks, bayberry, beach plum, and early wild roses, overrun with woodbine. What a splendid show of wild roses, whose sweetness is mingled with the aroma of the bayberry! 

A bar wholly made within three months; first exposed about first of May; as I paced, now seventy five rods long and six or eight rods wide at high water, and bay within six rods wide. The bay has extended twice as far, but is filled up. 

upland plover 

The upland plover hovers almost stationary in the air with a quivering note of alarm. Above, dark-brown interspersed with white, darkest in rear; gray-spotted breast, white beneath; bill dark above, yellowish at base beneath, and legs yellowish. 

July 11, 2015

Bank at lighthouse one hundred and seventy feet on the slope, perpendicular one hundred and ten; say shelf slopes four and ordinary tide-fall is nine, makes one hundred and twenty-three in all. Saw sand bank south fifteen to twenty-five feet higher. 

Mackerel-fishing not healthy like cod-fishing; hard work packing the mackerel, stooping over.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 11, 1855

Upland plover. "In Massachusetts, and to the eastward of that state, this species is best known by the name of 'Upland Plover,'”   ~ J. J. Audubon  [Bertram’s sandpiper (Bartramia longicauda),  now known as the Upland Sandpiper.]

July 11. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, July 11

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 © 2009-2021

Walked from post-office to lighthouse. Fog till eight or nine, and short grass very wet.

July 6.

Rode to North Truro very early in the stage or covered wagon, on the new road, which is just finished as far as East Harbor Creek. 

Blackfish on the shore. 

Walked from post-office to lighthouse. Fog till eight or nine, and short grass very wet. 

Board at James Small’s, the lighthouse, at $3.50 the week. 

Polygala polygama well out, flat, ray-wise, all over the fields. Cakile Americana, sea-rocket, the large weed of the beach, some time and going to seed, on beach. Pasture thistle (Cirsium pumilum), out some time. A great many white ones. 

The boy, Isaac Small, got eighty bank swallows’ eggs out of the clay-bank, i. e. above the clay. Small says there are a few great gulls here in summer.

I see small (?) yellow-legs. Many crow blackbirds in the dry fields hopping about. 

Upland plover near the lighthouse breeding. Small once cut off one’s wing when mowing in the field next the lighthouse as she sat on her eggs.

Many seringo-birds, apparently like ours. 

They say mackerel have just left the Bay, and fishermen have gone to the eastward for them. Some, however, are catching cod and halibut on the back side. 

Cape measures two miles in width here on the great chart.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 6, 1855

Board at James Small’s, the lighthouse, at $3.50 the week. See June 18, 1857 ("Small says that the lighthouse was built about sixty years ago.")