The voice of the woods

January 7.

Cold last night; rough walking; snow crusted. 

Now that the snow has lain more than a week, it begins to be spotted and darkened in the woods, with various dry leaves and scales from the trees. The wind and thaw have brought down a fresh crop of dry pine and spruce needles. The little roundish and stemmed scales of the alder catkins spot it thickly. 

The bird-shaped scales of the white birch are blown more than twenty rods from the trees. 

I see also the wings of pine seeds, — the seed being gone, — which look exactly like the wings of ants. 

I went to these woods partly to hear an owl, but did not; but, now that I have left them nearly a mile behind, I hear one distinctly, hoorer hoo. Strange that we should hear this sound so often, loud and far, — a voice which we call the owl, — and yet so rarely see the bird. Oftenest at twilight. It has a singular prominence as a sound; is louder than the voice of a dear friend. Yet we see the friend perhaps daily and the owl but few times in our lives.  It is a sound which the wood or horizon makes.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 7, 1854

The bird-shaped scales of the white birch are blown more than twenty rods from the trees. See January 7, 1856 ("I see birch scales (bird-like) on the snow on the river more than twenty rods south of the nearest and only birch, and trace them north to it”); January 7, 1853 (“Still the snow is strewn with the seeds of the birch, the small winged seeds or samarae and the larger scales or bracts shaped like a bird in flight, — a hawk or dove. The least touch or jar shakes them off, and it is difficult to bring the female catkins home in your pocket. They cover the snow like coarse bran. On breaking the male catkins, I am surprised to see the yellow anthers so distinct, promising spring. I did not suspect that there was so sure a promise or prophecy of spring. These are frozen in December or earlier, — the anthers of spring, filled with their fertilizing dust.”)

Strange that we should hear this sound so often . . . and [see] the owl but few times in our lives. It is a sound which the wood or horizon makes. See December 9, 1856 (“ I do not see the bird more than once in ten years.”) December 19, 1856 (“[it] is more than the voice of the owl, the voice of the wood as well.”)

January 7. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, January 7

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

A Book of Seasons: The Pines

~ A book, each page written in its own season, out-of-doors, in its own locality.

by Henry Thoreau, collected, edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx ©  2009-2014.

          

In the crucible of my celibate life

purified of all desire,

I enter truth from behind

and call her name.

Simplify! Simplify!

Chapter One. The Pines.

The shade of pines on the snow is in some lights quite blue. 

Journal, February 2, 1854




Now the white pine are a misty blue; anon a lively, silvery light plays on them, and they seem to erect themselves unusually; while the pitch pines are a brighter yellowish-green than usual. The sun loves to nestle in the boughs of the pine and pass rays through them.
Journal, February 4, 1852

The boughs, feathery boughs, of the white pines, tier above tier, reflect a silvery light against the darkness of the grove, as if both the silvery-lighted and greenish bough and the shadowy intervals of the shade behind belong to one tree.
Journal, February, 5, 1852

To-day I am agreeably surprised to find that hard closed cone, which defied all violent attempts to open it, has dried and opened with perfect regularity, filling the drawer, and from a solid, narrow, and sharp cone, has become a broad, rounded, open one, -- has, in fact, expanded with the regularity of a flower's petals into a conical flower of rigid scales, and has shed a remarkable quantity of delicate-winged seeds. The expanding of the pine cones, that, too, is a season.
Journal, February 27, 1853

The hemlock cones have shed their seeds, but there are some closed yet on the ground. Part of the pitch pine cones are yet closed.
Journal, March 6, 1853


I can see far into the pine woods to tree behind tree, and one tower behind another of silvery needles, stage above stage, relieved with shade. The edge of the wood is not a plane surface, but has depth.
Journal, April 2, 1853


The pine on Lee's shore of the pond, seen against the light water this cloudy weather from part way down the Cliff, is an agreeable object to me. When the outline and texture of white pine is thus seen against the water or the sky, it is an affecting sight.
Journal, April 22, 1852

The pines have an appearance they have not worn before, yet not easy to describe. The mottled sunlight and shade, seen looking into the woods, is more like summer. Coming home over the Corner road, the sun, now getting low, is reflected very bright and silvery from the water on the meadows, seen through the pines of Hubbard's Grove.
Journal, April 29, 1852

The white pine is beautiful in the morning light--the early sun light and the dew on it -- before the water is rippled and the morning song of the birds is quenched.
Journal, May 3, 1852

I see dark pines in the distance in the sunshine, contrasting with the light fresh green of the deciduous trees.
Journal, May 17, 1852

The forest, the dark-green pines, wonderfully distinct, near and erect, with their distinct dark stems, spiring tops, regularly disposed branches, and silvery light on their needles.
Journal, May 18, 1852


Having noticed the pine pollen washed up on the shore of three or four ponds in the woods lately and at Ripple Lake, a dozen rods from the nearest pine, it suggested to me that the air must be full of this fine dust at this season, that it must be carried to great distances, and its presence might be detected remote from pines by examining the edges of bodies of water, where it would be collected to one side by the wind and waves from a large area.
Journal, June 21, 1860

I am too late for the white pine flowers. The cones are half an inch long and greenish, and the male flowers effete.
Journal, June 25, 1852


The path by the wood-side is red with the effete staminiferous flowers of the white pine.
Journal, July 1, 1852


There is a handsome wood-path on the east side of White Pond. The shadows of the pine stems and branches fall across the path, which is perfectly red with pine-needles.
Journal, July 5, 1851

Some pigeons here are resting in the thickest of the white pines during the heat of the day, migrating, no doubt.
Journal, July 21, 1851

You see every feature of the white pine grove with distinctness, -- the stems of the trees, then the dark shade, then their fresh sunlit outsides -- and an inky darkness as of night under the edge of the woods, now at noonday heralding the evening of the year.
Journal, August 15, 1853

There is an abundant crop of cones on the white pines this year, and they are now for the most part brown and open. They make a great show even sixty rods off. The tops of the high trees for six or ten feet downward are quite browned with them, hanging straight downward. It is worth the while to observe this evidence of fertility, even in the white pine, which commonly we do not regard as a fruit-bearing tree. It is worth a long walk to look from some favorable point over a pine forest whose tops are thus covered with the brown cones just opened, — from which the winged seeds have fallen or are ready to fall. It is really a rich and interesting sight. How little observed are the fruits which we do not use! How few attend to the ripening and dispersion of the pine seed!
Journal, September 18, 1859

The pine fall, i.e. the change is commenced, and the trees are mottled green and yellowish.
Journal, October 3, 1852

A new carpet of pine leaves is forming in the woods. The forest is laying down her carpet for the winter.
Journal, October 12, 1852

The pines, both white and pitch, have now shed their leaves, and the ground in the pine woods is strewn with the newly fallen needles.
Journal, October 22, 1851

The ground is strewn with pine-needles as sunlight.

Journal, October 25, 1853

Measure some pine stumps on Tommy Wheeler's land, about that now frosty hollow, cut as I judge from sprouts four years ago. One, having 164 rings, sprang up at least one hundred and sixty-eight years ago, or about the year 1692, or fifty-seven years after the settlement, 1635.
Journal, November 1, 1860


I notice along the Corner road, beyond Abiel Wheeler's, quite a number of little white pines springing up against the south wall, whose seed must have been blown from Hubbard's Grove some fifty rods east.
Journal, November 8, 1860

Measured a stick of round timber, probably white pine, on the cars this afternoon, -- ninety-five feet long, nine and ten-twelfths in circumference at butt, and six and two-twelfths in circumference at small end, quite straight. From Vermont.
Journal, November 18, 1852


The pines standing in the ocean of mist, seen from the Cliffs, are trees in every stage of transition from the actual to the imaginary. As you advance, the trees gradually come out of the mist and take form before your eyes.
Journal, November 29, 1850

The evergreens are greener than ever. There is a peculiar bright light on the pines and on their stems. The lichens on their bark reflect it.
Journal, December 5, 1850

Now that the ground is covered with snow, the pine woods seen from the hilltops are not green but a dark brown, greenish-brown perhaps. You see dark patches of wood.
Journal, December 26, 1850

The white pines look greener than usual in this gentle rain, and every needle has a drop at the end of it. There is a mist in the air which partially conceals them, and they seem of a piece with it. Journal, December 28, 1851

The round greenish-yellow lichens on the white pines loom through the mist. The trees appear all at once covered with their crop of lichens and mosses of all kinds, the livid green of some, the fruit of others. Your eyes run swiftly through the mist to these things only. They eclipse the trees they cover.
Journal, December 31, 1851

I see where the squirrels have torn the pine cones in pieces to come at their seeds. And in some cases the mice have nibbled the buds of the pitch pines, where the plumes have been bent down by the snow.
Journal, January 23, 1852