Geese go over in the spring about 10 o'clock in the morning,

March 26.

There is a large specimen of what I take to be the common alder by the poplar at Egg Rock, five inches in diameter. It may be considered as beginning to bloom to-day.

Some white maples appear still as backward as the red.

Saw about 10 A. M. a gaggle of geese, forty-three in number, in a very perfect harrow flying northeasterly. One side the harrow was a little longer than the other. They appeared to be four or five feet apart.

At first I heard faintly, as I stood by Minott's gate, borne to me from the southwest through the confused sounds of the village, the indistinct honking of geese.

I was somewhat surprised to find that Mr. Loring at his house should have heard and seen the same flock. I should think that the same flock was commonly seen and heard from the distance of a mile east and west.

It is remarkable that we commonly see geese go over in the spring about 10 o'clock in the morning, as if they were accustomed to stop for the night at some place southward whence they reached us at that time.

Goodwin saw six geese in Walden about the same time.

The scales of the alder run to leaves sometimes.

P. M. Up Assabet to stone-heaps, in boat.

A warm, moist, April-like afternoon, with wet-looking sky, and misty.  For the first time I take off my coat.

Everywhere are hovering over the river and floating, wrecked and struggling, on its surface, a miller-like insect, without mealy wings, very long and narrow, six- legged with two long feelers and, I believe, two long slender grayish wings, from my harbor to the heaps, or a couple of miles at least, food for fishes. This was the degree and kind of warmth to bring them forth.

The tortoises, undoubtedly painted, drop now in several instances from the limbs and floating rails on which they had come out to sun.

I notice by the Island a yellow scum on the water close to the shore, which must be the pollen of the alders just above. This, too, is perhaps food for fishes.

Up the Assabet, scared from his perch a stout hawk, -- the red-tailed undoubtedly, for I saw very plainly the cow-red when he spread his wings from off his tail (and rump?).

I rowed the boat three times within gunshot before he flew, twice within four rods, while he sat on an oak over the water,-- I think because I had two ladies with me, which was as good as bushing the boat. Each time, or twice at least, he made a motion to fly before he started.

The ends of his primaries looked very ragged against the sky.

This is the hen-hawk of the farmer, the same, probably, which I have scared off from the Cliff so often. It was an interesting eagle-like object, as he sat upright on his perch with his back to us, now and then looking over his shoulder, the broad-backed, flat-headed, curve-beaked bird.

Heard a pewee. This, it seems to me, is the first true pewee day, though they have been here some time.

What is that cress-like weed in and on the edge of the river opposite Prescott Barrett's? A fresher and more luxuriant growth of green leaf than I have seen yet; as if it had grown in winter.

I do not perceive any fresh additions to the stone-heaps, though perhaps I did not examine carefully enough.

Went forth just after sunset.

A storm gathering, an April-like storm. I hear now in the dusk only the song sparrow along the fences and a few hylas at a distance. And now the rattling drops compel me to return.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 26, 1853

There is a large specimen of what I take to be the common alder by the poplar at Egg Rock. See December 30, 1855 ("For a few days I have noticed the snow sprinkled with alder and birch scales. I go now through the birch meadow southwest of the Rock. The high wind is scattering them over the snow there. ")

Saw about 10 A. M. a gaggle of geese, forty-three in number, in a very perfect harrow flying northeasterly. See March 24, 1859 (" C. sees geese go over again this afternoon."); March 25, 1853 ("A Lincoln man heard a flock of geese, he thinks it was day before yesterday."); March 27, 1857 ("Farmer says that he heard geese go over two or three nights ago."); March 27 and 28, 1860 (" Louis Minor tells me he saw some geese about the 23d."); March 28, 1859 ("I suspect it will be found that there is really some advantage in large birds of passage flying in the wedge form and cleaving their way through the air, — that they really do overcome its resistance best in this way, — and perchance the direction and strength of the wind determine the comparative length of the two sides . . .Undoubtedly the geese fly more numerously over rivers which, like ours, flow northeasterly, — are more at home with the water under them.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Signs of Spring, Geese Overhead

Everywhere are hovering over the river and floating, wrecked and struggling, on its surface, a miller-like insect . . the degree and kind of warmth to bring them forth. See March 7, 1859 ("Their appearance is a regular early spring, or late winter, phenomenon"); April 25, 1854 ("Many shad-flies in the air and alighting on my clothes. The summer approaches by almost insensibly increasing lieferungs of heat,  . . Each creature awaits with confidence its proper degree of heat.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Insect Hatches in Spring (millers, perla, shad-flies or ephemera)

Up the Assabet, scared from his perch a stout hawk, -- the red-tailed undoubtedly See March 6, 1858 ("I see the first hen-hawk, or hawk of any kind, methinks, since the beginning of winter. Its scream, even, is inspiring as the voice of a spring bird."); . March 2, 1855 ("Hear two hawks scream. There is something truly March-like in it, like a prolonged blast or whistling of the wind through a crevice in the sky. which, like a cracked blue saucer, overlaps the woods. Such are the first rude notes which prelude the summer’s quire, learned of the whistling March wind") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Signs of the Spring: the Hawks of March

The first true pewee day, though they have been here some time. See March 16, 1854.  ("The first phoebe near the water is heard.");  April 2, 1852 ("For a long distance, as we paddle up the river, we hear the two-stanza'd lay of the pewee on the shore, - pee-wet, pee-wee, etc. Those are the two obvious facts to eye and ear, the river and the pewee.") See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, the Eastern Phoebe

I do not perceive any fresh additions to the stone-heaps, See April 19, 1854 ("Yesterday, as I was returning down the Assabet, . . . I was surprised to find the river so full of sawdust from the pail-factory and Barrett's mill that I could not easily distinguish if the stone-heaps had been repaired"); May 3, 1855 ("Sitting on the bank near the stone-heaps, I see large suckers rise to catch insects,—sometimes leap."): June 11, 1858 (""Examine the stone-heaps. One is now a foot above water and quite sharp. They contain, apparently freshly piled up, from a wheelbarrow to a cartload of stones; but I can find no ova in them. "); July 31, 1859 ("A man fishing at the Ox-Bow said without hesitation that the stone-heaps were made by the sucker,")

Tortoise eggs hatching.

 

September 10. 

I can find no trace of the tortoise-eggs of June 18, though there is no trace of their having been disturbed by skunks. They must have been hatched earlier.

C. says he saw a painted tortoise a third grown, with a freshly killed minnow in his mouth as long as himself, eating it.

Thinking over the tortoises, I gave these names: rough tortoise, scented ditto, vermilion (rainbow, rail?), yellow box, black box, and yellow-spotted.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 10, 1855

I can find no trace of the tortoise-eggs of June 18. See June 18, 1855 ("At 3 P. M., as I walk up the bank by the Hemlocks, I see a painted tortoise just beginning its hole; . . . I stoop down over it, and, to my surprise, after a slight pause it proceeds in its work, directly under and within eighteen inches of my face.") see also June 11, 1858 ("Looking carefully to see where the ground had been recently disturbed, I dug with my hand and could directly feel the passage to the eggs, and so discovered two or three nests with their large and long eggs, – five eggs in one of them.").; June 12, 1860 ("At this moment these turtles are on their way inland to lay their eggs all over the State, warily drawing in their heads and waiting when you come by."); June 16, 1858 (“I see a yellow-spotted turtle digging its hole at mid afternoon, but, like the last of this species I saw, it changed its place after I saw it, and I did not get an egg; it is so wary.”); June 18, 1858 ("I find a young Emys insculpta, apparently going to lay, though she had not dug a hole. It was four and a quarter inches long by three and a half wide, and altogether the handsomest turtle of this species, if not of any, that I have ever seen."); August 26, 1854 ("I am convinced that there must be an irresistible necessity for mud turtles.”); August 28, 1856 ("I open the painted tortoise nest of June 10th, and find a young turtle partly out of his shell. . . .What's a summer? Time for a turtle's eggs to hatch. So is the turtle developed, fitted to endure, for he outlives twenty French dynasties. One turtle knows several Napoleons. ") September 9, 1854 ("Thus the earth is the mother of all creatures.”); And also see A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau,The Musk Turtle (Sternothaerus odoratus ); A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau,the Wood Turtle (Emys insculpta); A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau,The Yellow-Spotted Turtle (Emys guttata); A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau,the Painted Turtle (Emys picta)

They peep at intervals.

May 2.

6 A. M. — Is not the chipping sparrow the commonest heard in the village streets in the mornings now, sitting on an elm or apple tree?

Was it the black and white warbler that I saw this morning? It did not stop to creep round the trunks; was very shy.

Or was it the myrtle-bird? 

Might it have been the log-cock woodpecker that I saw yesterday morning?

Reptiles must not be omitted, especially frogs; their croaking is the most earthy sound now, a rustling of the scurf of the earth, not to be overlooked in the awakening of the year. It is such an earth-sound.

The flowers of Cheney's elm are not only much earlier and larger than others, but the peduncles are in separate bundles proceeding from a common short peduncle. There appears to be such a difference, the tree is made of a different form and appearance.\ I can easily break off a twig from its branches, which hang very low. Vide the rough -- barked elm in the swamp, --if it is not the corky elm.

The balm-of-Gilead begins to show its male (?) catkins.

The commonplaces of one age or nation make the poetry of another.

I think that my seringo-bird has not the marks of the Savannah sparrow. Looks like a chip-bird; or did I see a spot on its breast?

That white maple, methinks, has a smoother bark tħan the red ones.

P. M. - To Conantum.

The handsome blood-red lacquered marks on the edge and under the edge of the painted tortoise's shell, like the marks on a waiter, concentric, few colors like it in nature. This tortoise, too, like the guttata, painted on these parts of its shell and on legs and tail in this style, but throat bright yellow stripes, sternum dull yellowish or buff.
It hisses like the spotted.

Tortoises everywhere coupling.

Is the male the large and flatter, with depressed sternum? It so seems? There is some regularity in the guttata's spots, — generally a straight row on back. Some of the spots are orange sometimes on the head.

Brought home two little frogs which I have described in the Report (q. v.) but cannot make out. Are they young?

The andromeda is ready to bloom.

The yellow lily is budded.

The little frogs peep more or less during the day, but chiefly at evening twilight, rarely in the morning. They peep at intervals. One begins, then all join in over the whole pond, and they suddenly stop all together.

If you would obtain insight, avoid anatomy.

I am pretty sure that is the myrtle-bird I see and hear on the Corner road, picking the blossoms of the maple, with the yellow crown and black throat or cheeks. It sings pe-te-te-te-ter twe ', emphasizing the last and repeating the second, third, and fourth fast.

The little frogs I kept three days in the house peeped at evening twilight, though they had been silent all day; never failed; swelled up their little bagpipes, transparent, and as big as a small cherry or a large pea.

Saw a bird on the willows, very shy, which may be the indigo-bird, but I am not sure.

The Equisetum arvense is now in bloom (the male flowers) all over the railroad embankment, coloring it yellowish (?).


H. D. Thoreau, Journal, May 2, 1852

The year is stretching itself, is waking up.

April 25.


1.30 P. M. — Up railroad, returning through Acton via powder-mills and Second Division.

The frogs peep at midday.

The bees are on the pistillate flowers of the early willows, – the honey-bee, a smaller, fly-like bee with very transparent wings and bright-yellow marks on the abdomen, and also a still smaller bee, more like the honey-bee. They all hum like summer.

The water in the meadow beyond J. Hosmer's is still and transparent, and I hear the more stertorous sound or croak of frogs from it, such as you associate with sunny, warmer, calm, placid spring weather.

The tortoises are out sunning. The painted tortoise on a tussock. A spotted tortoise on the rail road hisses when I touch it with my foot and draws its [head] in.

What is that bird on the willows, size of a vireo, yellow below, with darker lines, chestnut crown, whitish (?) line over eye, two white feathers in tail, yellow - olive back, darker tail?

Yarrow is started.

Saw the first kingfisher, and heard his most unmusical note.

That warmer, placid pool and stertorous sound of frogs must not be forgotten, - beneath the railroad causeway.

The bees hum on the early willows that grow in the sand.

They appear to have nearly stripped the sterile flowers of their pollen, and each has its little yellow parcel.

The year is stretching itself, is waking up.
. . .

What different tints of blue in the same sky! It requires to be parted by white clouds that the delicacy and depth of each part may appear.  Beyond a narrow wisp or feather of mist, how different the sky! Sometimes it is full of light, especially toward the horizon.

The sky is never seen to be of so deep and delicate a blue as when it is seen between downy clouds.


H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 25, 1852

The year is stretching itself, is waking up. See April 25, 1854 ("I hear the woods filled with the hum of insects, as if my hearing were affected; and thus the summer's quire begins. The silent spaces have begun to be filled with notes of birds and insects and the peep and croak and snore of frogs, even as living green blades are everywhere pushing up amid the sere ones.")

We have no more sap nor verdure nor color now.

December 3.

P. M. - Up river by boat to Clamshell Hill.

Saw two tree sparrows on Monroe's larch by the waterside. Larger than chip-birds, with more bay above and a distinct white bar on wings, not to mention bright-chestnut crown and obscure spot on breast; all beneath pale-ash.

They were busily and very adroitly picking the seeds out of the larch cones. It would take man's clumsy fingers a good while to get at one, and then only by breaking off the scales, but they picked them out as rapidly as if they were insects on the outside of the cone, uttering from time to time a faint, tinkling chip.

I see that muskrats have not only erected cabins, but, since the river rose, have in some places dug galleries a rod into the bank, pushing the sand behind them into the water. So they dig these now as places of retreat merely, or for the same purpose as the cabins, apparently.

One I explored this afternoon was formed in a low shore (Hubbard's Bathing-Place), at a spot where there were no weeds to make a cabin of, and was apparently never completed, perhaps because the shore was too low.

The ranunculus is still a fresh bright green at the bottom of the river. It is the evergreen of the river, and indeed resembles the common running evergreen (Lycopodium, I think it is called).

I see along the sides of the river, two to four inches above the surface but all at one level, clear, drop shaped crystals of ice, either held up by some twig or hanging by a dead vine of climbing mikania. They are the remains of a thin sheet of ice, which melted as the river went down, and in drops formed around and ran down these cores and again froze, and, being thicker than the surrounding ice, have outlasted it.

At J. Hosmer's tub spring, I dug out a small bull frog (?) in the sandy mud at the bottom of the tub — it was lively enough to hop — and brought it home. Probably they lie universally buried in the mud now, below the reach of frost.

In a ditch near by, under ice half an inch thick, I saw a painted tortoise moving about.

The frogs then are especially to be looked for in the mud about springs.

It is remarkable how much power I can exert through the undulations which I produce by rocking my boat in the middle of the river. Some time after I have ceased I am surprised to hear the sound of the undulations which have just reached the shores acting on the thin ice there and making a complete wreck of it for a long distance up and down the stream, cracking off pieces four feet wide and more.

I have stirred up the river to do this work, a power which I cannot put to rest. The secret of this power appears to lie in the extreme mobility, or, as I may say, irritability, of this element.

It is the principle of the roller, or of an immense weight moved by a child on balls, and the momentum is tremendous.

Some of the clamshells, freshly opened by the muskrats and left lying on their half-sunken cabins, where they are kept wet by the waves, show very handsome rainbow tints.

I examined one such this afternoon. The hinge of the shell was not broken, and I could discover no injury to the shell, except a little broken off the edges at the broadest end, as if by the teeth of the rat in order to get hold, insert its incisors.

The fish is confined to the shell by strong muscles at each end of each valve, and the rat must dissolve the union between both of these and one side of the shell before he can get it open, unless the fish itself opens it, which perhaps it cannot wide enough. I could not open one just dead without separating the muscle from the shell. The growth of the mussels shell appears to be in somewhat concentric layers or additions to a small shell or eye.

The clam which I brought home the 30th ult., and left outdoors by mistake, I now find frozen to death.

J. Hosmer told me the other day that he had seen a man eat many of these clams raw and relish them.

It is a somewhat saddening reflection that the beautiful colors of this shell for want of light cannot be said to exist, until its inhabitant has fallen a prey to the spoiler, and it is thus left a wreck upon the strand. Its beauty then beams forth, and it remains a splendid cenotaph to its departed tenant, symbolical of those radiant realms of light to which the latter has risen, - what glory he has gone to.

And, by the way, as long as they remain in “the dark unfathomed caves of ocean," they are not “gems of purest ray serene,” though fitted to be, but only when they are tossed up to light.

Probably the muskrat inserts his incisors between the edges of the shells (and so crumbles them) in order to pry them open.

Some of these shells at Clamshell Hill, whose contents were cooked by the Indians, are still entire, but separated.

Wood has spread a great many loads over his land.

People would be surprised to learn what quantities of these shellfish are annually consumed by the muskrat.

Their shells help convert the meadow mud or river sediment into food for plants.

The Indians generally — I have particularly observed it in the case of the Penobscots —make a very extensive use of the muskrat for food, and from these heaps it would seem that they used the fresh-water clam extensively also, – these two peculiarly indigenous animals.

What if it were calculated how often a muskrat rises to his stool on the surface of the ice with a mussel in his mouth and ejects the tenant, taking the roof? It is as if the occupant had not begun to live until the light, with whatever violence, is let into its shell with these magical results.

It is rather a resurrection than a death. These beaming shells, with the tints of the sky and the rainbow commingled, suggest what pure serenity has occupied it.

Look at the trees, bare or rustling with sere brown leaves, except the evergreens, their buds dormant at the foot of the leaf-stalks. Look at the fields, russet and withered, and the various sedges and weeds with dry bleached culms. Such is our relation to nature at present; such plants are we. We have no more sap nor verdure nor color now.

I remember how cheerful it has been formerly to sit around a fire outdoors amid the snow, and, while I felt some cold, to feel some warmth also, and see the fire gradually increasing and prevailing over damp, steaming and dripping logs and making a warm hearth for me.

When I see even these humble clamshells lying open along the riverside, displaying some blue, or violet, or rainbow tints, I am reminded that some pure serenity has occupied them.

(I sent two and a half bushels of my cranberries to Boston and got four dollars for them.) 

There the clam dwells within a little pearly heaven of its own.

But even in winter we maintain a temperate cheer and a serene inward life, not destitute of warmth and melody. Only the cold evergreens wear the aspect of summer now and shelter the winter birds.

Layard discovers sculptured on a slab at Kouyunjik ( Nineveh ) machines for raising water which I perceive correspond exactly to our New England well-sweeps, except that in the former case the pole is “balanced on a shaft of masonry.” He observes that it is “still generally used for irrigation in the East, as well as in south ern Europe, and called in Egypt a shadoof.” 

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 3, 1853

Two tree sparrows . . . with more bay above and a distinct white bar on wings, not to mention bright-chestnut crown and obscure spot on breast; all beneath pale-ash.  See December 3, 1855 ("Hear and see, of birds, only a tree sparrow. "); see also December 4, 1856 ("Saw and heard cheep faintly one little tree sparrow, the neat chestnut crowned and winged and white-barred bird, perched on a large and solitary white birch. So clean and tough, made to withstand the winter. This color reminds me of the upper side of the shrub oak leaf.") And also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Tree Sparrow; A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Winter Birds

I see that muskrats have not only erected cabins, but, since the river rose, have in some places dug galleries a rod into the bank. See December 3, 1852 ("The muskrats' cabins are an ornament to the river . . . Could not the architect take a hint from the pyramidal or conical form of the muskrat's house? Something of this form and color, like a large haycock in the meadow, would be in harmony with the scenery."); see also November 11, 1855 (" The building of these cabins appears to be coincident with the commencement of their clam diet, for now their vegetable food, excepting roots, is cut off. ");. . December 8, 1853 ("I observe a place on the shore where a small circle of the withered grass was feathered white with frost, and, putting down my hand, felt the muskrat's hole in the bank which was concealed to my eye.") And also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Musquash

I am surprised to hear the sound of the undulations which have just reached the shores acting on the thin ice there and making a complete wreck of it. See November 14, 1855 ("The motion of my boat sends an undulation to the shore, which rustles the dry sedge half immersed there.")

But even in winter we maintain a temperate cheer. See November 12, 1853 ("I hear one cricket singing still, faintly deep in the bank, now after one whitening of snow. His theme is life immortal. The last cricket, full of cheer and faith, piping to himself, as the last man might."); November 27, 1853 ("Now a man will eat his heart, if ever, now while the earth is bare, barren and cheerless, and we have the coldness of winter without the variety of ice and snow; but methinks the variety and compensation are in the stars now.")

A Book of the Seasons: November 24 (lichens contrast with first slight snow, geese migrating , the Andromeda phenomenon, cold Thanksgiving weather, acorns , last flower, winter begins)

The year is but a succession of days,

and I see that I could assign some office to each day

which, summed up, would be the history of the year.

Henry Thoreau, August 24, 1852

November 24.

Snow sugars the ground

to reveal a cow-path in

the distant landscape.

November 24, 1858

Looking from the sun

the andromeda is a 

 uniform pale brown.

November 24, 1857

Looking toward the sun,

the andromeda is a

very warm red brown.

November 24, 1857

Clear and freezing cold 

with a strong northerly wind – 

the winter begins.

November 24, 1853

November 24, 2020

At this time last year the andromeda in the Ministerial Swamp was red. Now it has not turned from brown. November 24, 1852

Looking toward the sun, the andromeda in front of me is a very warm red brown and on either side of me, a pale silvery brown; looking from the sun, a uniform pale brown. November 24, 1857

The first or northernmost Andromeda Pond. . . is filled with a uniformly dense and level bed of brown andromeda, in which I detect nothing else from the hills except some white cotton-grass waving over it.  November 24, 1857

Between the andromeda and the hills, there is a border, from one to two rods wide, of coarse and now yellowish sedge all the way round, November 24, 1857

On the dry hillside next the water, there is another belt, i.e. of lambkill, pretty dense, running apparently quite round the pond a rod or more in width. . .  here it is a thick growth and has relation to the swamp. November 24, 1857

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 24, 1855

The last three or four days have been quite cold, the sidewalks a glare of ice and very little melting. November 24, 1855

To-day has been exceedingly blustering and disagreeable, as I found while surveying. November 24, 1855

At noon, after a drizzling forenoon, the weather suddenly changes to clear and wintry, freezing cold with strong wind from a northerly quarter. November 24, 1853

Cold Thanksgiving weather again, the pools freezing. November 24, 1857

There is a slight sugaring of snow on the ground. November 24, 1858

When I looked out this morning, the landscape presented a very pretty wintry sight, little snow as there was. Being very moist, it had lodged on every twig, November 24, 1858

That first slight snow has not yet gone off! and very little has been added. November 24, 1855

On grass ground there is much the less, and that is barely perceptible, while plowed ground is quite white, and I can thus distinguish such fields even to the horizon. November 24, 1858

The plowed fields were for a short time whitened. November 24, 1860

I can not only distinguish plowed fields — regular white squares in the midst of russet — but even cart-paths, and foot or cow paths a quarter of a mile long, as I look across to Conantum. November 24, 1858 

It is pleasant to see thus revealed as a feature, even in the distant landscape, a cow-path leading from far inland down to the river. November 24, 1858

It is dark, drizzling still from time to time, sprinkling or snowing a little. I see more snow in the north and north west horizon November 24, 1858

It is a lichen day, with a little moist snow falling. November 24, 1858

The first spitting of snow — a flurry or squall – from out a gray or slate-colored cloud that came up from the west. November 24, 1860

This consisted almost entirely of pellets an eighth of an inch or less in diameter. November 24, 1860

These drove along almost horizontally, or curving upward like the outline of a breaker, before the strong and chilling wind. November 24, 1860

The hands seek the warmth of the pockets, and fingers are so benumbed that you cannot open your jack-knife. November 24, 1860

The air was so filled with these snow pellets that we could not not see a hill half a mile off for an hour. November 24, 1860

The green moss about the bases of trees was very prettily spotted white with them, and also the large beds of cladonia in the pastures. November 24, 1860

The great green lungwort lichen shows now on the oaks  . . . and the fresh bright chestnut fruit of other kinds, glistening with moisture, brings life and immortality to light. November 24, 1858 

That side of the trunk on which the lichens are thickest is the side on which the snow lodges in long ridges. November 24, 1858

They come to contrast with the red cockspur lichens on the stumps, which you had not noticed before. November 24, 1860

Striking against the trunks of the trees on the west side they fell and accumulated in a white line at the base. November 24, 1860

Though a slight touch, this was the first wintry scene of the season. November 24, 1860

The rabbits in the swamps enjoy it, as well as you. November 24, 1860

Ice forms in my boat at 5 p. m., and what was mud in the street is fast becoming a rigid roughness. November 24, 1853

Ice has frozen pretty thick in the bottom of my boat. November 24, 1855

Fair Haven Pond is closed still. November 24, 1858

It seems like the beginning of winter. November 24, 1853

The farmers now bring the apples they have engaged (and the cider); it is time to put them in the cellar, and the turnips. November 24, 1855

Under the two white oaks by the second wall south east of my house, on the east side the wall, I am surprised to find a great many sound acorns still, though everyone is sprouted, — frequently . . .with its radicle two inches long penetrated into the earth. November 24, 1860

But many have had their radicle broken or eaten off, and many have it now dead and withered. November 24, 1860

So far as my observation goes there, by far the greatest number of white oak acorns were destroyed by decaying (whether in consequence of frost or wet), both before and soon after falling. November 24, 1860

Not nearly so many have been carried off by squirrels and birds or consumed by grubs, though the number of acorns of all kinds lying under the trees is now comparatively small to what it was early in October. November 24, 1860

It is remarkable that all sound white oak acorns (and many which are not now sound) are sprouted, and that I have noticed no other kind sprouted. November 24, 1860

It will be worth the while to see how many of these sprouted acorns are left and are sound in the spring. November 24, 1860

It is true these two trees are exceptions and I do not find sound ones nearly as numerous under others. Nevertheless, the sound white oak acorns are not so generally and entirely picked up as I supposed. November 24, 1860

The bitter-sweet of a white oak acorn which you nibble in a bleak November walk over the tawny earth is more to me than a slice of imported pineapple. November 24, 1860

I hear a screech owl in Wheeler’s wood by the railroad, and I heard one a few evenings ago at home. November 24, 1858

The Fringilla hyemalis appear to be flitting about in a more lively manner on account of the cold. They go off with a twitter from the low weeds and bushes November 24, 1857

See, on the railroad-slope by the pond, and also some days ago, a flock of goldfinches eating the seed of the Roman wormwood. November 24, 1859

Nowadays birds are so rare I am wont to mistake them at first for a leaf or mote blown off from the trees or bushes. November 24, 1857

Setting stakes in the swamp (Ministerial). Saw seven black ducks fly out of the peat-hole. November 24, 1851

Saw there also a tortoise still stirring, the painted tortoise, I believe. November 24, 1851 

Found on the south side of the swamp the Lygodium palmatum, which Bigelow calls the only climbing fern in our latitude, an evergreen November 24, 1851

The Rubus hispidus is now very common and conspicuous amid the withered grass and leaves of the swamp, with its green or reddened leaves. November 24, 1858

How pretty amid the downy and cottony fruits of November the heads of the white anemone. November 24, 1859

At Spanish Brook Path, the witch-hazel (one flower) lingers.  November 24, 1859

November 24, 2016

A Book of Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, The Andromeda phenomenon

((Andromeda polifolia — bog-rosemary)

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, Blackberries

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, Lambkill (Kalmia augustifolia)

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, the Lichens and the lichenst studying lichens.

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Painted Turtle (Emys picta)

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, the American Black Duck

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, Geese in Autumn

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Screech Owl

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau the Goldfinch

  A Book of the Seasons by Henry Thoreau, the Dark-eyed Junco (Fringilla hyemalis)

A Book of Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, First Ice

A Book of Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,  First Snow

 A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, The Witch-Hazel

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, November days

November 24, 2018

March 2, 1858 (“ the snow is quite soft or damp, lodging in perpendicular walls on the limbs, white on black.”)

March 12, 1859 ("See two ducks flying over Ministerial Swamp.")

April 29, 1857 ("Sweet-fern at entrance of Ministerial Swamp.")

May 1, 1859 ("The climbing fern is persistent, i.e. retains its greenness still, though now partly brown and withered.") ;

May 19, 1860 (“At the Ministerial Swamp I see a white lady's-slipper almost out, fully grown, with red ones.”)

June 2, 1860 ("I soon hear its mournful scream. . . not loud now but, though within twenty or thirty rods, sounding a mile off.”);

June 25, 1860 ("At evening up the Assabet hear four or five screech owls on different sides of the river, uttering those peculiar low screwing or working, ventriloquial sounds.”)

July 7, 1854 ("See a pretty large hawk. . . circling over the Ministerial Swamp.")

August 14, 1854 (“I hear the tremulous squealing scream of a screech owl in the Holden Woods.”)

August 28, 1860 (" The Lycopodium inundatum common by Harrington's mud-hole, Ministerial Swamp.")

September 23, 1855 (" I hear from my chamber a screech owl about Monroe’s house this bright moonlight night, — a loud, piercing scream, much like the whinny of a colt perchance, a rapid trill, then subdued or smothered a note or two.”)

September 24, 1855 ("See coming from the south in loose array some twenty apparently black ducks, . . .At first they were in form like a flock of blackbirds, then for a moment assumed the outline of a fluctuating harrow. ); 

September 29, 1851 ("Scared up three black ducks, which rose with a great noise of their wings, striking the water. ");

 September 30, 1853 ("Saw a large flock of black ducks flying northwest in the form of a harrow."); 

October 2, 1859 (“The climbing fern is perfectly fresh, — and apparently therefore an evergreen, — the more easily found amid the withered cinnamon and flowering ferns.”);

October 7, 1860 ("I see one small but spreading white oak full of acorns just falling and ready to fall. . . . Some that have fallen have already split and sprouted.”);

October 8, 1860 ("I find a great many white oak acorns already sprouted, although they are but half fallen, and can easily believe that they sometimes sprout before they fall. It is a good year for them.")

October 11, 1860 ("There is a remarkably abundant crop of white oak acorns this fall.");

October 13, 1860 ("This is a white oak year")

October 14, 1856 (“[F]inger-cold to-day. Your hands instinctively find their way to your pockets”); 
October 19, 1854 (“The country above Littleton (plowed ground) more or less sugared with snow,”)

October 20, 1859 (“It is finger-cold as I come home, and my hands find their way to my pocket.”)
October 23, 1857 ("The ferns which I can see on the bank, apparently all evergreens, are polypody at rock, marginal shield fern, terminal shield fern, and (I think it is) Aspidium spinulosum,. . .The above-named evergreen ferns are so much the more conspicuous on that pale-brown ground. They stand out all at once and are seen to be evergreen; their character appears.”);
October 29, 1860 ("At some of the white oaks visited on the 11th, where the acorns were so thick on the ground and trees, I now find them perhaps nearly half picked up, yet perhaps little more than two thirds spoiled. The good appear to be all sprouted now.")

November 3, 1852 ("At Andromeda Pond, started nine black (?) ducks just at sunset, as usual they circling far round to look at me.")
November 3, 1853 (" I think it was the 27th October I saw a goldfinch. ")

November 4, 1855 ("See some large flocks of F. hyemalis, which fly with a clear but faint chinking chirp, and from time to time you hear quite a strain, half warbled, from them. They rise in a body from the ground and fly to the trees as you approach.”)
November 6, 1853 ("It is surprising how little most of us are contented to know about the sparrows which drift about in the air before us just before the first snows. These little sparrows with white in tail, perhaps the prevailing bird of late, have flitted before me so many falls and springs, yet they have been strangers to me. I have not inquired whence they came or whither they were going,")

November 8, 1853 ("The snow begins to whiten the plowed ground now, but it has not overcome the russet of the grass ground.")

November 8, 1853 (“Our first snow,. . . The children greet it with a shout when they come out at recess. ”)

November 8, 1858 ("Lichens . . .are the various grays and browns which give November its character.")
November 11, 1851 ("In the withered grass at Nut Meadow Brook, two black ducks, . . .rise black between me and the sun, but, when they have circled round to the east, show some silvery sheen on the under side of their wings. ")
November 11, 1851 (”A bright, but cold day, finger-cold. One must next wear gloves, put his hands in winter quarters.”)
November 11, 1853 ("Bracing cold, and exhilarating sunlight . . .I wear mittens now.”)
; November 11, 1858 (“Coming home I have cold fingers, and must row to get warm.”)

November 13, 1858 (“We looked out the window at 9 P. M. and saw the ground for the most part white with the first sugaring, which at first we could hardly tell from a mild moonlight, — only there was no moon. Thus it comes stealthily in the night and changes the whole aspect of the earth.”)
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 14, 1851 ("Surveying the Ministerial Lot in the southwestern part of the town.")

November 14, 1855 ("A painted tortoise swimming under water and a wood tortoise out on the bank.")
November 15, 1859 (“About the 23d of October I saw a large flock of goldfinches (judging from their motions and notes) on the tops of the hemlocks up the Assabet, apparently feeding on their seeds, then falling. They were collected in great numbers on the very tops of these trees and flitting from one to another. Rice has since described to me the same phenomenon ”)

November 17, 1855 ("Just after dark the first snow is falling, after a chilly afternoon with cold gray clouds, when my hands were uncomfortably cold.”) 

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, 1851 ("A day when you cannot pluck a flower, cannot dig a parsnip, nor pull a turnip, for the frozen ground! What do the thoughts find to live on?")

 November 14, 1855 ("Mr. Rice . . . remembered a similar season fifty-four years ago, and he remembered it because on the 13th of November that year he was engaged in pulling turnips and saw wild geese go over, when one came to tell him that his father was killed by a bridge giving way ")

 November 15, 1853 ("Take up a witch-hazel with still some fresh blossoms.")
November 15, 1858 ("I go to look for evergreen ferns before they are covered up. The end of last month and the first part of this is the time.")

 November 16, 1858  ("Rubus hispidus leaves last through the winter, turning reddish.")

 November 17 1856 ("Winter is not all white and sere. . . . a few evergreen ferns scattered about keep up the semblance of summer still") 

November 17, 1859 (“How fair and memorable this prospect when you stand opposite to the sun, these November afternoons, and look over the red andromeda swamp”)

November 18, 1855 ("About an inch of snow fell last night, but the ground was not at all frozen or prepared for it. A little greener grass and stubble here and there seems to burn its way through it this forenoon.");

November 18,1851 ("Surveying these days the Ministerial Lot . . .I hear the hooting of an owl . . . Here hawks also circle by day, and chickadees are heard, and rabbits and partridges abound.")
November 18, 1858 ("I go along under the east side of Lee’s Cliff, looking at the evergreen ferns.")

November 20, 1857 ("I enter the Ministerial Swamp at the road below Tarbell’s. The water andromeda leaves are brown now, except where protected by trees. In some places where many of the bright-crimson shoots of high blueberry are seen together, they have a very pretty effect")

November 20, 1858  ("Tthe Rubus hispidus leaves last all winter like an evergreen.")
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 20, 1860 ("Decidedly finger cold tonight.")

November 21, 1860 ("Another finger-cold evening, which I improve in pulling my turnips”)

November 22, 1853 (“Geese went over yesterday, and to-day also.”)

November 22, 1860 ("Though you are finger-cold toward night, and you cast a stone on to your first ice, and see the unmelted crystals under every bank, it is glorious November weather, and only November fruits are out.”)
November 23, 1850 ("To-day it has been finger-cold. Unexpectedly I found ice by the side of the brooks this afternoon nearly an inch thick. Prudent people get in their barrels of apples to-day. ")

 November 23, 1852 ("There is something genial even in the first snow, and Nature seems to relent a little of her November harshness.")

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 23, 1852 ("I am surprised to see Fair Haven entirely skimmed over.")

November 25, 1850 ("I found Fair Haven skimmed entirely over, though the stones which I threw down on it from the high bank on the east broke through. Yet the river was open.")

November 25, 1857("This is November of the hardest kind, — bare frozen ground covered with pale-brown or straw-colored herbage, a strong, cold, cutting northwest wind which makes me seek to cover my ears, a perfectly clear and cloudless sky. . . . Ditches and pools are fast skimming over, and a few slate-colored snowbirds, with thick, shuffling twitter, and fine-chipping tree sparrows flit from bush to bush in the other wise deserted pastures. This month taxes a walker's resources more than any.")

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 27, 1856 ("Take a turn down the river. A painted tortoise sinking to the bottom, and apparently tree sparrows along the shore")

November 27, 1852 (“I find acorns which have sent a shoot down into the earth this fall.”)
November 29, 1856 ("This the first snow I have seen, ")

November 30, 1851 ("The Lygodium palmatum is quite abundant on that side of the swamp, twining round the goldenrods, etc., etc")

November 30, 1853 ("Now, first since spring, I take notice of the cladonia lichens")

December 2, 1854 ("Got up my boat and housed it, ice having formed about it.”)

December 2, 1857 ("Measuring Little Goose Pond, I observed two painted tortoises moving about under the thin transparent ice"); 

December 3, 1852 (" In a ditch near by, under ice half an inch thick, I saw a painted tortoise moving about.") 

December 8, 1850 ("The dear privacy and retirement and solitude which winter makes possible!”)

December 9, 1852 ("A few petals of the witch-hazel still hold on")

 December 21, 1851 (“As I stand by the edge of the swamp (Ministerial), a heavy-winged hawk flies home to it at sundown, just over my head, in silence.”);

December 13, 1857 ("I go this afternoon thinking I may find the stakes set for auction lots on the Ministerial Lot in December, '51")

December 14, 1859 (Snow-storms might be classified. . . .Also there is the pellet or shot snow, which consists of little dry spherical pellets the size of robin-shot. This, I think, belongs to cold weather.")

December 16, 1857 ("Plowed grounds show white first.")

December 22, 1858 ("I see in the cut near the shanty-site quite a flock of F. hyemalis and goldfinches together, on the snow and weeds and ground.")

December 23, 1850 ("I can discern a faint foot or sled path sooner when the ground is covered with snow than when it is bare")

December 24, 1856 ("The snow collects and is piled up in little columns like down about every twig and stem, and this is only seen in perfection, complete to the last flake, while it is snowing, as now.”)

December 26, 1853 ("It has fallen so gently that it forms an upright wall on the slenderest twig”)

 December 26, 1855 ("The scarlet fruit of the cockspur lichen, seen glowing through the more opaque whitish or snowy crust of a stump, is, on close inspection, the richest sight of all ”)

December 31, 1851 ("Nature has a day for each of her creatures, her creations. To-day it is an exhibition of lichens at Forest Hall.”)

January 5, 1860 ("I see where a flock of goldfinches in the morning had settled on a hemlock's top, by the snow strewn with scales, literally blackened or darkened with them for a rod.")

January 7, 1855 (“It is a lichen day. . . . How full of life and of eyes is the damp bark!”)
January 10,1855 ("As I go toward the sun now at 4 P. M., the translucent leaves are lit up by it and appear of a soft red, more or less brown, like cathedral windows, but when I look back from the sun, the whole bed appears merely gray and brown or less reddish.”).

January 14, 1853 ("White walls of snow rest on the boughs of trees, in height two or three times their thickness.”)

January 26, 1858 (“This is a lichen day. The white lichens, partly encircling aspens and maples, look as if a painter had touched their trunks with his brush as he passed”) 

January 26, 1852 ("The lichens look rather bright to-day, . . .The beauty of lichens, with their scalloped leaves, the small attractive fields, the crinkled edge! I could study a single piece of bark for hour.”)

January 30, 1856 ("It has just begun to snow, — those little round dry pellets like shot. Stops snowing before noon, not having amounted to anything.”)

February 5, 1853 ("It is a lichen day. . . . All the world seems a great lichen and to grow like one to-day, - a sudden humid growth.”)

February 16, 1854 ("That Indian trail on the hillside about Walden is revealed with remarkable distinctness to me standing on the middle of the pond, by the slight snow which had lodged on it forming a clear white line unobscured by weeds and twigs. (For snow is a great revealer not only of tracks made in itself, but even in the earth before it fell.) It is quite distinct in many places where you would not have noticed it before. A light snow will often reveal a faint foot or cart track in a field which was hardly discernible before, for it reprints it, as it were, in clear white type, alto-relievo.”)

November 24, 2020

If you make the least correct

observation of nature this year,

 you will have occasion to repeat it

 with illustrations the next, 

and the season and life itself is prolonged.

  April 7, 1853 

November 23 <<<<<<<<  November 24  >>>>>>>> November 25

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, November 24

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

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