April 21.
April 21, 2019
Setting pines all day. This makes two and a half days, with two men and a horse and cart to help me. We have set some four hundred trees at fifteen feet apart diamondwise, covering some two acres.
I set every one with my own hand, while another digs the holes where I indicate, and occasionally helps the other dig up the trees.
We prefer bushy pines only one foot high which grow in open or pasture land, yellow-looking trees which are used to the sun, instead of the spindling dark-green ones from the shade of the woods. Our trees will not average much more than two feet in height, and we take a thick sod with them fifteen to eighteen inches in diameter. There are a great many more of these plants to be had along the edges and in the midst of any white pine wood than one would suppose.
One man charged us five or six cents for them about a mile and a half distant! Got about one hundred and twenty from George Heywood's land and the rest from the Brister lot and this Wyman lot itself.
R. W. E. has bought a quarter of a pound of white pine seed at $4.00 per pound.
We could not dig up pines on the north side of the wood on the Brister lot to-day on account of frost! Though we had quite forgotten it, and put the winter so far behind us.
See the Vanessa Antiopa. C. has seen it a week or so. C. sees a cicindela to-day.
I hear of a robin's nest begun, and that geese go over to-day.
Put out a fire in the woods, the Brister lot. Quite a warm day.
Storer's account of the salamanders concludes with these words, "All the salamanders here described, feed upon insects, which they devour in very large numbers, and hence their utility cannot be questioned." The same might be said in behalf of the creatures that devour the salamanders.
In those little Ripple Lakes in the cool hollows in the woods, there you find these active bright-spotted salamanders, — S. dorsalis, the brown (olive-brown or palish-brown), with carinated and wave-crenate thin tail, and the S. symmetrica, the bright orange salmon, with a thick, straight-edged tail, — both with vermilion spots on back and countless fine black dots above and beneath.
The first-named is quite voracious, catching many of the larvae in the aquarium, in fact depopulating it. He gulps them down very deliberately after catching them.
R. W. E. has bought a quarter of a pound of white pine seed at $4.00 per pound.
We could not dig up pines on the north side of the wood on the Brister lot to-day on account of frost! Though we had quite forgotten it, and put the winter so far behind us.
See the Vanessa Antiopa. C. has seen it a week or so. C. sees a cicindela to-day.
I hear of a robin's nest begun, and that geese go over to-day.
Put out a fire in the woods, the Brister lot. Quite a warm day.
Storer's account of the salamanders concludes with these words, "All the salamanders here described, feed upon insects, which they devour in very large numbers, and hence their utility cannot be questioned." The same might be said in behalf of the creatures that devour the salamanders.
In those little Ripple Lakes in the cool hollows in the woods, there you find these active bright-spotted salamanders, — S. dorsalis, the brown (olive-brown or palish-brown), with carinated and wave-crenate thin tail, and the S. symmetrica, the bright orange salmon, with a thick, straight-edged tail, — both with vermilion spots on back and countless fine black dots above and beneath.
The first-named is quite voracious, catching many of the larvae in the aquarium, in fact depopulating it. He gulps them down very deliberately after catching them.
What pretty things go to make up the sum of life in any valley!
This Ripple Lake with the wind playing over it, the bright spotted butterflies that flutter from time to time over the dry leaves, and the minnows and salamanders that dart in the water itself. Beneath this play of ripples which reflect the sky, — a darker blue than the real, — the vermilion-spotted salamanders are darting at the various grotesque-formed larva? of the lake.
H.D. Thoreau, Journal, April 21, 1859
Setting pines all day. See April 19, 1859 ("Began to set white pines in R.W.E.'s Wyman lot."); April 22, 1859 ("When setting the pines at Walden the last three days, I was sung to by the field sparrow.")
The first-named [salamander] is quite voracious, catching many of the larvae in the aquarium, See April 18, 1859 (("Ed Emerson shows me his aquarium. He has two . . . salamanders, one from Ripple Lake and the other from the pool behind my house . . . One some four inches long, with a carinated and waved (crenated) edged tail as well as light-vermilion spots on the back, evidently the Salamandra dorsalis.")
The sum of life. See Darwin, Origin of the Species (November 24, 1859) (Imagine a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth.)
This Ripple Lake with the wind playing over it, ... this play of ripples which reflect the sky,-- a darker blue than the real ... See April 9, 1859 ("Watching the ripples fall and dash across the surface of low-lying and small woodland lakes is one of the amusements of these windy March and April days.”)
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