Water is as yet only melted ice.

April 7. 

The purple finch, — if not before.

P. M. – To Annursnack.

April 7, 2012

This is the Rana halecina day, — awakening of the meadows, — though not very warm. The thermometer in Boston to - day is said to be 49. Probably, then, when it is about 50 at this season, the river being low, they are to be heard in calm places.

Fishes now lie up abundantly in shallow water in the sun, - pickerel, and I see several bream. What was lately motionless and lifeless ice is a transparent liquid in which the stately pickerel moves along. A novel sight is that of the first bream that has come forth from I know not what hibernaculum, moving gently over the still brown river-bottom, where scarcely a weed has started. 

Water is as yet only melted ice, or like that of November, which is ready to become ice.

As we were ascending the hill in the road beyond College Meadow, we saw the dust, etc., in the middle of the road at the top of the hill taken up by a small whirl wind. Pretty soon it began to move northeasterly through the balm-of-Gilead grove, taking up a large body of withered leaves beneath it, which were whirled about with a great rustling and carried forward with it into the meadow, frightening some hens there.

And so they went on, gradually, or rather one after another, settling to the ground, and looking at last almost exactly like a flock of small birds dashing about in sport, till they were out of sight forty or fifty rods off. These leaves were chiefly only a rod above the ground (I noticed some taken up last spring very high into the air), and the diameter of the whirl may have been a rod, more or less.

Early potentilla out, - how long? - on side of Annursnack.

H.D. Thoreau, Journal, April 7, 1860

The purple finch. See April 15, 1854 ("The arrival of the purple finches appears to be coincident with the blossoming of the elm, on whose blossom it feeds.")

This is the Rana halecina day, — awakening of the meadows. [Rana halecina -- Lithobates sphenocephala utricularia – Northern Leopard Frog.] See April 3, 1858 ("They were the R. halecina. I could see very plainly the two very prominent yellow lines along the sides of the head and the large dark ocellated marks, even under water, on the thighs, etc. . . .Their note is a hard dry tut tut tut tut, not at all ringing like the toad’s, . . .; and from time to time one makes that faint somewhat bullfrog-like er er er. Both these sounds, then, are made by one frog, and what I have formerly thought an early bullfrog note was this. This, I think, is the first frog sound I have heard from the river meadows or anywhere . . . This might be called the Day of the Snoring Frogs, or the Awakening of the Meadows.");  April 5, 1855 ("Hear from one half-flooded meadow that low, general, hard, stuttering tut tut tut of frogs,—the awakening of the meadow."); April 5, 1858 ("The woods resound with the one [R. sylvatica], and the meadows day and night with the other [R. halecina], so that it amounts to a general awakening of the pools and meadows. "); April 5, 1858 (“I go to the meadow at the mouth of the Mill Brook to find the spawn of the R. halecina. They are croaking and coupling there by thousands"); April 7 1858 ("You hear no stertorous sounds of the Rana halecina this cold and blustering day, unless a few when you go close to their breeding places and listen attentively. . . . .On the Great Meadows, I stand close by two coupled. The male is very much the smallest, an inch, at least, the shortest, and much brighter-colored. The line, or “halo” (?), or margin about its blotches is a distinct yellow or greenish yellow. The female has a distended paunch full of spawn."); April 9, 1853 (“The whole meadow resounds, probably from one end of the river to the other, this evening, with this faint, stertorous breathing. It is the waking up of the meadows."); April 13, 1859 ("To-day is the awakening of the meadows now partly bare. I hear the stuttering note of probably the Rana halecina"). See also May 6, 1858 ("Each shore of the river now for its whole length is all alive with this stertorous purring.. . . at night it [is] universal all along the river. If the note of the R. halecina, April 3d, was the first awakening of the river meadows, this is the second.")

A small whirlwind. See May 1, 1859 ("As we sat on the steep hillside south of Nut Meadow Brook Crossing, we noticed a remarkable whirlwind on a small scale, which carried up the oak leaves from that Island copse in the meadow. . . ."); December 11, 1858 ("A “swirl,” applied to leaves suddenly caught up by a sort of whirlwind, is a good word enough, methinks.")