Looking carefully through a dense maple swamp, I find little maples, a couple of inches high, which have sprung up chiefly on certain spots alone, especially where the seed has fallen on little beds of sphagnum, which apparently have concealed the seed at the same time that they supplied the necessary moisture. Each little tree is already deeply rooted, while the now useless winged seed lies empty nearby.
Two months ago the maple swamp was red with maple seed falling in showers around, but now only a very small number of maple seeds are to be found. Indeed, almost every seed that falls to the earth is picked up by some animal or other whose favorite and perhaps peculiar food it is.
They are daily busy about it in the season, and the few seeds which escape are exceptions. There is at least a squirrel or mouse to a tree. They ransack the woods. These little creatures must live, and this apparently is one of the principal ends of the abundance of seeds that falls.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 1, 1860
These little creatures must live, and this apparently is one of the principal ends of the abundance of seeds that falls. See May 13, 1858 (“Bunch after bunch he plucked and ate, letting many fall, and he made an abundant if not sumptuous feast,. . . a cunning red squirrel perched on a slender twig between you and the sun, feasting on the handsome red maple keys.”)
I stand at the wall-end on the Cliffs and look over the Miles meadow on Conantum. It is an unusually clear day after yesterday's rain. How much of beauty — of color, as well as form — on which our eyes daily rest goes unperceived by us! No one but a botanist is likely to distinguish nicely the different shades of green with which the open surface of the earth is clothed, — not even a landscape-painter if he does not know the species of sedges and grasses which paint it.
With respect to the color of grass, most of those even who attend peculiarly to the aspects of Nature only observe that it is more or less dark or light, green or brown, or velvety, fresh or parched, etc. But if you are studying grasses you look for another and different beauty, and you find it, in the wonderful variety of color, etc., presented by the various species. Take the bare, unwooded earth now, and consider the beautiful variety of shades (or tints?) of green that clothe it under a bright sun. The pastured hills of Conantum, now just imbrowned (probably by the few now stale flowering tops of the red-top which the cows have avoided as too wiry), present a hard and solid green or greenish brown, just touched here and there delicately with light patches of sheep's fescue (though it may be only its radical leaves left), as if a dew lay on it there, — and this has some of the effect of a watered surface, — and the whole is dotted with a thousand little shades of projecting rocks and shrubs.
Then, looking lower at the meadow in Miles's field, that is seen as a bright-yellow and sunny stream (yet with a slight tinge of glaucous) between the dark-green potato- fields, flowing onward with windings and expansions, and, as it were, with rips and waterfalls, to the river meadows.
Again, I sit on the brow of the orchard, and look northwest down the river valley (at mid-afternoon). There flows, or rests, the calm blue winding river, lake like, with its smooth silver-plated sides, and wherever weeds extend across it, there too the silver plate bridges it, like a spirit's bridge across the Styx; but the rippled portions are blue as the sky. This river reposes in the midst of a broad brilliant yellow valley amid green fields and hills and woods, as if, like the Nanking or Yang-ho (or what-not), it flowed through an Oriental Chinese meadow where yellow is the imperial color. The immediate and raised edge of the river, with its willows and button-bushes and polygonums, is a light meadows, where the sedge prevails, is a brilliant and cheerful yellow, intensely, incredibly bright, such color as you never see in pictures; yellow of various tints, in the lowest and sedgiest parts deepening to so much color as if gamboge had been rubbed into the meadow there; the most cheering color in all the landscape; shaded with little darker isles of green in the midst of this yellow sea of sedge. Yet it is the bright and cheerful yellow , as of spring, and with nothing in the least autumnal in it.
How this contrasts with the adjacent fields of red-top, now fast falling before the scythe!
When your attention has been drawn to them, nothing is more charming than the common colors of the earth's surface. See yonder flashing field of corn through the shimmering air. (This was said day before yesterday.)
The deciduous woods generally have now and for a long time been nearly as dark as the pines, though, unlike the pines, they show a general silveriness.
For some days have seen stigmas of what I have called Cyperus dentatus, but it is evidently later than the diandrus.
See a berry (not ripe) of the two-leaved Solomon's- seal dropped at the mouth of a mouse or squirrel's hole, and observe that many are gone from these plants, as if plucked by mice .
The sphagnum shows little black-balled drumsticks now.
The nuthatch is active now.
Meadow-haying commenced.
Cinna arundinacea (?) almost.
Looked in two red maple swamps to find the young plants. If you look carefully through a dense red maple swamp now, you find many little maples a couple of inches high which have sprung up chiefly on certain spots alone, especially where the seed has fallen on little beds of sphagnum, which apparently have concealed the seed at the same time that they supplied the necessary moisture. There you find the little tree already deeply rooted, while the now useless winged seed lies empty near by, with its fragile wing half wasted away, as if wholly unrelated to that plant, — not visibly attached, but lying empty on one side.
But so far as I look, I see only one maple to a seed, but, indeed, I see only a single seed at a time. You do not find dense groves of them generally, as you might expect from the abundance of seed that falls. Nevertheless, you will be surprised, on looking through a large maple swamp which two months ago was red with maple seed falling in showers around, at the very small number of maple seeds to be found there, and probably every one of these will be empty.
The little maples appear oftenest to have sprung from such as fell into crevices in the moss or leaves and so escaped.
Indeed, almost every seed that falls to the earth is picked up by some animal or other whose favorite and perhaps peculiar food it is. They are daily busy about it in the season, and the few seeds which escape are exceptions. There is at least a squirrel or mouse to a tree. If you postpone your search but for a short time, you find yourself only gleaning after them. You may find several of their holes under every tree, if not within it. They ransack the woods. Though the seed may be almost microscopic, it is nuts to them; and this apparently is were intended to serve.
Look under a nut tree a month after the nuts have fallen, and see what proportion of sound nuts to the abortive ones and shells you will find ordinarily. They have been dispersed, and many effectually planted, far and wide by animals. You have come, you would say, after the feast was over, and are presented with shells only. It looks like a platform before a grocery. These little creatures must live, and, pray, what are they to eat if not the fruits of the earth ? — i. e. the graminivorous [sic] ones.
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