A first spring day.

March 10.

This is the first really spring day. The sun is brightly reflected from all surfaces, and the north side of the street begins to be a little more passable to foot-travelers. You do not think it necessary to button up your coat. Something analogous to the thawing of the ice seems to have taken place in the air. At the end of winter there is a season in which are are daily expecting spring, and finally a day when it arrives.

I see many middling-sized black spiders on the edge of the snow, very active. 

By John Hosmer's ditch by the riverside I see the skunk-cabbage springing freshly, the points of the spathes just peeping out of the ground, in some other places three inches high even. The radical leaves of innumerable plants (as here a dock in and near the water) are evidently affected by the spring influences. Many plants are to some extent evergreen, like the buttercup now beginning to start. 

Methinks the first obvious evidence of spring is the pushing out of the swamp willow catkins, then the relaxing of the earlier alder catkins, then the pushing up of skunk-cabbage spathes (and pads at the bottom of water). This is the order I am inclined to, though perhaps any of these may take precedence of all the rest in any particular case.

What is that dark pickle-green alga (?) at the bottom of this ditch, looking somewhat like a decaying cress, with fruit like a lichen? 

At Nut Meadow Brook crossing we rest awhile on the rail, gazing into the eddying stream. The ripple-marks on the sandy bottom, where silver spangles shine in the river with black wrecks of caddis-cases lodged under each shelving sand, the shadows of the invisible dimples reflecting prismatic colors on the bottom, the minnows already stemming the current with restless, wiggling tails, ever and anon darting aside, probably to secure some invisible mote in the water, whose shadows we do not at first detect on the sandy bottom, — when detected so much more obvious as well as larger and more interesting than the substance, — in which each fin is distinctly seen, though scarcely to be detected in the substance; these are all very beautiful and exhilarating sights, a sort of diet drink to heal our winter discontent. Have the minnows played thus all winter? 

The equisetum at the bottom has freshly grown several inches. Then should I not have given the precedence on the last page to this and some other water-plants ? I suspect that I should, and the flags appear to be starting.

I am surprised to find on the rail a young tortoise, an inch and one sixteenth long in the shell, which has crawled out to sun, or perchance is on its way to the water, which I think must be the Emys guttata, for there is a large and distinct yellow spot on each dorsal and lateral plate, and the third dorsal plate is hexa gonal and not quadrangular, as the E. picta is described to be, though in my specimen I can't make it out to be so. Yet the edges of the plates are prominent, as is described in the E. insculpta, which, but for the spots and two yellow spots on each side of the hind head and one fainter on the top of the head, I should take it to be. It is about seven eighths of an inch wide. Very inactive. When was it hatched and where? 

What is the theory of these sudden pitches, or steep shelving places, in the sandy bottom of the brook ? It is very interesting to walk along such a brook as this in the midst of the meadow, which you can better do now before the frost is quite out of the sod, and gaze into the deep holes in its irregular bottom and the dark gulfs under the banks. Where it rushes rapidly over the edge of a steep slope in the bottom, the shadow of the disturbed surface is like sand hurried forward in the water. The bottom, being of shifting sand, is exceedingly irregular and interesting. 

What was that sound that came on the softened air? It was the warble of the first bluebird from that scraggy apple orchard yonder. When this is heard, then has spring arrived. 

It must be that the willow twigs, both the yellow and green, are brighter-colored than before. I cannot be deceived. They shine as if the sap were already flowing under the bark; a certain lively and glossy hue they have. 

The early poplars are pushing forward their catkins, though they make not so much display as the willows. 

Still in some parts of the woods it is good sledding. 

At Second Division Brook, the fragrance of the senecio, which is decidedly evergreen, which I have bruised, is very permanent and brings round the year again. It is a memorable sweet meadowy fragrance. 

I find a yellow- spotted tortoise (Emys guttata) in the brook. 

A very few leaves of cowslips, and those wholly under water, show themselves yet. 

The leaves of the water saxifrage, for the most part frost-bitten, are common enough. 

Near the caltha was also green hog-spawn, and Channing says he saw pollywogs. Perhaps it is a particularly warm place. 

The alder's catkins — the earliest of them — are very plainly expanding, or, rather, the scales are loose and separated, and the whole catkin relaxed. 

Minott says that old Sam Nutting, the hunter, — Fox Nutting, Old Fox, he was called, — who died more than forty years ago (he lived in Jacob Baker's house, Lin coln; came from Weston) and was some seventy years old then, told him that he had killed not only bear about Fair Haven among the walnuts, but moose!

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 10, 1853

This is the first really spring day. . . .You do not think it necessary to button up your coat. See March 15, 1852 ("This afternoon I throw off my outside coat. A mild spring day.  The air is full of bluebirds.  . . . My life partakes of infinity. “)

Something analogous to the thawing of the ice seems to have taken place in the air. See February 18, 1857 (“The very grain of the air seems to have undergone a change and is ready to split into the form of the bluebird's warble.”); March 9, 1852 ("[T]he air excites me. When the frost comes out of the ground, there is a corresponding thawing of the man.”); March 21, 1853 (“[W]inter breaks up within us; the frost is coming out of me, and I am heaved like the road; accumulated masses of ice and snow dissolve, and thoughts like a freshet pour down unwonted channels.”)