The haze, accompanied by much wind, is so thick this forenoon that the sun is obscured as by a cloud. I see no rays of sunlight.
P. M. — To Great Meadows on foot along bank into Bedford meadows; thence to Beck Stow's and Gowing's Swamp.
Walking may be a science, so far as the direction of a walk is concerned. I go again to the Great Meadows, to improve this remarkably dry season and walk where in ordinary times I cannot go. There is, no doubt, a particular season of the year when each place may be visited with most profit and pleasure, and it may be worth the while to consider what that season is in each case.
This is a prairial walk. I go along the river and meadows from the first, crossing the Red Bridge road to the Battle-Ground. In the 'Mill Brook, behind Jones's, am attracted by one of those handsome high-colored masses of fibrous pink roots of the willow in the water. It is three or four feet long, five or six inches wide, and four or five inches thick, — long parallel roots nearly as big as a crow-quill, with in numerable short fibres on all sides, all forming a dense mass of a singular bright-pink color.
There are three or four haymakers still at work in the Great Meadows, though but very few acres are left uncut.
Am surprised to hear a phoebe's pewet pewee and see it.
I perceive a dead mole in the path half-way down the meadow.
At the lower end of these meadows, between the river and the firm land, are a number of shallow muddy pools or pond-holes, in which, even in this dry season, there is considerable water left. In these shallow muddy pools, but a few inches deep and few feet in diameter, I am surprised to observe the undulations produced by pretty large fishes endeavoring to conceal themselves. In one little muddy basin where there is hardly a quart of water, caught half a dozen little breams and pickerel, only an inch long, as perfectly distinct as full grown, and in another place, where there is little else than mud left, breams two or three inches long still alive. In many dry hollows are dozens of small breams, pickerel, and pouts, quite dead and dry. Hundreds, if not thousands, of fishes have here perished on account of the drought.
See a blue heron — apparently a young bird, of a brownish blue — fly up from one of these pools, and a stake-driver from another, and also see their great tracks on the mud, and the feathers they had shed, — some of the long, narrow white neck-feathers of the heron. The tracks of the heron are about six inches long. Here is a rare chance for the herons to transfix the imprisoned fish. It is a wonder that any have escaped.
To these remote shallow and muddy pools, usually surrounded by reeds and sedge, far amid the wet meadows, — to these, then, the blue heron resorts for its food. Here, too, is an abundance of the yellow lily, on whose seeds they are said to feed. There, too, are the paths of muskrats. There are now hopping all over this meadow small Rana palustris, and also some more beautifully spotted halecina or shad frogs.
There is a pretty strong wind from the north-northwest. The haze is so thick that we can hardly see more than a mile. The low blue haze around the distant edge of the meadow looks even like a low fog at a sufficient distance.
I find at length a pitcher-plant with a spoonful of water in it. It must be last night's dew. It is wonderful that in all this drought it has not evaporated. Arum berries ripe. High blueberries pretty thick, but now much wilted and shrivelled.
Thus the drought serves the herons, etc., confining their prey within narrower limits, and doubtless they are well acquainted with suitable retired pools far in the marshes to go a-fishing in.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 22, 1854
I go again to the Great Meadows, to improve this remarkably dry season and walk where in ordinary times I cannot go. See August 21, 2019 ("There is quite a drought, and I can walk almost anywhere over these meadows without wetting my feet., , , It is like the summer of '54.")
I perceive a dead mole in the path . . . See July 31, 1856 ("Another short-tailed shrew dead in the wood-path."); July 12, 1856(“I have found them thus three or four times before. . . .Have I not commonly noticed them dead after rain?”)
I find at length a pitcher-plant with a spoonful of water in it. It must be last night's dew. It is wonderful that in all this drought it has not evaporated. See September 11, 1851 ("We have had no rain for a week, and yet the pitcher-plants have water in them. . . .Are they not replenished by the dews always, and, being shaded by the grass, saved from evaporation? ")
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