Those silver-gray cocoons so securely attached

January 6

6. P. M. – To Great Meadows. 

January 6, 2013

Saw one of those silver-gray cocoons which are so securely attached by the silk being wound round the leaf-stalk and the twig. This was more than a year old and empty and, having been attached to a red maple shoot, a foot or more above the meadow, it had girdled it just as a wire might, it was so unyielding, and the wood had overgrown it on each side. 

What is that small insect with large, slender wings  which I see on the snow or fluttering in the air these days? 

Also some little black beetles on the ice of the meadow, ten rods from shore. 

In many places near the shore the water has over flowed the ice to a great extent and frozen again with water between of a yellowish tinge, in which you see motes moving about as you walķ. 

The skating is for the most part spoiled by a thin, crispy ice on top of the old ice, which is frozen in great crystals and crackles under your feet. This is apparently the puddles produced by the late thaw and rain, which froze thinly while the rest of the water was soaked up.

 A fine snow is falling and drifting before the wind over the ice and lodging in shallow drifts at regular intervals.

I see where a woodpecker has drilled a hole about two inches over in a decayed white maple; quite recently, for the chippings are strewn over the ice beneath and were the first sign that betrayed it. The tree was hollow.  Is it for a nest next season? 

There was an old hole higher up. 

I see that the locust pods are still closed, or but partially open, but they open wider after lying in my chamber.


H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 6, 1855

Saw one of those silver-gray cocoons which are so securely attached by the silk being wound round the leaf-stalk and the twig. See December 17, 1853 ("While surveying for Daniel Weston in Lincoln to-day, see a great many — maybe a hundred — silvery-brown cocoons"); December 24, 1853 ("In Weston's field I counted thirty-three or four of those large silvery-brown cocoons . . . The bare silvery cocoons would otherwise be too obvious. The worm has evidently said to itself: 'Man or some other creature may come by and see my casket. I will disguise it, will hang a screen before it.'"); January 19, 1854 ("The A. Promethea is the only moth whose cocoon has a fastening wound round the petiole of the leaf, and round the shoot, the leaf partly folded round it . . . not some poor worm's instinct merely, as we call it, but the mind of the universe rather, which we share . . . determined how cocoons had best be suspended");  February 19, 1854 ("The light ash-colored cocoons of the A. Promethea, with the withered and faded leaves wrapped around them so artfully and admirably secured by fine silk wound round the leaf-stalk and the twig."); May 17, 1857 ("Two cocoons of apparently the Attacus Promethea on a small black birch, the silk wound round the leaf stalk.") See also January 14, 1857 ("What kind of understanding was there between the mind that determined that these leaves should hang on during the winter, and that of the worm that fastened a few of these leaves to its cocoon in order to disguise it?”)

January 6. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, January 6.

Silver-gray cocoons 

attached by the silk wound round 

the leaf-stalk and twig 

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau,  Silver-gray cocoons so securely attached

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau

"A book, each page written in its own season,

out-of-doors, in its own locality.”

~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx © 2009-2025

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