A strong wind with snow driving from the west and thickening the air.

March 26.

6 A. M.—Still cold and blustering; wind southwest, but clear. 

March 1, 2019

I see a muskrat-house just erected, two feet or more above the water and sharp; and, at the Hubbard Bath, a mink comes teetering along the ice by the side of the river. I am between him and the sun, and he does not notice me. He runs daintily, lifting his feet with a jerk as if his toes were sore. They seem to go a-hunting at night along the edge of the river; perhaps I notice them more at this season, when the shallow water freezes at night and there is no vegetation along the shore to conceal them. 

The lark sings, perched on the top of an apple tree, quite sweet and plaintive, contrasting with the cheerless season and the bleak meadow. 

P. M. — Sail down to the Great Meadows. 

A strong wind with snow driving from the west and thickening the air. The farmers pause to see me scud before it. At last I land and walk further down on the meadow-bank. 

I scare up several flocks of ducks.

There is but little water on the meadow, and that far down and partly frozen, but a great many acres of the meadow-crust have there been lifted and broken up by the ice and now make hundreds of slanting isles amid the shallow water, looking like waves of earth, and amid these the ducks are sailing and feeding.

The nearest are two, apparently middle sized with black heads, white breast and wings and apparently all above but the tail or tips of wings, which are black. A third with them is apparently all dark. I do not know what to call them. Probably sheldrakes.

You are much more sure to see ducks in a stormy afternoon like this than in a bright and pleasant one. 

Returning. I see, near the Island, two ducks which have the marks (one of them) of the wood duck (i. e. one or two longitudinal white stripes down the head and neck), but when they go over I hear distinctly and for a long time the whistling of their wings, fine and sharp. Are they golden-eyes, or whistlers? Probably male and female wood duck.

For several weeks, or since the ice has melted, I notice the paths made by the muskrats when the water was high in the winter, leading from the river up the bank to a bed of grass above or below the surface. When it runs under the surface I frequently slump into it and can trace it to the bed by the hollow sound when I stamp on the frozen ground. They have disfigured the banks very much in some places, only the past winter. Clams have been carried into these galleries a rod or more under the earth. The galleries kept on the surface and terminated perhaps at some stump where the earth was a little raised, where the ice still remained thick over them after the water had gone down. 

I am surprised to find fishworms only four inches beneath the surface in the meadow, close against the frozen portion of the crust. A few may also be found on the bottom of brooks and ditches in the water, where they are probably food for the earliest fishes. 

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 26, 1855

At the Hubbard Bath, a mink comes teetering along the ice by the side of the river. See February 4, 1854  ("I go over to the Hemlocks on the Assabet this morning. See the tracks of a mink, in the shallow snow along the edge of the river, looking for a hole in the ice."); March 8, 1853 ("Saw a mink run across the road in Sudbury, a large black weasel, to appearance, worming its supple way over the snow.");  March 13, 1859 ("I commonly saw two or three in a year. ");April 15, 1858 ("Having stood quite still on the edge of the ditch close to the north edge of the maple swamp some time, and heard a slight rustling near me from time to time, I looked round and saw a mink under the bushes within a few feet. It was pure reddish-brown above, with a blackish and somewhat bushy tail, a blunt nose, and somewhat innocent-looking head. It crept along toward me and around me, within two feet, in a semicircle, snuffing the air, and pausing to look at me several times."); April 29, 1860 ("I now actually see one small-looking rusty or brown black mink scramble along the muddy shore and enter a hole in the bank.")

The farmers pause to see me scud before it. See May 19, 1856 (“As I sail up the reach of the Assabet above Dove Rock with a fair wind, a traveller riding along the highway is watching my sail while he hums a tune. . . . As he looked at my sail, I listened to his singing. Perchance they were equally poetic, and we repaid each other. ”)