Saturday, March 14, 2015

Late snows blind us most.

March 14.

Three inches of snow in the morning, and it snows a little more during the day, with occasional gleams of sunshine. Winter back again in prospect, and I see a few sparrows, probably tree sparrows, in the yard. 

P. M. — To Andromeda Ponds. At one of the holes under the stump of March 7th, caught a Mus leucopus (deer mouse). So this was the kind, undoubtedly, that fed on the moss. Some whiskers, as usual, are white, others black, and I count the “six tubercles on each palm.” 

There are no tracks about the stump, for they are not abroad by day, i. e. since the last of this snow, but probably there will be tracks to-morrow morning. Thus it is generally. If it ceases snowing in the morning, you see few, if any, tracks in your walk, but the next morning many.

It is the first and last snows - especially the last -  that blind us most, when the sun is most powerful and our eyes are unused to them. 

I observe the tracks of sparrows leading to every little sprig of blue-curls amid the other weeds which (its seemingly empty pitchers) rises above the snow. There seems, however, to be a little seed left in them. This, then, is reason enough why these withered stems still stand, - that they may raise these granaries above the snow for the use of the snowbirds. 

That ice of February has destroyed almost the whole of Charles Hubbard’s young red maple swamp in front of the Hollowell place. Full an acre of thrifty young maples, as well as alders and birches four to ‘seven feet high, is completely destroyed, being pulled and broken down (broken near the ground) as the ice sank after the water went down. It is all flat, and looks at a little distance as if one had gone through with a bush-whack and done his work faithfully. 

R. Rice tells me that a great many young white pines in a swamp of his in Sudbury have been barked, the bark rubbed down several inches completely bare by the ice. 

Thus the river from time to time asserts its authority over its swamps to a great distance.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 14, 1855

Rice tells me that a great many young white pines in a swamp of his in Sudbury have been barked. See March 14, 1857 ("The maples, apple trees, etc., have been barked by the ice,")

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