Northern lights, rainbow, ice, snow, hail, pollywogs and mice.

March 13. 

Northern lights last night. Rainbow in east this morning. 

6.30 A. M. — The river is low, very low for the season. It has been falling ever since the freshet of February 18th. Now, about sunrise, it is nearly filled with the thin, half cemented ice-crystals of the night, which the warmer temperature of day apparently has loosened. They grate against the bushes and wheel round in great fields with a slight crash and piling up.

I hear the rapid tapping of the woodpecker from over the water.

P. M. — To Hubbard’s Close. I am surprised to see, not only many pollywogs through the thin ice of the warm ditches, but, in still warmer, stagnant, unfrozen holes in this meadow, half a dozen small frogs, probably Rana palustris. 

Coming through the stubble of Stow’s rye-field in front of the Breed house, I meet with four mice-nests in going half a dozen rods. They lie flat on the ground amid the stubble; are flattened spheres, the horizontal diameter about five inches, the perpendicular considerably less, composed of grass or finer stubble, and on taking them up you do not at once detect the entrance with your eye, but rather feel it with your finger on the side; lined with the finest of the grass. 

These were undoubtedly - probably - made when the snow was on the ground, for their winter residence, while they gleaned the rye-field, and when the snow went off they scampered to the woods. I think they were made by the Mus leucopus.

I look into many woodchucks’ holes, but as yet they are choked with leaves and there is no sign of their having come abroad. 

At evening the raw, overcast day concludes with snow and hail. 

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 13, 1855

I hear the rapid tapping of the woodpecker from over the water. See March 11, 1859 (“But methinks the sound of the woodpecker tapping is as much a spring note as any these mornings; it echoes peculiarly in the air of a spring morning.); March 15, 1854 ("I hear that peculiar, interesting loud hollow tapping of a woodpecker from over the water.”); March 18, 1853 ("The tapping of the woodpecker about this time.”); March 30, 1854 ("At the Island I see and hear this morning the cackle of a pigeon woodpecker at the hollow poplar; had heard him tapping distinctly from my boat's place."); April 14, 1856 ("Hear the flicker’s . . . tapping sounds afar over the water . It is a hollow sound which rings distinct to a great distance, especially over water."); See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Signs of the Spring, woodpeckers tapping

I look into many woodchucks’ holes. See March 5, 1857 ("See the tracks of a woodchuck in the sand-heap about the mouth of his hole, where he has cleared out his entry."); See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Signs of the Spring; The Woodchuck Ventures Out