Spring birding wearing gloves.

March 20.

A flurry of snow at 7 A. M. I go to turn my boat up.

Four or five song sparrows are flitting along amid the willows by the waterside. Probably they came yesterday with the bluebirds. From distant trees and bushes I hear a faint tinkling te te te te te' and at last a full strain whose rhythm is whit whit whit, ter tche, tchear tche, deliberately sung, measuredly, while the falling snow is beginning to whiten the ground, —not discouraged by such a reception. 

The bluebird, too, is in the air, and I detect its blue back for a moment upon a picket. 

It is remarkable by what a gradation of days which we call pleasant and warm, beginning in the last of February, we come at last to real summer warmth. At first a sunny, calm, serene winter day is pronounced spring, or reminds us of it; and then the first pleasant spring day perhaps we walk with our greatcoat buttoned up and gloves on.

P. M. — Up Assabet. It soon clears off and proves a fair but windy day.  I notice havoc along the stream on making my first voyages on it.  

At my landing I hear the F. hyemalis, in company with a few tree sparrows. They take refuge from the cold wind, half a dozen in all, behind an arbor-vitae hedge, and there plume themselves with puffed-up feathers.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 20, 1855

It is remarkable by what a gradation of days which we call pleasant and warm . . ..  See April 26, 1860 ("What we should have called a warm day in March is a cold one at this date in April.”)