The bushes ringing with the evening song of song sparrows and robins, and the evening sky reflected from the surface of the rippled water

April 25.

A moist April morning. 

A small native willow leafing  and showing catkins to-day; also the black cherry in some places. 

The common wild rose to-morrow. Balm-of-Gilead will not shed pollen apparently for a day or more. Shepherd’s-purse will bloom to-day,—the first I have noticed which has sprung from the ground this season, or of an age. 

Say lilac begins to leaf with common currant. 

P. M. — To Beck Stow’s. 

Hear a faint cheep and at length detect the white throated sparrow, the handsome and well-marked bird, the largest of the sparrows, with a yellow spot on each side of the front, hopping along under the rubbish left by the woodchopper. I afterward hear a faint cheep very rapidly repeated, making a faint sharp jingle,—no doubt by the same. Many sparrows have a similar faint metallic cheep, —the tree sparrow and field sparrow, for instance. I first saw the white-throated sparrow at this date last year. 

Hear the peculiar squeaking notes of a pigeon woodpecker. 

Two black ducks circle around me three or four times, wishing to alight in the swamp, but finally go to the river meadows. I hear the whistling of their wings. Their bills point downward in flying. 

The Andromeda calyculata is out in water, in the little swamp east of Beck Stow’s, some perhaps yesterday; and C. says he saw many bluets yesterday, and also that he saw two F. hyemalis yesterday. 

I have noticed three or four upper jaws of muskrats on the meadow lately, which, added to the dead bodies floating, make more than half a dozen perhaps drowned out last winter.

After sunset paddle up to the Hubbard Bath. The bushes ringing with the evening song of song sparrows and robins, and the evening sky reflected from the surface of the rippled water like the lake grass on pools. 

A spearers’ fire seems three times as far off as it is.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 25, 1855


Hear a faint cheep and at length detect the white throated sparrow, the handsome and well-marked bird .. . See April 25, 1854 ("[Saw] on the low bushes, — shrub oaks, etc., — by path, a large sparrow with ferruginous- brown and white-barred wings, — the white-throated sparrow, — uttered a faint ringing chirp.")

A spearers’ fire seems three times as far off as it is. See April 25, 1856 ("At evening see a spearer’s light.")