The mountains, after this our warmest day as yet, have a peculiar soft mantle of blue haze.

April 16. 

P. M. — To Flint’s Pond. 

A perfectly clear and very warm day, a little warmer than the 31st of March or any yet, and I have not got far before, for the first time, I regret that I wore my greatcoat. 

Noticed the first wasp, and many cicindelae on a sandy place. Have probably seen the latter before in the air, but this warmth brings them out in numbers.

The gray of Hubbard’s oaks looks drier and more like summer, and it is now drier walking, the frost in most places wholly out. I got so near a grass-bird as to see the narrow circle of white round the eye. 

The spots on the Emys guttata, in a still, warm leafy-paved ditch which dries up, are exceedingly bright now. Does it last? 

At Callitriche Pool (I see no flowers on it), I see what looks like minnows an inch long, with a remarkably forked tail—fin; probably larvae of dragon-flies. The eyed head conspicuous, and something like a large dorsal fin. They dart about in this warm pool and rest at different angles with the horizon. 

The water ranunculus was very forward here. This pool dries up in summer. The very pools, the receptacles of all kinds of rubbish, now, soon after the ice has melted, so transparent and of glassy smoothness and full of animal and vegetable life, are interesting and beautiful objects. 

Stow’s cold pond-hole is still full of ice though partly submerged, —the only pool in this state that I see. 

The orange-copper vanessa, middle-sized, is out, and a great many of the large buff-edged are fluttering over the leaves in wood-paths this warm afternoon. 

I am obliged to carry my great coat on my arm. 

A striped snake rustles down a dry open hillside where the withered grass is long. 

I cannot dig to the nest of the deer mouse in Britton’s Hollow, because of the frost about six inches beneath the surface. (Yet, though I have seen no plowing in fields, the surveyors plowed in the road on the 14th.) As far as I dug, their galleries appeared at first to be lined with a sort of membrane, which I found was the bark or skin of roots of the right size, their galleries taking the place of the decayed wood. An oak stump. 

At Flint’s, sitting on the rock, we see a great many ducks, mostly sheldrakes, on the pond, which will hardly abide us within half a mile. With the glass I see by their reddish heads that all of one party ——the main body—are females. 

You see little more than their heads at a distance and not much white but on their throats, perchance. When they fly, they look black and white, but not so large nor with that brilliant contrast of black and white which the male exhibits. In another direction is a male by himself, conspicuous, perhaps several. 

Anon alights near us a flock of golden-eyes — surely, with their great black (looking) heads and a white patch on the side; short much clear black, contrasting with much clear white. Their heads and bills look ludicrously short and parrot-like after the others. 

Our presence and a boat party on the pond at last drives nearly all the ducks into the deep easterly cove. We steal down on them carefully through the woods, at last crawling on our bellies, with great patience, till at last we find ourselves within seven or eight rods —as I measure afterward —of the great body of them, and watch them for twenty or thirty minutes with the glass through a screen of cat-briar, alders, etc. 

There are twelve female sheldrakes close together, and, nearest us, within two rods of the shore, where it is very shallow, two or more constantly moving about within about the diameter of a rod and keeping watch while the rest are trying to sleep, — to catch a nap with their heads in their backs; but from time to time one will wake up enough to plume himself. 

It seems as if they must have been broken of their sleep and were trying to make it up, having an arduous journey before them, for we had seen them all disturbed and on the wing within half an hour. 

They are headed various ways. Now and then they seem to see or hear or smell us, and utter a low note of alarm, something like the note of a tree-toad, but very faint, or perhaps a little more wiry and like that of pigeons, but the sleepers hardly lift their heads for it. How fit that this note of alarm should be made to resemble the croaking of a frog and so not betray them to the gunners! 

They appear to sink about midway in the water, and their heads are all a rich reddish brown, their throats white. Now and then one of the watchmen lifts his head and turns his bill directly upward, showing his white throat. 

There are some black or dusky ducks in company with them at first, apparently about as large as they, but more alarmed. Their throats look straw colored, somewhat like a bittern’s, and I see their shovel bills. These soon sail further off. 

At last we arise and rush to the shore within three rods of them, and they rise up with a din, — twenty-six mergansers (I think all females), ten black ducks, —and five golden-eyes from a little further off, also another still more distant flock of one of these kinds.

The black ducks alone utter a sound, their usual hoarse quack. They all fly in loose array, but the three kinds in separate flocks. We are surprised to find ourselves looking on a company of birds devoted to slumber after the alarm and activity we just witnessed. 

Returning, at Goose Pond, which many water bugs (gyrinus) were now dimpling, we scare up two black ducks. The shore is strewn with much fresh eel-grass and the fine, now short eriocaulon with its white roots, apparently all pulled up by them an drifted in.

The spearer’s light to-night, and, after dark, the sound of geese honking all together very low over the houses and apparently about to settle on the Lee meadow. 

Have not noticed fox-colored sparrows since April 13th. 

I am startled sometimes these mornings to hear the sound of doves alighting on the roof just over my head; they come down so hard upon it, as if one had thrown a heavy stick on to it, and I wonder it does not injure their organizations. Their legs must be cushioned in their sockets to save them from the shock? 

When we reach Britton’s clearing on our return this afternoon, at sunset, the mountains, after this our warmest day as yet, have a peculiar soft mantle of blue haze, pale blue as a blue heron, ushering in the long series of summer sunsets, and we are glad that we stayed out so late and feel no need to go home now in a hurry.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 16, 1855

[A] little warmer than the 31st of March or any yet, and I have not got far before, for the first time, I regret that I wore my greatcoat. See March 31, 1855 (“I am uncomfortably warm, gradually unbutton both my coats, and wish that I had left the outside one at home.”)

At Flint’s, sitting on the rock, we see a great many ducks, mostly sheldrakes, on the pond. See April 16, 1859 ("Sheldrakes yet on Walden."); See also  April 22, 1855 ("Goosanders, . . .can get out of sight about as well by diving as by flying. At a distance you see only the male, alternately diving and sailing, when the female may be all the while by his side") Also. Henry Thoreau, A Book of the Seasons, The Sheldrake (Merganser, Goosander)

A striped snake rustles down a dry open hillside where the withered grass is long. See April 16, 1861("Horace Mann says that he killed a bullfrog which had swallowed and contained a common striped snake.") See also April 2, 1858 (" No doubt on almost every such warm bank now you will find a snake lying out"); April 9, 1856 ("saw a striped snake, which probably I had scared into the water from the warm railroad bank”); April 20, 1854 ("A striped snake on a warm, sunny bank.");  May 19, 1856 (‘"a small striped snake in the act of swallowing a Rana palustris. . .”); November 1, 1856 (“A striped snake basks in the sun amid dry leaves.”). Also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Striped Snake

We are glad that we stayed out so late and feel no need to go home now in a hurry. See June 14, 1853 ("Home is farther away than ever. Here is home; the beauty of the world impresses you"); May 23, 1853 (" A certain lateness in the sound, pleasing to hear . . . releases me from the obligation to return in any particular season. I have passed the Rubicon of staying out. I have said to myself, that way is not homeward; I will wander further from what I have called my home — to the home which is forever inviting me. In such an hour the freedom of the woods is offered me,"); June 13, 1854 ("When I have stayed out thus late many miles from home, and have heard a cricket beginning to chirp louder near me in the grass I have felt that I was not far from home after all, -- began to be weaned from my village home.");