P. M. — Up river to Conantum with C.
A very bright and pleasant fall day.
The button bushes pretty well browned with frost (though the maples are but just beginning to blush), their pale yellowish season past.
Nowadays remark the more the upright and fresh green phalanxes of bulrushes when the pontederias are mostly prostrate. The river is perhaps as low as it has been this year.
Hardly can I say a bird sings, except a slight warble, perhaps, from some kind of migrating sparrow. Was it a tree sparrow, not seen?
The slender white spikes of the Polygonum hydropiperoides and the rose-colored ones of the front-rank kind, and rarely of the P. amphibium, look late and cool over the water.
See some kalmiana lilies still freshly bloomed.
Above the Hubbard Bridge we see coming from the south in loose array some twenty apparently black ducks, with a silveriness to the under sides of their wings in the light. At first they were in form like a flock of blackbirds, then for a moment assumed the outline of a fluctuating harrow.
Some still raking, others picking, cranberries.
I suppose it was the solitary sandpiper (Totanus solitarius) which I saw feeding at the water’s edge on Cardinal Shore, like a snipe. It was very tame; we did not scare it even by shouting. I walked along the shore to within twenty-five feet of it, and it still ran toward me in feeding, and when I flushed it, it flew round and alighted between me and C., who was only three or four rods off. It was about as large as a snipe; had a bluish dusky bill about an inch and a quarter long, apparently straight, which it kept thrusting into the shallow water with a nibbling motion, a perfectly white belly, dusky-green legs; bright brown and black above, with duskier wings. When it flew, its wings, which were uniformly dark, hung down much, and I noticed no white above, and heard no note.
Brought home quite a boat-load of fuel, —-one oak rail, on which fishers had stood in wet ground at Bittern Cliff, a white pine rider (?) with a square hole in [it] made by a woodpecker anciently, so wasted the sap as to leave the knots projecting, several chestnut rails; and I obtained behind Cardinal Shore a large oak stump which I know to have been bleaching there for more than thirty years, with three great gray prongs sprinkled with lichens. It bore above the marks of the original burning. There was a handful of hazel nuts under it emptied by the ground (?) squirrel, a pretty large hole in the rough and thin stem end of each, where the bur was attached. Also, at Clamshell Hill Shore, a chestnut boat-post with a staple in it, which the ice took up last winter, though it had an arm put through it two feet underground. Some much decayed perhaps old red maple stumps at Hubbard’s Bath Place.
It would be a triumph to get all my winter’s wood thus. How much better than to buy a cord coarsely from a farmer, seeing that I get my money’s worth! Then it only affords me a momentary satisfaction to see the pile tipped up in the yard.
Now I derive a separate and peculiar pleasure from every stick that I find. Each has its history, of which I am reminded when I come to burn it, and under what circumstances I found it.
Got home late. C. and I supped together after our work at wooding, and talked it over with great appetites.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 24, 1855
button bushes ... browned with frost. . . See September 24, 1854 ("the button-bushes, which before had attained only a dull mixed yellow, are suddenly bitten, wither, and turn brown, ")
Solitary sandpiper. See May 26, 1855 ("See to-day (and saw the 23d) a larger peetweet like bird on the shore, with longer, perhaps more slender, wings, black or blackish without white spots; all white beneath; and when it goes off it flies higher. ")
A very bright and pleasant fall day.
The button bushes pretty well browned with frost (though the maples are but just beginning to blush), their pale yellowish season past.
Nowadays remark the more the upright and fresh green phalanxes of bulrushes when the pontederias are mostly prostrate. The river is perhaps as low as it has been this year.
Hardly can I say a bird sings, except a slight warble, perhaps, from some kind of migrating sparrow. Was it a tree sparrow, not seen?
The slender white spikes of the Polygonum hydropiperoides and the rose-colored ones of the front-rank kind, and rarely of the P. amphibium, look late and cool over the water.
See some kalmiana lilies still freshly bloomed.
Above the Hubbard Bridge we see coming from the south in loose array some twenty apparently black ducks, with a silveriness to the under sides of their wings in the light. At first they were in form like a flock of blackbirds, then for a moment assumed the outline of a fluctuating harrow.
Some still raking, others picking, cranberries.
I suppose it was the solitary sandpiper (Totanus solitarius) which I saw feeding at the water’s edge on Cardinal Shore, like a snipe. It was very tame; we did not scare it even by shouting. I walked along the shore to within twenty-five feet of it, and it still ran toward me in feeding, and when I flushed it, it flew round and alighted between me and C., who was only three or four rods off. It was about as large as a snipe; had a bluish dusky bill about an inch and a quarter long, apparently straight, which it kept thrusting into the shallow water with a nibbling motion, a perfectly white belly, dusky-green legs; bright brown and black above, with duskier wings. When it flew, its wings, which were uniformly dark, hung down much, and I noticed no white above, and heard no note.
Brought home quite a boat-load of fuel, —-one oak rail, on which fishers had stood in wet ground at Bittern Cliff, a white pine rider (?) with a square hole in [it] made by a woodpecker anciently, so wasted the sap as to leave the knots projecting, several chestnut rails; and I obtained behind Cardinal Shore a large oak stump which I know to have been bleaching there for more than thirty years, with three great gray prongs sprinkled with lichens. It bore above the marks of the original burning. There was a handful of hazel nuts under it emptied by the ground (?) squirrel, a pretty large hole in the rough and thin stem end of each, where the bur was attached. Also, at Clamshell Hill Shore, a chestnut boat-post with a staple in it, which the ice took up last winter, though it had an arm put through it two feet underground. Some much decayed perhaps old red maple stumps at Hubbard’s Bath Place.
It would be a triumph to get all my winter’s wood thus. How much better than to buy a cord coarsely from a farmer, seeing that I get my money’s worth! Then it only affords me a momentary satisfaction to see the pile tipped up in the yard.
Now I derive a separate and peculiar pleasure from every stick that I find. Each has its history, of which I am reminded when I come to burn it, and under what circumstances I found it.
Got home late. C. and I supped together after our work at wooding, and talked it over with great appetites.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 24, 1855
button bushes ... browned with frost. . . See September 24, 1854 ("the button-bushes, which before had attained only a dull mixed yellow, are suddenly bitten, wither, and turn brown, ")
Solitary sandpiper. See May 26, 1855 ("See to-day (and saw the 23d) a larger peetweet like bird on the shore, with longer, perhaps more slender, wings, black or blackish without white spots; all white beneath; and when it goes off it flies higher. ")
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