I see the blue heron arise from the November shore and disappear on undulating wing around a bend.

November 1.
After a rain-threatening morning it is a beautiful Indian-summer day, the most remarkable hitherto and equal to any of the kind. Yet we kept fires in the fore noon, the warmth not having got into the house.

It is akin to sin to spend such a day in the house. 

The air is still and warm. The river is perfectly smooth. Whole schools of little minnows leap from the surface at once with a silvery gleam. The wool-grass, with its drooping head and the slender withered leaves dangling about its stem, stands in little sheaves upon its tussocks, clean dry straw, and is thus reflected in the water. 

This is the November shore. 

This, too, is the recovery of the year, — as if the year, having nearly or quite accomplished its work, and abandoned all design, were in a more favorable and poetic mood, and thought rushed in to fill the vacuum. 

The maples and swamp oaks and willows are for the most part bare, but some of the oaks are partly clothed yet with withered leaves. I see one white maple quite thick and green, and some black willows are thinly clad with green leaves, and many yellowish leaves are seen on the sallows rising above the bare button-bushes. 

Yet I see no painted tortoises out, and I think it is about a fortnight since I saw any. 

As I push up the river past Hildreth’s, I see the blue heron arise from the shore and disappear with heavily-flapping wings around a bend in front; the greatest of the bitterns, with heavily-undulating wings, low over the water, seen against the woods, just disappearing round a bend in front; with a great slate-colored expanse of wing, suited to the shadows of the stream, a tempered blue as of the sky and dark water commingled. 

This is the aspect under which the Musketaquid might be represented at this season: a long, smooth lake, reflecting the bare willows and button-bushes, the stubble, and the wool-grass on its tussock, a muskrat-cabin or two conspicuous on its margin amid the unsightly tops of pontederia, and a bittem disappearing on undulating wing around a bend. 

Returning in the twilight, I see a bat over the river.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 1, 1855

I see the blue heron arise from the shore and disappear with heavily-flapping wings around a bend . . . See October 29, 1855 ("I scare up a blue heron from the bathing rock this side the Island. . . .")