On the rock this side the Leaning Hemlocks

March 6, 2016

March 6.

P. M. — Up Assabet.

The snow is softening. 

Methinks the lichens are a little greener for it. A thaw comes, and then the birches, which were gray on their white ground before, appear prettily clothed in green. 

I see various kinds of insects out on the snow now. 

On the rock this side the Leaning Hemlocks, is the track of an otter. He has left some scentless jelly-like substance an inch and a half in diameter there, yellowish beneath, maybe part of a fish, or clam(?), or himself. 

The leaves still hanging on some perhaps young swamp white oaks are re markably fresh, almost ochre-colored brown. 

See the snow discolored yellowish under a (probably) gray squirrel’s nest high in a pitch pine, and acorn shells about on it. 

Also a squirrel’s track on the snow over Lee’s Hill. The outside toe on the forefeet is nearly at right angles with the others. This also distinguishes it from a rabbit’s track. It visits each apple tree, digs up frozen apples and sometimes filberts, and when it starts again, aims for an apple tree, though fifteen rods distant. 

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 6, 1856

Methinks the lichens are a little greener. See March 5, 1852 ("I find myself inspecting little granules, as it were, on the bark of trees, little shields or apothecia springing from a thallus, such is the mood of my mind, and I call it studying lichens."); March 6, 1852  ("Old Mr. Joe Hosmer chopping wood at his door. He is full of meat. Had a crack with him. I told him I was studying lichens, pointing to his wood. He thought I meant the wood itself . . . Found three or four parmelias caperata in fruit on a white oak on the high river-bank between Tarbell's and Harrington’s. ") See also  A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Lichens and the lichenst

I see various kinds of insects out on the snow now. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Signs of the Spring: insects and worms come forth and are active

On the rock this side the Leaning Hemlocks, is the track of an otter. March 6, 1852 ("See the track of an otter near the Clamshell Hill, for it looks too large for a mink, — nearly an inch and a half in diameter and nearly round. Occasionally it looked as if a rail had been drawn along through the thin snow over the ice, with faint footprints at long intervals. I saw where he came out of a hole in the ice, and tracked him forty rods, to where he went into an other. Saw where he appeared to have been sliding. "); See also December 6, 1856 (“Just this side of Bittern Cliff, I see a very remarkable track of an otter . . .The river was all tracked up with otters, from Bittern Cliff upward. Sometimes one had trailed his tail, apparently edge wise, making a mark like the tail of a deer mouse; sometimes they were moving fast, and there was an interval of five feet between the tracks.”); December 31, 1854 (“ On the edge of A. Wheeler’s cranberry meadow I see the track of an otter made since yesterday morning.”); January 21, 1853 (“I think it was January 20th that I saw that which I think an otter track in path under the Cliffs, — a deep trail in the snow, six or seven inches wide and two or three deep in the middle, as if a log had been drawn along, similar to a muskrat's only much larger, and the legs evidently short and the steps short, sinking three or four inches deeper still, as if it had waddled along.”); February 4, 1855 ("See this afternoon a very distinct otter-track by the Rock, at the junction of the two rivers.”); February 8, 1857 (“The otter must roam about a great deal, for I rarely see fresh tracks in the same neighborhood a second time the same winter, though the old tracks may be apparent all the winter through.”);  February 20, 1856 (“See a broad and distinct otter-trail, made last night or yesterday. It came out to the river through the low declivities, making a uniform broad hollow trail there without any mark of its feet. . . .Commonly seven to nine or ten inches wide, and tracks of feet twenty to twenty-four apart; but sometimes there was no track of the feet for twenty-five feet, frequently for six; in the last case swelled in the outline.”); February 22, 1856 (“Just below this bridge begins an otter track, several days old yet very distinct, which I trace half a mile down the river. In the snow less than an inch deep, on the ice, each foot makes a track three inches wide, apparently enlarged in melting. The clear interval, sixteen inches; the length occupied by the four feet, fourteen inches. It looks as if some one had dragged a round timber down the middle of the river a day or two since, which bounced as it went.”). See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Otter