To Trillium Wood and to Nut Meadow Brook

March 20.

It snowed three or four inches of damp snow last afternoon and night, now thickly adhering to the twigs and branches. Probably it will soon melt and help carry off the snow. 

P. M. —To Trillium Wood and to Nut Meadow Brook to tap a maple, see paludina, and get elder and sumach spouts, slumping in the deep snow. 

It is now so softened that I slump at every third step. 

The sap of red maples in low and warm positions now generally flows, but not in high and exposed ones.

Where I saw those furrows in the sand in Nut Meadow Brook the other day, I now explore, and find within a square foot or two half a dozen of Paludina decisa with their feet out, within an inch of the surface, so I have scarcely a doubt that they made them. I suppose that they do not furrow the bottom thus under the ice, but as soon as the spring sun has thawed it, they come to the surface, — perhaps at night only, — where there is some little sand, and furrow it thus by their motions. Maybe it is the love season. 

Perhaps these make part of the food of the crows which visit this brook and whose tracks I now see on the edge, and have all winter. Probably they also pick up some dead frogs. 

Considering how solid and thick the river was a week ago, I am surprised to find how cautious I have grown about crossing it in many places now. The river has just begun to open at Hubbard’s Bend. It has been closed there since January 7th, i. e. ten weeks and a half.

For two or three days I have heard the gobbling of turkeys, the first spring sound, after the chickadees and hens, that I think of. 

Set a pail before coming here to catch red maple sap, at Trillium Wood. I am now looking after elder and sumach for spouts.  Got my smooth sumach on the south side of Nawshawtuct. I know of no shrubs hereabout except elders and the sumachs which have a suitable pith and wood for such a purpose.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 20, 1856

Where I saw those furrows in the sand in Nut Meadow Brook the other day. See March 18, 1856 (“I see many small furrows, freshly made, in the sand at the bottom of the brook, from half an inch to three quarters wide, which I suspect are made by some small shellfish already moving.”)

Set a pail before coming here to catch red maple sap, at Trillium Wood. I am now looking after spouts. See March 15, 1856 ("Put a spout in the red maple of yesterday, and hang a pail beneath to catch the sap")