The earliest gooseberry leaf has spread a third of an inch or more.

April 24.

A rain-threatening April day. Sprinkles a little in the forenoon. 

P. M. — To mayflower. 

The yellow willow peels fairly, probably for several days. Its buds are bursting and showing a little green, at end of railroad bridge. 

On Money-Diggers’ Shore, much large yellow lily root washed up; that white root with white fibres and yellowish leaf—buds. I doubt if I have seen any pontederia this year. 

I find, on the southeast side of Lupine Hill, nearly four rods from the water and a dozen feet above its level, a young Emys picta, one and five eighths inches long and one and a half wide. I think it must have been hatched year before last. It was headed up-hill. Its rear above was already covered with some kind of green moss (?) or the like, which probably had adhered or grown to it in its winter quarters. 

The epigaea on the upper edge of the bank shows a good deal of the pink, and may open in two or three days if it is pleasant. 

April 23, 2024

Trailing arbutus (epigaea) April 24, 2020

Equisetum arvense, by path beyond second brook, probably yesterday. As usual, am struck with the forwardness of the dark patch of slender rush at the cowslip place. 

Returning, in the low wood just this side the first Second Division Brook, near the meadow, see a brown bird flit, and behold my hermit thrush, with one companion, flitting silently through the birches. I saw the fox-color on his tail-coverts, as well as the brown streaks on the breast. Both kept up a constant jerking of the tail as they sat on their perches. 

This season of rain and superabundant moisture makes attractive many an unsightly hollow and recess. I see some roadside lakes, where the grass and clover had already sprung, owing to previous rain or melted snow, now filled with perfectly transparent April rain water, through which I see to their emerald bottoms, -- paved with emerald.

In the pasture beyond Nut Meadow Brook Crossing, the unsightly holes where rocks have been dug and blasted out are now converted into perfect jewels. They are filled with water of crystalline transparency, paved with the same emerald, with a few hardhacks and meadow-sweets standing in them, and jagged points of rock, and a few skaters gliding over them.

Even these furnish goblets and vases of perfect purity to hold the dews and rains, and what more agreeable bottom can we look to than this which the earliest moisture and sun had tinged green? We do not object to see dry leaves and withered grass at the bottom of the goblet when we drink, if these manifestly do not affect the purity of the water. What wells can be more charming? 

If I see an early grasshopper drowning in one, it looks like a fate to be envied. Here is no dark unexplored bottom, with its imagined monsters and mud, but perfect sincerity, setting off all that it reveals. Through this medium we admire even the decaying leaves and sticks at the bottom. 

The brook had risen so, owing to Miles’s running his mill, that I could not get over where I did going.* 

April wells, call them, vases clean as if enameled.

There is a slight sea-turn. I saw it like a smoke beyond Concord from Brown’s high land, and felt the Cool fresh east wind. Is it not common thus early?

The old caterpillar-nests which now lie on the ground under wild cherry trees, and which the birds may use, are a quite light-colored cottony web, close and thick matted, together with the dried excrement of caterpillars, etc., on the inside. 

See a dog’s-bane with two pods open and partially curved backward on each side, but a third not yet open. This soon opens and scatters its down and seeds in my chamber. The outside is a dull reddish or mahogany-color, but the inside is a singularly polished very pale brown. The inner bark of this makes a strong twine like that of the milkweed, but there is not so much of it. 

What is that now ancient and decayed fungus by the first mayflowers, —trumpet-shaped with a very broad mouth, the chief inner part green, the outer dark brown?   

The earliest gooseberry leaf has spread a third of an inch or more.

Goodwin shot, about 6 P. M., and brought to me a cinereous coot (Fulica Americana) which was flying over the willows at Willow Bay, where the water now runs up. It measures fourteen inches to end of tail; eighteen and one half to end of legs. Tail projects a half inch beyond closed wings. Alar extent twenty-six inches. (These dimensions are somewhat stretched.) Above it is a bluish slate, passing into olive behind the wings, the primaries more brownish. Beneath, ash color or pale slate. Head and neck, uniform deep black. Legs, clear green in front, passing into lead-color behind and on the lobes. Edging of wings, white; also the tips of the secondaries for one fourth of an inch, and a small space under the tail. Wings beneath, very light,  almost silvery, slate. Vent, for a small space, black. Bill, bluish-white, with a chestnut bar near tip, and corresponding chestnut spot on each side of lower mandible and a somewhat diamond-shaped chestnut spot at base in front. No noticeable yellow on bill. Irides, reddish. No noticeable whitish spot beneath eyes; only bare lid. Legs and feet are very neat; talons very slender, curving, and sharp, the middle ones 1/2 inch+ long. Lobes chiefly on the inner side of the toes. Legs bare half an inch above the joint. From its fresh and tender look I judge it to be a last year’s bird. It is quite lousy. 

According to Nuttall, they range from 55° north latitude to Florida and Jamaica and west to Oregon (?) and Mexico. Probably breed in every part of North America, —even in Fresh Pond, he would imply, — but their nests, eggs, and breeding-habits are yet unknown. Nocturnal, hiding by day. In Florida in the winter. Come to Fresh Pond in September. A pair there in April, and seen with young birds in June. When alarmed utter a “hoarse kruk.” Called “flusterers” in Carolina, according to Lawson, because they fly trailing their legs or pattering with them over the water. Food: vegetables, also small shellfish, insects, gravel, etc. Leave the Northern States in November.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 24, 1856

*Warren Miles at his new mill tells me eels can’t get above his mill now, in the spring.


A young Emys picta, one and five eighths inches long. See April 21, 1855 ("Saw a painted turtle not two inches in diameter. This must be more than one year old”). See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Painted Turtle (Emys picta)


The inner bark of [the dog's-bane] makes a strong twine like that of the milkweed. See August 16, 1856 ("I find the dog's-bane (Apocynum androsoemifolium) bark not the nearly so strong as that of the A. cannabinum”).; August 5, 1856 (“At the Assabet stone bridge, apparently freshly in flower, — though it may have been out nearly as long as the androscemifolium, — apparently the Apocynum var. hypericifolium (?)”) ;  September 2, 1856 ("Some years ago I sought for Indian hemp (Apocynum cannabinum) hereabouts in vain, and concluded that it did not grow here. A month or two ago I read again, as many times before, that its blossoms were very small, scarcely a third as large as those of the common species, and for some unaccountable reason this distinction kept recurring to me, and I regarded the size of the flowers I saw, though I did not believe that it grew here; and in a day or two my eyes fell on it, aye, in three different places, and different varieties of it.")

The earliest gooseberry leaf has spread a third of an inch or more. See April 23, 1855 ("The currant and second gooseberry are bursting into leaf.”)

The epigaea on the upper edge of the bank shows a good deal of the pink. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Epigaea

Equisetum arvense, by path beyond second brook, probably yesterday. . . . See April 24, 1855 ("The Equisetum arvense on the causeway sheds its green pollen . . .”)

Behold my hermit thrush, with one companion, flitting silently through the birches. . . . Both kept up a constant jerking of the tail as they sat on their perches.   This may be HDT’s first certain, correct identification of the hermit, which is the first thrush to arrive in April. He has mistaken it for the wood and the "golden-crowned” and  has been brushing up on his thrushes. See  May 7, 1852 (" A wood [sic] thrush which. . .betrayed himself by moving, like a large sparrow with ruffled feathers, and quirking his tail like a pewee,  on a low branch.”);  May 22, 1852 ("On my way to Plymouth, looked at Audubon in the State-House. The female (and male?) wood thrush spotted the whole length of belly; the hermit thrush not so.”); April 18, 1854 ("Was surprised to see a wagtail thrush, the golden-crowned, at the Assabet Spring,”); April 27, 1854 ("What a shy fellow my hermit thrush! ");May 4, 1855 ("Several larger thrushes on low limbs and on ground, with a dark eye (not the white around it of the wood thrush) and, I think, the nankeen spot on the secondaries. A hermit thrush?); April 21, 1855 ("At Cliffs, I hear at a distance a wood [sic] thrush. It affects us as a part of our unfallen selves..”); September 29, 1855 ("At Natural History Library saw Dr. Cabot, who says that he has heard either the hermit, or else the olivaceous, thrush sing,—very like a wood thrush, but softer. Is sure that the hermit thrush sometimes breeds hereabouts.”). See also June 12, 1857 ("At Natural History Rooms.. . . The wood thrush's is a slender egg, a little longer than a catbird's and uniform greenish-blue. . . . The egg of the hermit thrush [which variety?] is about as big as that of Wilson's thrush, but darker green.”); October 22, 1857 (“I see what I call a hermit thrush on the bushes by the shore of Flint’s Pond . . .”) Also see A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Signs of Spring: The Arrival of the Hermit Thrush