Think I hear the very faint gnah of a nuthatch

October 20. 

October 20.

P. M. — To Hill, to look for ground squirrel nests.

The river-banks have now assumed almost their November aspect. The button-bushes are nearly bare. The water is smooth, the sun warm, and the reflections particularly fine and distinct; but there are reflected now, for the most part, only gray twigs and a few sere and curled brown leaves, wool-grass, etc. 

Land at Hemlocks, in the eddy there, where the white bits of sawdust keep boiling up and down and whirling round as in a pot. 

Amid the young pitch pines in the pasture behind I notice, as elsewhere of late, a great many brownish-yellow (and some pink) election-cake fungi, eaten by crickets; about three inches in diameter. Some of those spread chocolate-colored ones have many grubs in them, though dry and dusty. 

Think I hear the very faint gnah of a nuthatch. Thus, of late, when the season is declining, many birds have departed, and our thoughts are turned towards winter (began to have a fire, more or less, say ten days or a fortnight ago), we hear the jay again more frequently, and the chickadees are more numerous and lively and familiar and utter their phebe note, and the nuthatch is heard again, and the small woodpecker seen amid the bare twigs. 

Owing to the great height of the river, there has been no Bidens Beckii nor Polygonum amphibium to my knowledge this year, nor have I found any myrio- phyllum. 

I dig into two or three squirrel-holes under a black oak, and in a rotten stump trace them a foot or more and lose them, or else they come to an end? Though I saw a squirrel enter the ground, I dug and lost it. They are apparently very busy now laying up their stores. I see a gray one making haste with waving tail across the field from the nut trees to the woods. 

Looking up the side of the hill toward the sun, I see a little gossamer on the sweet-fern, etc.; and, from my boat, little flocks of white gossamer occasionally, three quarters of an inch long, in the air or caught on twigs, as if where a spider had hauled in his line.

I think that all spiders can walk on water, for when, last summer, I knocked one off my boat by chance, he ran swiftly back to the boat and climbed up, as if more to avoid the fishes than the water. This would account for those long lines stretched low over the water from one grass stem to another. I see one of them now five or six feet long and only three or four inches above the surface, and it is remarkable that there is no perceptible sag to it, weak as the line must be. 

The pin-weeds are now bare, and their stem and fruit turned a dark brown. 

The thorns on the hill are all bare. 

There are fewer turtles, now and for some time, out sunning. A very little Solidago nemoralis in one place from the axil. 

I hear from my chamber the note of myrtle-birds [White-throat sparrow] mingled with sparrows, in the yard, especially in the morning, quite like a clear, sweet squeaking wheel barrow.

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

A great many brownish-yellow (and some pink) election-cake fungi.  See October 20, 1857 ("I see the yellowish election-cake fungi."); See also  October 29, 1855 ("There are many fresh election-cake toadstools amid the pitch pine”); July 29, 1853 (“ . . .small, umbrella-shaped (with sharp cones), shining and glossy yellow fungi, like an election cake atop,. . .”). See also Concord: A Sense of Place, Octoberr 20, 2015, Election-cake Fungus Mystery.

 Thus, of late, when the season is declining, many birds have departed, and our thoughts are turned towards winter . . . the nuthatch is heard again. See November 26, 1860 ("I hear the faint note of a nuthatch . . .a phenomenon of the late fall or early winter; for we do not hear them in summer that I remember. ...”); December 1, 1857 ("I thus always begin to hear this bird on the approach of winter, as if it did not breed here, but wintered here.([but] Hear it all the fall (and occasionally through the summer of ’59).)”) Compare July 12, 1860 ("Hear a nuthatch in the street. So they breed here."). See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Nuthatch