The voice of the peepers is not so much of the earth earthy as of the air airy.

March 31. 

A very pleasant day. 

Spent a part of it in the garden preparing to set out fruit trees. It is agreeable once more to put a spade into the warm mould. The victory is ours at last, for we remain and take possession of the field. In this climate, in which we do not commonly bury our dead in the winter on account of the frozen ground, and find ourselves exposed on a hard bleak crust, the coming out of the frost and the first turning up of the soil with a spade or plow is an event of importance. 

P. M. — To Hill. 

As I rise the east side of the Hill, I hear the distant faint peep of hylodes and the tut tut of croaking frogs from the west of the Hill. 

How gradually and imperceptibly the peep of the hylodes mingles with and swells the volume of sound which makes the voice of awakening nature! If you do not listen carefully for its first note, you probably will not hear it, and, not having heard that, your ears become used to the sound, so that you will hardly notice it at last, however loud and universal. 

I hear it now faintly from through and over the bare gray twigs and the sheeny needles of an oak and pine wood and from over the russet fields beyond, and it is so intimately mingled with the murmur or roar of the wind as to be well-nigh inseparable from it. 

It leaves such a lasting trace on the ear’s memory that often I think I hear their peeping when I do not. It is a singularly emphatic and ear-piercing proclamation of animal life, when with a very few and slight exceptions vegetation is yet dormant. 

The dry croaking and tut tut of the frogs (a sound which ducks seem to imitate, a kind of quacking, —and they are both of the water!) is plainly enough down there in some pool in the woods, but the shrill peeping of the hylodes locates itself nowhere in particular, but seems to take its rise at an indefinite distance over wood and hill and pasture, from clefts or hollows in the March wind. It is a wind-born sound. 

[This must be the Rana halecina. Vide Apr. 3d, 1858.]

To-day both croakers and peepers are pretty numerously heard, and I hear one faint stertorous (bullfrog-like ??) sound on the river meadow. 

What an important part to us the little peeping hylodes acts, filling all our ears with sound in the spring afternoons and evenings, while the existence of the otter, our largest wild animal, is not betrayed to any of our senses (or at least not to more than one in a thousand)! 

The voice of the peepers is not so much of the earth earthy as of the air airy. It rises at once on the wind and is at home there, and we are incapable of tracing it further back. 

The earliest gooseberry in the garden begins to show a little green near at hand. 

An Irishman is digging a ditch for a foundation wall to a new shop where James Adams’s shop stood. He tells me that he dug up three cannon-balls just in the rear of the shop lying within a foot of each other and about eighteen inches beneath the surface. I saw one of them, which was about three and a half inches in diameter and somewhat eaten with rust on one side. These were probably thrown into the pond by the British on the 19th of April, 1775. Shattuck says that five hundred pounds of balls were thrown into the pond and wells. These may have been dropped out the back window. 

The tortoises now quite commonly lie out sunning on the sedge or the bank. As you float gently down the stream, you hear a slight rustling and, looking up, see the dark shining back of a picta sliding off some little bed of straw-colored coarse sedge which is upheld by the button-bushes or willows above the surrounding water. They are very wary and, as I go up the Assabet, will come rolling and sliding down a rod or two, though they appear to have but just climbed up to that height.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 31, 1857


The existence of the otter, our largest wild animal, is not betrayed to any of our senses (or at least not to more than one in a thousand)! See  April 6, 1855 ("it reminds me of an otter, which however I have never seen."); January 30, 1854 ("How retired an otter manages to live! He grows to be four feet long without any mortal getting a glimpse of him,"); February 20, 1855 (among the quadrupeds of Concord, the otter is "very rare."); the Natural History of Massachusetts (1842) ("The bear, wolf, lynx, wildcat, deer, beaver, and marten have disappeared ; the otter is rarely if ever seen here at present; and the mink is less common than formerly..")

As I rise the east side of the Hill, I hear the distant faint peep of hylodes and the tut tut of croaking frogs from the west of the Hill. Compare March 31, 1855 ("I listen in vain to hear a frog or a new bird as yet; only the frozen ground is melting a little deeper, and the water is trickling down the hills in some places.”)

There is just enough snow left from the big storm of the 15th to make good walking. We are out in a wet snow, almost rain, crossing the Kendall pond  coming out in the beautiful old woods and now head kitty corner straight down to the mountain. it is easy going downhill. The snow being just right. At the head of the stream that crosses our land  we go up a bank into a  hemlock woods on a steep knoll.  Looking down I see a deer. it  takes off and stops quite a distance away and takes off again before the dogs catch its scent and run off. Looking down I see our road and then  it is quite an experience to spot the house through the trees  from above just enough red color to make it visible And here we are high on a knoll never been here looking steeply down on the house The forest is full of large   hemlocks bigger than I can wrap my arms around the feeling of everything is new never been here before yet so close  I never knew the  deer runs  though these old trees standing on the mountain  high above the place where we live.

Everything is new

 never been here before yet

so close to the house.

20170331 zphx

Walden open today.

March 29.

P.M. — To Walden and river.

Walden open, say to-day, though there is still a little ice in the deep southern bay and a very narrow edging along the southern shore.

Cross through the woods to my boat under Fair Haven Hill. How empty and silent the woods now, before leaves have put forth or thrushes and warblers are come! Deserted halls, floored with dry leaves, where scarcely an insect stirs as yet.

Taking an average of eight winters, it appears that Walden is frozen about ninety-eight days in the year.

When I have put my boat in its harbor, I hear that sign-squeaking blackbird, and, looking up, see half a dozen on the top of the elm at the foot of Whiting’s lot. They are not red-wings, and by their size they make me think of crow blackbirds, yet on the whole I think them grackles (?). Possibly those I heard on the 18th were the same ?? Does the red-wing ever make a noise like a rusty sign?

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 29, 1857

Walden open today. See March 14, 1860 ("No sooner has the ice of Walden melted than the wind begins to play in dark ripples over the surface of the virgin water. Ice dissolved is the next moment as perfect water as if melted a million years.”); March 20, 1853 ("It is glorious to behold the life and joy of this ribbon of water sparkling in the sun. The wind ... raises a myriad brilliant sparkles on the bare face of the pond, an expression of glee, of youth, of spring, as if it spoke the joy of the fishes within it and of the sands on its shore. It is the contrast between life and death. There is the difference between winter and spring. The bared face of the pond sparkles with joy.");   March 26, 1857 ("Walden is already on the point of breaking up. In the shallow bays it is melted six or eight rods out, and the ice looks dark and soft.”); March 28, 1858 (“Walden is open. When? On the 20th it was pretty solid. C. sees a very little ice in it to-day, but probably it gets entirely free to-night.”); March 29, 1855 ("As I stand on Heywood’s Peak, looking over Walden, more than half its surface already sparkling blue water, I inhale with pleasure the cold but wholesome air like a draught of cold water”); March 29, 1857 ("Walden open, say to-day, though there is still a little ice in the deep southern bay and a very narrow edging along the southern shore.”);  March 29, 1859 ("Walden is first clear after to-day.”);  March 31, 1855 ("Yesterday the earth was simple to barrenness, and dead, —bound out. Out-of-doors there was nothing but the wind and the withered grass and the cold though sparkling blue water, and you were driven in upon yourself. Now you would think that there was a sudden awakening in the very crust of the earth, as if flowers were expanding and leaves putting forth... We feel as if we had obtained a new lease of life. Looking from the Cliffs I see that Walden is open to-day first."); April 18, 1856 ("Walden is open entirely to-day for the first time, owing to the rain of yesterday and evening. I have observed its breaking up of different years commencing in ’45, and the average date has been April 4th.“)

In 1845 Walden was first completely open on the 1st of April;

in '46, the 25th of March;
in '47, the 8th of April;
in '51, the 28th of March;
in '52, the 18th of April;
in '53, the 23rd of March;
in '54, about the 7th of April. ~ Walden.



See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Ice-out

And so, many a fisherman is not seen on the shore who the last spring did not fail here.

March 28. 

8.30 A. M. — Up river to Fair Haven by boat. 

A pleasant morning; the song of the earliest birds, i.e. tree sparrows, (now decidedly) and song sparrows and bluebirds, in the air. A red-Wing’s gurgle from a willow. 

The Emys picta, now pretty numerous, when young and fresh, with smooth black scales without moss or other imperfection, unworn, and with claws perfectly sharp, is very handsome. When the scales are of this clear, though dull, black, the six middle ones, counting from side to side, are edged forward with broad dull greenish-yellow borders, the others with a narrow whitish border, and the singular vermilion and yellow marks of the marginal scales extend often on to the lateral scales. The concentric lines of growth are in distinguishable. The fore and hind legs and tail are slashed or streaked horizontally with broad clear vermilion and also a fine yellow line or two, answering to those on the hinge scales continued, showing the tenant to be one with the house he occupies. Beneath it is a clear buff.

He who painted the tortoise thus, what were his designs?  

At Lee’s Cliff and this side, I see half a dozen buff edged butterflies (Vanessa Antiopa) and pick up three dead or dying, two together, the edges of their wings gone. Several are fluttering over the dry rock débris under the cliff, in whose crevices probably they have -wintered. Two of the three I pick up are not dead, though they will not fly. Verily their day is a short one. What has checked their frail life? Within, the buff edge is black with bright sky-blue spots, and the main part within is a purplish brown. Those little oblong spots on the black ground are light as you look directly down on them, but from one side they vary through violet to a crystalline rose-purple.

I can remember now some thirty years — after a fashion — of life in Concord, and every spring there are many dead suckers floating belly upward on the meadows. This phenomenon of dead suckers is as constant as the phenomenon of living ones; nay, as a phenomenon it is far more apparent. 

Farmer thinks pickerel may have been frozen through half a day and yet come to. Instances pickerel he caught a very cold day on Bateman’s Pond, which he brought home frozen and put in a pail of water in his cellar and after found them alive. 

A Mr. Parkhurst of Carlisle assures him that though minnows put into a half-hogshead of water will die in forty-eight hours unless you change the water, if you put with it a piece of granite a foot square they will live all winter, and that he keeps his minnows in this way. 

A pleasing sight this of the earlier painted tortoises which are seen along the edge of the flooded meadows, often three or four suddenly dimpling the smooth surface of a ditch, which had been sunning on a tussock, sluggish moving flakes of clear black. Soon they rise again and put their heads out warily, looking about and showing the yellow stripes on their necks. They seem to feel the very jar of the ground as you approach. They rest with their shells at an angle in the water, their heads out and their feet outstretched, or partly bury themselves in the grassy bottom. Often hindered by the bushes, between which their shells are caught. Poking their heads through, they are impeded by their shells. The very earliest I see moving along the bottom on the meadows, but soon after they begin to lie out in the sun on the banks and tussocks as I have mentioned. 

The Emys guttata is found in brooks and ditches. I passed three to-day, lying cunningly quite motionless, with heads and feet drawn in, on the bank of a little grassy ditch, close to a stump, in the sun, on the russet flattened grass, like snails, or rather scales, under which some insects might lurk, with their high-arched backs. When out of water they are the less exposed to observation by their shells drying and their spots being dimmed. 

Do I ever see a yellow-spot turtle in the river? Do I ever see a wood tortoise in the South Branch? 

There is consolation in the fact that a particular evil, which perhaps we suffer, is of a venerable antiquity, for it proves its necessity and that it is part of the order, not disorder, of the universe. When I realize that the mortality of suckers in the spring is as old a phenomenon, perchance, as the race of suckers itself, I contemplate it with serenity and joy even, as one of the signs of spring. Thus they have fallen on fate. And so, many a fisherman is not seen on the shore who the last spring did not fail here. 

Flood tells me to-day that he finds no frost to trouble him in Monroe’s garden. He can put his spade or fork in anywhere. 

Chestnut, evidently because it is packed as in a little chest. 

The maple sap has been flowing well for two or three weeks. 

When I witness the first plowing and planting, I acquire a long-lost confidence in the earth, —that it will nourish the seed that is committed to its bosom. I am surprised to be reminded that there is warmth in it. We have not only warmer skies, then, but a warmer earth. The frost is out of it, and we may safely commit these seeds to it in some places. Yesterday I walked with Farmer beside his team and saw one furrow turned quite round his field. What noble work is plowing, with the broad and solid earth for material, the ox for fellow-laborer, and the simple but efficient plow for tool! Work that is not done in any shop, in a cramped position, work that tells, that concerns all men, which the sun shines and the rain falls on, and the birds sing over! You turn over the whole vegetable mould, expose how , many grubs, and put a new aspect on the face of the earth. It comes pretty near to making a world. Redeeming a swamp does, at any rate. A good plowman is a terrae filius. The plowman, we all know, whistles as he drives his team afield. 

The broad buff edge of the Vanessa Antiopa’s wings harmonizes with the russet ground it flutters over, and as it stands concealed in the winter, with its wings folded above its back, in a cleft in the rocks, the gray brown under side of its wings prevents its being distinguished from the rocks themselves. 

Often I can give the truest and most interesting account of any adventure I have had after years have elapsed, for then I am not confused, only the most significant facts surviving in my memory. Indeed, all that continues to interest me after such a lapse of time is sure to be pertinent, and I may safely record all that I remember. 

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 28, 1857

Farmer thinks pickerel may have been frozen through half a day and yet come to. See March 20, 1857("When I began to tell him of my experiment on a frozen fish, he said that Pallas had shown that fishes were frozen and thawed again, but I affirmed the contrary, and then Agassiz agreed with me. "); January 4, 1856 ("[T]hinking of what I had heard about fishes coming to life again after being frozen, on being put into water, I thought I would try it. . . . ")

The mortality of suckers in the spring.  See March 27,1858 ("I saw on the 22d a sucker which apparently had been dead a week or two at least. Therefore they must begin to die late in the winter."); March 20, 1857 ("[the phenomenon I speak of, which last is confined to the very earliest spring or winter."); March 19, 1857 ("I observed yesterday a dead shiner by the riverside, and to-day the first sucker."); April 14, 1856 ("I see the first dead sucker"); April 10, 1855("Saw a tolerably fresh sucker floating."); May 23, 1854 ("How many springs shall I continue to see the common sucker (Catostomus Bostoniensis) floating dead on our river!")

At Lee's Cliff and this side, I see half a dozen buff-edged butterflies (Vanessa Antiopa) See March 28, 1858("I start up two Vanessa Antiopa, which flutter about over the dry leaves before, and are evidently attracted toward me, settling at last within a few feet. The same warm and placid day calls out men and butterflies."); see als0 March 21, 1853 ("On the warm, dry cliff, looking south over Beaver Pond, I am surprised to see a large butterfly, black with buff-edged wings, so tender a creature to be out so early, . . .Saw two more of those large black and buff butterflies. The same degree of heat brings them out everywhere.");April 2, 1856 ("A large buff-edged butterfly flutters by along the edge of the Cliff, — Vanessa antiopa. Though so little of the earth is bared, this frail creature has been warmed to life again."):; April 9, 1853 ("You see the buff-edged . . . in warm, sunny southern exposures on the edge of woods or sides of rocky hills and cliffs, above dry leaves and twigs, where the wood has been lately cut and there are many dry leaves and twigs about."); April 11, 1853: ("See my first Vanessa Antiopa."); April 17, 1860.(" Dr. Harris says that that early black-winged, buff-edged butterfly is the Vanessa Antiopa, and is introduced from Europe, and is sometimes found in this state alive in winter.") and A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, the Buff-edged Butterfly

Often I can give the truest and most interesting account of any adventure I have had after years have elapsed,. . ., and I may safely record all that I remember. See March 27, 1857 ("The men and things of to-day are wont to lie fairer and truer in to-morrow’s memory."). See also July 23, 1851 ("Put an interval between the impression and the expression, - wait till the seed germinates naturally.”); May 5, 1852 ("I succeed best when I recur to my experience not too late, but within a day or two; when there is some distance, but enough of freshness."); January 10, 1854 ("What you can recall of a walk on the second day will differ from what you remember on the first day, ... as any view changes to one who is journeying amid mountains when he has increased the distance."); April 20, 1854 ("I find some advantage in describing the experience of a day on the day following.”).

I do not know at first what it is that charms me

March 27. 

There is no snow now visible from my window except on the heel of a bank in the swallow hole behind Dennis’s. A sunny day, but rather cold air.

8.30 A. M. — Up Assabet in boat. 

At last I push myself gently through the smooth and sunny water, sheltered by the Island woods and hill, where I listen for birds, etc. There I may expect to hear a woodpecker tapping the rotten aspen tree. There I pause to hear the faint voice of some early bird amid the twigs of the still wood-side. You are pretty sure to hear a woodpecker early in the morning over these still waters. 

But now chiefly there comes borne on the breeze the tinkle of the song sparrow along the river side, and I push out into wind and current. 

Leave the boat and run down to the white maples by the bridge. The white maple is well out with its pale [?] stamens on the southward boughs, and probably began about the 24th. That would be about fifteen days earlier than last year. 

I find a very regular elliptical rolled stone in the freshly (last fall) plowed low ground there, evidently brought from some pond‘or seaside. It is about seven inches long. The Indians prized such a stone, and I have found many of them where they haunted. Commonly one or both ends will be worn, showing that they have used it as a pestle or hammer. 

As I go up the Assabet, I see two Emys insculpta on the bank in the sun, and one picta. They are all rather sluggish, and I can paddle up and take them up. 

Found on the edge of Dodge’s Brook, about midway, in the cedar field, what I did not hesitate to regard as an Emys insculpta, but thickly spotted with rusty-yellowish spots on the scales above, and the back was singularly depressed. Was it a variety? It looked like a very old turtle, though not unusually large; the shell worn pretty smooth beneath. I could count more than thirty striae above. When it dropped into the brook, I saw that the rusty-yellow spots served admirably to conceal it, for while the shell was bronze-colored (for a ground work), the rusty-yellow spots were the color of the sandy and pebbly bottom of the brook. It was very differently shaped from the shell I have, and Storer does not mention yellow spots. 

Hear a lark in that meadow. Twitters over it on quivering wing and awakes the slumbering life of the meadow. 

The turtle and frog peep stealthily out and see the first lark go over. 

Farmer was plowing a level pasture, unplowed for fourteen years, but in some places the frost was not quite out. Farmer says that he heard geese go over two or three nights ago. 

I would fain make two reports in my Journal, first the incidents and observations of to-day; and by tomorrow I review the same and record what was omitted before, which will often be the most significant and poetic part. 

I do not know at first what it is that charms me. The men and things of to-day are wont to lie fairer and truer in to-morrow’s memory. 

I saw quail-tracks some two months ago, much like smaller partridge-tracks. 

Farmer describes a singular track in the snow the past winter from near his house to Annursnack. Traced it in all five or six miles to a hemlock on the west side, and there he lost it. It travelled like a mink; made a track with all its four feet together, about as big as that of a horse’s foot, eighteen inches apart more or less. Wondered if it was a pine marten.

Men talk to me about society as if I had none and they had some, as if it were only to be got by going to the sociable or to Boston.

Compliments and flattery oftenest excite my contempt by the pretension they imply, for who is he that assumes to flatter me? To compliment often implies an assumption of superiority in the complimenter. It is, in fact, a subtle detraction.

Pickerel begin to dart in shallows.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 27, 1857

I would fain make two reports in my Journal,. . . The men and things of to-day are wont to lie fairer and truer in to-morrow’s memory. See notes to March 24, 1857 ("If you are describing any occurrence, or a man, make two or more distinct reports at different times.");  and March 28, 1857 ("Often I can give the truest and most interesting account of any adventure I have had after years have elapsed, for then I am not confused, only the most significant facts surviving in my memory. Indeed, all that continues to interest me after such a lapse of time is sure to be pertinent, and I may safely record all that I remember.")

Pickerel begin to dart in shallows. See  March 22, 1860 ("Pickerel begin to dart in shallows. ");  March 30, 1855  ("The pickerel begin to dart from the shallowest parts not frozen. "); Apri 1, 1858 ("Far up in still shallows, disturb pickerel and perch, etc. They apparently touch the muddy bottom as they dart out, muddying the water here and there."); See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Pickerel

There is no snow now

visible from my window –

A cold sunny day.

Like the light reflected from the mountain-ridges within the shaded portions of the moon

March 26. 

P. M. — To Walden and Fair Haven. 

Though there has been quite a number of light snows, we have had no sleighing fairly since about February 14th. Walden is already on the point of breaking up. In the shallow bays it is melted six or eight rods out, and the ice looks dark and soft. 

As I go through the woods by Andromeda Ponds, though it is rather cool and windy in exposed places, I hear a faint, stertorous croak from a frog in the open swamp; at first one faint note only, which I could not be sure that I had heard, but, after listening long, one or two more suddenly croaked in confirmation of my faith, and all was silent again. 

When first in the spring, as you walk over the rustling leaves amid bare and ragged bushes, you hear this at first faint, hard, dry, and short sound, it hardly sounds like the note of an animal. It may have been heard some days. 

[The next day at 2.30 P. M., or about the same time, and about the same weather, our thermometer is at 48°.]

I lay down on the fine, dry sedge in the sun, in the deep and sheltered hollow a little further on, and when I had lain there ten or fifteen minutes, I heard one fine, faint peep from over the windy ridge between the hollow in which I lay and the swamp, which at first I referred to a bird, and looked round at the bushes which crowned the brim of this hollow to find it, but ere long a regularly but faintly repeated phe-phe-phe-phe revealed the Hylodes Pickeringii. 

It was like the light reflected from the mountain-ridges within the shaded portions of the moon, forerunner and herald of the spring. 

At Well Meadow Head, am surprised to find the skunk-cabbage in flower, though the flower is very little exposed yet, and some still earlier have been killed by frost. Some of those cabbage buds are curved and short like the beak of a bird. 

The buds of the cowslip are very yellow, and the plant is not observed a rod off, it lies so low and close to the surface of the water in the meadow. It may bloom and wither there several times before villagers discover or suspect it. 

The chrysosplenium is very conspicuous and pretty now. This can afford to be forward, it lies so flat and unexposed. 

Fair Haven is open; may have been open several days; there is only a little ice on the southeast shore. I sit on the high eastern bank. 

Almost every cistus stem has had its bark burst off and left hanging raggedly for an inch or more next the ground by the crystals which formed round it in the fall and winter, but some have escaped. 

As I come out of the Spring Woods I see Abiel Wheeler planting peas and covering them up on his warm sandy hillside, in the hollow next the woods. It is a novel sight, that of the farmer distributing manure with a shovel in the fields and planting again. 

The earth looks warm and genial again. The sight of the earliest planting with carts in the field so lately occupied with snow is suggestive of the genialness of Nature. I could almost lie down in the furrow and be warmed into her life and growth. 

Stopped at Farrar’s little stithy. He is making two nuts to mend a mop with, and when at length he has forged and filed them and cut the thread, he remarks that it is a puttering job and worth a good deal more than he can charge. He has sickness in the house, a daughter in consumption, which he says is a flattering disease, up one day and down the next. 

Seeing a monstrous horseshoe nailed against his shop inside, with a little one within it, I asked what that was for. He said that he made the big one when he was an apprentice (of three months’ standing) for a sign, and he picked up the little one the other day in the road and put it within it for the contrast. But he thought that the big one was hardly too big for one of the fore feet of the horse Columbus, which he had seen. 

The first croaking frogs, the hyla, the white maple blossoms, the skunk-cabbage, and the alder’s catkins are observed about the same time. I saw one hazel catkin much elongated and relaxed. It is surprising always to see this on dry plains or banks where there is so little evidence of life beside. 

Farrar spoke of horses driven “tantrum.” 

You take your walk some pretty cold and windy, but sunny March day, through rustling woods, perhaps, glad to take shelter in the hollows or on the south side of the hills or woods. When ensconced in some sunny and sheltered hollow, with some just melted pool at its bottom, as you recline on the fine withered sedge, in which the mice have had their galleries, leaving it pierced with countless holes, and are, perchance, dreaming of spring there, a single dry, hard croak, like a grating twig, comes up from the pool. 

Such is the earliest voice of the pools, where there is a small smooth surface of melted ice bathing the bare button-bushes or water andromeda or tufts of sedge; such is the earliest voice of the liquid pools, hard and dry and grating. Unless you watch long and closely, not a ripple nor a bubble will be seen, and a marsh hawk will have to look sharp to find one. The notes of the croaking frog and the hylodes are not only contemporary with, but analogous to, the blossoms of the skunk-cabbage and white maple. 

Are not March and November gray months? 

Men will hardly believe me when I tell them of the thickness of snow and ice at this time last year.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 26, 1857


The first croaking frogs, the hyla, the white maple blossoms, the skunk-cabbage, and the alder’s catkins are observed about the same time. See March 26, 1860 ("TFair Haven Pond may be open by the 20th of March, as this year, or not till April 13 as in ’56, or twenty-three days later. Tried by the skunk-cabbage, this may flower March 2 (‘60) or April 6 or 8 (as in ’55 and ’54), or some five weeks later, — say thirty-six days . . .The wood frog may be heard March 15, as this year, or not till April 13, as in ’56, — twenty-nine days. That is, tried by the last four phenomena, there may be about a month’s fluctuation, so that March may be said to have receded half-way into February or advanced half-way into April, i. e., it borrows half of February or half of April."); March 27, 1853 ("though I waited about half an hour, would not utter a sound . . .")

Fair Haven is open; may have been open several days . . . See March 26, 1860 ("Fair Haven Pond may be open by the 20th of March, as this year], or not till April 13 as in '56, or twenty-three days later.”) Also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Ice-out

Are not March and November gray months?  See March 30, 1855 (“He must have a great deal of life in him to draw upon, who can pick up a subsistence in November and March. . . . Except for science, do not travel in such a climate as this in November and March.”); March 12, 1854 (“The scenery is like, yet unlike, November; you have the same barren russet, but now, instead of a dry, hard, cold wind, a peculiarly soft, moist air, or else a raw wind.”)

To preserve the fruit of our experience

March 24.

P. M. — Paddle up Assabet. 

The water is fast going down. See a small water bug. It is pretty still and warm. 

As I round the Island rock, a striped squirrel that was out the steep polypody rock scampered up with a chuckle. 

On looking close, I see the crimson white maple stigmas here and there, and some early alder catkins are relaxed and extended and almost shed pollen. 

I see many of those narrow four-winged insects (perla?) of the ice now fluttering on the water like ephemerae. They have two pairs of wings indistinctly spotted dark and light. 

Humphrey Buttrick says he saw two or three fish hawks down the river by Carlisle Bridge yesterday; also shot three black ducks and two green-winged teal, — though the latter had no green on their wings, it was rather the color of his boat, but Wesson assured him that so they looked in the spring. 

Buttrick had a double barrelled gun with him, which he said he bought of a broker in Boston for five dollars! Thought it had cost eighteen dollars. He had read Frank Forester and believed him, and accordingly sent to New York and got one of Mullin’s guns for sixty dollars. It was the poorest gun he ever had. He sold it for forty. 

As for cheap or old-fashioned guns bursting, there was Melvin; he had used his long enough, and it had not burst yet. He had given thirty-five dollars for it, say thirty years ago. Had had but one, or no other since. Melvin’s —and Minott’s still more — is such a gun as Frank Forester says he would not fire for a hundred dollars, and yet Melvin has grown gray with using it; i. e., he thinks that it would not be safe to fire a two barrelled gun offered new for less than fifty dollars.

If you are describing any occurrence, or a man, make two or more distinct reports at different times. Though you may think you have said all, you will to-morrow remember a whole new class of facts which perhaps interested most of all at the time, but did not present themselves to be reported. If we have recently met and talked with a man, and would report our experience, we commonly make a very partial report at first, failing to seize the most significant, picturesque, and dramatic points; we describe only what we have had time to digest and dispose of in our minds, without being conscious that there were other things really more novel and interesting to us, which will not fail to recur to us and impress us suitably at last. 

How little that occurs to us in any way are we prepared at once to appreciate! We discriminate at first only a few features, and we need to reconsider our experience from many points of view and in various moods, to preserve the whole fruit of it. 

H.  D.  Thoreau, Journal, March 24, 1857

As I round the Island rock, a striped squirrel that was out the steep polypody rock scampered up with a chuckle. See. March 10,1852 (" I am pretty sure that I hear the chuckle of a ground squirrel among the warm and bare rocks of the Cliffs. "); . March 17, 1859 ("As I float by the Rock, I hear rustling amid the oak leaves above that new water-line, and, there being no wind, I know it to be a striped squirrel, and soon see its long-unseen striped sides . . . a type which I have not seen for a long time, or rather a punctuation-mark, the character to indicate where a new paragraph commences in the revolution of the seasons.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau,Signs of the Spring, the striped squirrel comes out

I see many of those narrow four-winged insects (perla?) of the ice now fluttering on the water .See
May 9, 1854("That early narrow curved-winged insect on ice and river which I thought an ephemera [Harris ]says is a Sialis, or maybe rather a Perla.");  March 17, 1858 ("As usual, I have seen for some weeks on the ice these peculiar (perla?) insects with long wings and two tails."); March 22, 1856 (“On water standing above the ice under a white maple, are many of those Perla(?) insects, with four wings, drowned.”) See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Insect Hatches in Spring;and A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau,Signs of the Spring: insects and worms come forth and are active

Frank Forester: Henry William Herbert (April 3, 1807 – May 17, 1858), pen name Frank Forester, was an English novelist, poet, historian, illustrator, journalist and writer on sport. See July 12, 1855 (quoting Forester’s  “Manual for Young Sportsmen,”)

[Forester] thinks that it would not be safe to fire a two barrelled gun offered new for less than fifty dollars. See Forester’s Manual at 58 ("I do not, of course, mean to say that every cheap gun must necessarily burst ; but I do say that, against each one, severally, the odds are heavy that it will . . .By the word low-priccd guns, I mean, as a general rule, in reference to buying a safe and serviceable piece, any thing like new, with two barrels and the smallest show of exterior ornament, cheaper than fifty dollars.”)

If you are describing any occurrence, or a man, make two or more distinct reports at different times. . . . How little that occurs to us in any way are we prepared at once to appreciate. See March 27, 1857 ("I would fain make two reports in my Journal, first the incidents and observations of to-day; and by tomorrow I review the same and record what was omitted before, which will often be the most significant and poetic part. I do not know at first what it is that charms me. The men and things of to-day are wont to lie fairer and truer in to-morrow’s memory."); October 1, 1856 (“I do not perceive the poetic and dramatic capabilities of an anecdote or story which is told me, its significance, till some time afterwards. . ."); April 20, 1854 ("I find some advantage in describing the experience of a day on the day following. At this distance it is more ideal, like the landscape seen with the head inverted, or reflections in water”); January 10, 1854 ("What you can recall of a walk on the second day will differ from what you remember on the first day, ... as any view changes to one who is journeying amid mountains when he has increased the distance.”); May 5, 1852 ("I succeed best when I recur to my experience not too late, but within a day or two; when there is some distance, but enough of freshness.”); July 23, 1851 ("Do not tread on the heels of your experience. Be impressed without making a minute of it. Put an interval between the impression and the expression, - wait till the seed germinates naturally.”)

March 24. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, March 24

We are not at once

conscious of the whole fruit of

our experience.

How little occurs

that we are prepared at once

to appreciate.

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, 

To preserve the fruit of our experience.

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau

"A book, each page written in its own season,

out-of-doors, in its own locality."

~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx © 2009-2024

https://tinyurl.com/hdt570324

Discusssng experimental science.

March 20. 

Dine with Agassiz at R. W. E.’s. 

He thinks that the suckers die of asphyxia, having very large air-bladders and being in the habit of coming to the surface for air. But then, he is thinking of a different phenomenon from the one I speak of, which last is confined to the very earliest spring or winter.

He says that the Emyspicta does not copulate till seven years old, and then does not lay till four years after copulation, or when eleven years old. 

The Cistuda Blandingii (which he has heard of in Massachusetts only at Lancaster) copulates at eight or nine years of age. He says this is not a Cistuda but an Emys. 

He has eggs of the serpentina from which the young did not come forth till the next spring. 

He thinks that the Esquimau dog is the only indigenous one in the United States. 

He had not observed the silvery appearance and the dryness of the lycoperdon fungus in water which I showed. 

He had broken caterpillars and found the crystals of ice in them, but had not thawed them. 

When I began to tell him of my experiment on a frozen fish, he said that Pallas had shown that fishes were frozen and thawed again, but I affirmed the contrary, and then Agassiz agreed with me. 

Says Aristotle describes the care the pouts take of their young. I told him of Tanner’s account of it, the only one I had seen. 

The river over the meadows again, nearly as high as in February, on account of rain of the 19th.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal , March 20, 1857

He thinks that the suckers die of asphyxia. . . a different phenomenon from the one I speak of, which last is confined to the very earliest spring or winter.  See March 28, 1857 ("When I realize that the mortality of suckers in the spring is as old a phenomenon, perchance, as the race of suckers itself, I contemplate it with serenity and joy even, as one of the signs of spring."); March 19, 1857 ("I observed yesterday a dead shiner by the riverside, and to-day the first sucker."); April 14, 1856 ("I see the first dead sucker"); April 10, 1855("Saw a tolerably fresh sucker floating."); May 23, 1854 ("How many springs shall I continue to see the common sucker (Catostomus Bostoniensis) floating dead on our river!")

The dryness of the lycoperdon fungus in water which I showed. See February 8, 1857 ("To my surprise, when held under water it looked like a mass of silver or melted lead, it was so coated with air,. . .It was impossible to wet. It seems to be encased in a silvery coat of air which is water-tight.")

He had broken caterpillars and found the crystals of ice in them, but had not thawed them. See February 12, 1857  ("The caterpillar, which I placed last night on the snow beneath the thermometer, is frozen stiff again, this time not being curled up, the temperature being -6° now. Yet, being placed on the mantelpiece, it thaws and begins to crawl in five or ten minutes, before the rear half of its body is limber. ")

My experiment on a frozen fish . . . See January 4, 1856 ("[T]hinking of what I had heard about fishes coming to life again after being frozen, on being put into water, I thought I would try it. . . . ")

Aristotle describes the care the pouts take of their young. See July 15, 1856 ("I saw a school of a thousand little pouts about three quarters of an inch long without any attending pout, and now have no doubt that the pout I had caught (but let go again) was tending them . . ")

It is April weather.

March 19. 

Heavy rain in the night and to-day, i.e. A.M. 

This, as usual, rapidly settles the ways, for, taking the frost out, the water that stood on the surface is soaked up, so that it is even drier and better walking before this heavy rain is over than it was yesterday before it began. 

It is April weather. 

I observed yesterday a dead shiner by the riverside, and to-day the first sucker. 

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 19, 1857

It is April weather. See March 10, 1854 (“The weather is almost April-like. We always have much of this rainy, drizzling, misty weather in early spring, after which we expect to hear geese.”)



To-day the firat dead sucker.  See March 20, 1857 ("[the phenomenmon I speak of, which last is confined to the very earliest spring or winter."); April 14, 1856 ("I see the first dead sucker"); April 10, 1855("Saw a tolerably fresh sucker floating."); May 23, 1854 ("How many springs shall I continue to see the common sucker (Catostomus Bostoniensis) floating dead on our river!"); April 18, 1852 ("The sight of the sucker floating on the meadow at this season affects me singularly, as if it were a fabulous or mythological fish, realizing my idea of a fish. It reminds me of pictures of dolphins or of Proteus. I see it for what it is, — not an actual terrene fish, but the fair symbol of a divine idea, the design of an artist")

Goodwin paddling up the still, dark river.

March 18. 

9 A. M. —Up Assebet. 

A still and warm but overcast morning, threatening rain. 

I now again hear the song sparrow’s tinkle along the riverside, probably to be heard for a day or two, and a robin, which also has been heard a day or two. 

The ground is almost completely bare, and but little ice forms at night along the riverside. 

I meet Goodwin paddling up the still, dark river on his first voyage to Fair Haven for the season, looking for muskrats and from time to time picking driftwood—logs and boards, etc.— out of the water and laying it up to dry on the bank, to eke out his wood-pile with. He says that the frost is not out so that he can lay wall, and so he thought he go and see what there was at Fair Haven. 

Says that when you hear a woodpecker’s rat-tat-tat-tat-tat on a dead tree it is a sign of rain. 

While Emerson sits writing [in] his study this still, overcast, moist day, Goodwin is paddling up the still, dark river. Emerson burns twenty-five cords of wood and fourteen tons of coal; Goodwin perhaps a cord and a half, much of which he picks out of the river.

He says he’d rather have a boat leak some for fishing. 

I hear the report of his gun from time to time for an hour, heralding the death of a muskrat and reverberating far down the river. Goodwin had just seen Melvin disappearing up the North River, and I turn up thither after him. 

The ice-belt still clings to the bank on each side, a foot or more above the water, and is now fringed with icicles of various lengths, only an inch or two apart, where it is melting by day and dripping into the river. Being distinctly reflected, you think you see two, two feet apart, the water-line not being seen. 

I land and walk half-way up the hill. 

A red squirrel runs nimbly before me along the wall, his tail in the air at a right angle with his body; leaps into a walnut and winds up his clock. 

The reindeer lichens on the pitch pine plain are moist and flacid. 

I hear the faint fine notes of apparent nuthatches coursing up the pitch pines, a pair of them, one answering to the other, as it were like a vibrating watch-spring. Then, at a distance, that whar-whar whar-whar-whar-whar, which after all I suspect may be the note of the nuthatch and not a woodpecker.

And now from far southward coming on through the air, the chattering of blackbirds, —probably red-wings, for I hear an imperfect conqueree. 

Also I hear the chill-lill or tchit-a-tchit of the slate-colored sparrow, and see it. 

On the pitch pine plain, nearly the whole of a small turtle’s egg, by the side of its excavated nest. 

Save with my boat the dead top of (apparently) a pine, divested of its bark and bleached. Before the bark fell off it was curiously etched by-worms in variously curved lines and half-circles, often with regular short recurving branches.

Pere Buteux, going on commission to the Attikamegues in 1651, describes a fall away up there, where a river falls into a sort of trough or cradle a hundred paces long. 

“In this cradle the river boils (bouillonne) in such a fashion, that if you cast a stick (baston) into it, it remains some time without appearing, then all at once it elevates itself (il s’éléve en haut) to the height of two pikes, at forty or fifty paces from the place where you cast it in.” 

It is to be observed that in the old deed of the Hunt farm, written in 1701, though the whole, consisting of something more than one hundred and fifty acres, is minutely described in thirteen different pieces, no part is described as woodland or wood-lot, only one piece as partly unimproved. This shows how little account was made of wood. Mr. Nathan Brooks reminds me that not till recently, i. e. not till within forty years, have wood-lots begun to be taxed for anything like their full value.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 18, 1857

I now again hear the song sparrow’s tinkle along the riverside, probably to be heard for a day or two. See March 18, 1852 ("I hear the song sparrow's simple strain, most genuine herald of the spring.”); March 11, 1854 ("On Tuesday, the 7th, I heard the first song sparrow chirp, and saw it flit silently from alder to alder. This pleasant morning after three days' rain and mist, they generally forthburst into sprayey song from the low trees along the river. The developing of their song is gradual but sure, like the expanding of a flower. This is the first song I have heard."); March 27, 1857 ("But now chiefly there comes borne on the breeze the tinkle of the song sparrow along the river side”); March 18, 1858 (“Almost every bush has its song sparrow this morning, and their tinkling strains are heard on all sides.”). See also Henry Thoreau,  A Book of the Seasons: the Song Sparrow (Fringilla melodia).
[Goodwin] says that when you hear a woodpecker’s rat-tat-tat-tat-tat on a dead tree it is a sign of rain. See March 18, 1853 ("The tapping of the woodpecker about this time.”); March 11, 1859 (“But methinks the sound of the woodpecker tapping is as much a spring note as any these mornings.");  March 13, 1855 (“I hear the rapid tapping of the woodpecker from over the water.”); March 15, 1854 ("I hear that peculiar, interesting loud hollow tapping of a woodpecker from over the water.”)  See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Pigeon Woodpecker (flicker).

That whar-whar whar-whar-whar-whar . . .  may be the note of the nuthatch and not a woodpecker.  See March 13, 1853 (“But what was that familiar spring sound from the pine wood across the river, a sharp vetter vetter vetter vetter,”); February 18, 1857 (" I hear that earliest spring note from some bird, perhaps a pigeon woodpecker (or can it be a nuthatch, whose ordinary note I hear?), the rapid whar whar, whar whar, whar whar, which I have so often heard before any other note.”) ; March 17, 1857 (“It is only some very early still, warm, and pleasant morning in February or March that I notice that woodpecker-like whar-whar-whar-whar-whar-whar, earliest spring sound.”);  March 5, 1859 ("I heard a white-bellied nuthatch on an elm within twenty feet, uttering peculiar notes and more like a song than I remember to have heard from it.. . .It was something like to-what what what what what, rapidly repeated, and not the usual gnah gnah; and this instant it occurs to me that this may be that earliest spring note which I hear, and have referred to a woodpecker!  . . .  It is the spring note of the nuthatch")

The slate-colored sparrow/dark-eyed junco. See March 20, 1852 ("And now, within a day or two, I have noticed the chubby slate-colored snowbird (Fringilla hyemalis?), and I drive the flocks before me on the railroad causeway as I walk. It has two white feathers in its tail.”); March 15, 1854 (“Hear on the alders by the river the lill lill lill lill of the first F. hyemalis,”)

No mortal is alert enough to be present at the first dawn of the spring.

March 17. 

These days, beginning with the 14th, more springlike.

March 17, 2017

Last night it rained a little, carrying off nearly all the little snow that remained, but this morning it is fair, and I hear the note of the woodpecker on the elms (that early note) and the bluebird again. 

Launch my boat. 

No mortal is alert enough to be present at the first dawn of the spring, but he will presently discover some evidence that vegetation had awaked some days at least before. Early as I have looked this year, perhaps the first unquestionable growth of an indigenous plant detected was the fine tips of grass blades which the frost had killed, floating pale and flaccid, though still attached to their stems, spotting the pools like a slight fall or flurry of dull-colored snowflmakes. 

After a few mild and sunny days, even in February, the grass in still muddy pools or ditches sheltered by the surrounding banks, which reflect the heat upon it, ventures to lift the points of its green phalanx into the mild and flattering atmosphere, advances rapidly from the saffron even to the rosy tints of morning. But the following night comes the frost, which, with rude and ruthless hand, sweeps the surface of the pool, and the advancing morning pales into the dim light of earliest dawn. 

I thus detect the first approach of spring by finding here and there its scouts and vanguard which have been slain by the rear-guard of retreating winter. 

It is only some very early still, warm, and pleasant morning in February or March that I notice that woodpecker-like whar-whar-whar-whar-whar-whar, earliest spring sound.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 17, 1857

.I notice that woodpecker-like whar-whar-whar-whar-whar-whar, earliest spring sound.  See February 18, 1857 ("When I step out into the yard I hear that earliest spring note from some bird, perhaps a pigeon woodpecker . . ., the rapid whar whar, whar whar, whar whar, which I have so often heard before any other note.”); February 17, 1855 ("Can it be a jay? or a pigeon woodpecker? Is it not the earliest springward note of a bird?”); March 5, 1859 ("Going down-town this forenoon, I heard a white-bellied nuthatch on an elm within twenty feet, uttering peculiar notes and more like a song than I remember to have heard from it.. . .It was something like to-what what what what what, rapidly repeated, and not the usual gnah gnah; and this instant it occurs to me that this may be that earliest spring note which I hear, and have referred to a woodpecker! (This is before I have chanced to see a bluebird, blackbird, or robin in Concord this year.) It is the spring note of the nuthatch")

No mortal is alert enough to be present at the first dawn of the spring .See March 3, 1859 ("How imperceptibly the first springing takes place!"); March 15, 1857 (“An early dawn and premature blush of spring, at which I was not present.”)  See also  Walden, “Spring” ("I am on the alert for the first signs of spring,”). Compare Walden (“ The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake.”); Walden ("We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, by an infinite expectation of the dawn.”); January 26, 1853 (“ I look back for the era of this creation, not into the night, but to a dawn for which no man ever rose early enough.”); March 17, 1852 (“There is a moment in the dawn,. . . when we see things more truly than at any other time.”); and note to June 13, 1852 ("All things in this world must be seen with the morning dew on them, must be seen with youthful, early-opened, hopeful eyes. ")