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.

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