Wednesday, August 9, 2017

Signs of fall.

August 9

Sunday. 

I see the blackbirds flying in flocks (which did not when I went away July 20th) and hear the shrilling of my alder locust.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 9, 1857


Blackbirds flying in flocks.  See August 18, 1858 ("See large flocks of blackbirds, blackish birds with chattering notes. It is a fine sight when you can look down on them just as they are settling on the ground with outspread wings, — a hovering flock.");   September 7, 1857 ("I see a small round flock of birds, perhaps blackbirds, dart through the air, as thick as a charge of shot, — now comparatively thin, with regular intervals of sky be tween them, like the holes in the strainer of a watering-pot, now dense and dark, as if closing up their ranks when they roll over one another and stoop downward."); October 29, 1859 (''Also a flock of blackbirds fly eastward over my head from the to
p of an oak, either red-wings or grackles"). See also October 6, 1860 ("The crow, methinks, is our only large bird that hovers and circles about in flocks in an irregular and straggling manner, filling the air over your head and sporting in it as if at home here. They often burst up above the woods where they were perching, like the black fragments of a powder-mill just exploded.")

The shrilling of my alder locust. See August 9, 1851 ("Among the pines and birches I hear the invisible locust.") and August 4, 1851 ("I hear the note of a cricket, and am penetrated with the sense of autumn. . . ."); August 4, 1856 ( "Have heard the alder cricket some days. The turning-point is reached.");  August 10, 1853 ("Saw an alder locust this morning."); August 11, 1852 ("The autumnal ring of the alder locust.");   August 12, 1858 (“Hear what I have called the alder locust (?) as I return over the causeway, and probably before this.”); August 13, 1860 ("Hear the steady shrill of the alder locust."); August 15, 1852 ("That clear ring like an alder locust (is it a cricket ?) for some time past is a sound which belongs to the season.")

August 9. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau,  August 9

 

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 © 2009-2021


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