A still, warm, cloudy, rain-threatening day.

November 30

A still, warm, cloudy, rain-threatening day. 

Surveying the J. Richardson lot. 

The air is full of geese. I saw five flocks within an hour, about 10 A. M., containing from thirty to fifty each, and afterward two more flocks, making in all from two hundred and fifty to three hundred at least, all flying southwest over Goose and Walden Ponds. The former was apparently well named Goose Pond. 

You first hear a faint honking from one or two in the northeast and think there are but few wandering there, but, looking up, see forty or fifty coming on in a more or less broken harrow, wedging their way southwest. I suspect they honk more, at any rate they are more broken and alarmed, when passing over a village, and are seen falling into their ranks again, assuming the perfect harrow form. Hearing only one or two honking, even for the seventh time, you think there are but few till you see them. 

According to my calculation a thousand or fifteen hundred may have gone over Concord to-day. When they fly low and near, they look very black against the sky. [I hear that one was killed by Lee in the Corner about this time.]

Northwest of Little Goose Pond, on the edge of Mrs. Bigelow's wood-lot, are several hornbeams (Carpinus). Looking into a cleft in one of them about three feet from the ground, which I thought might be the scar of a blazing, I found some broken kernels of corn, probably placed there by a crow or jay. This was about half a mile from a corn-field. 

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 30, 1857

A still, warm, cloudy, rain-threatening day. The air is full of geese all flying southwest. See November 8 , 1857 ("A warm, cloudy, rain-threatening morning. About 10 A.M. a long flock of geese are going over from northeast to southwest  . . .  In the afternoon. . .was the third flock to-day. Now if ever, then, we may expect a change in the weather."); November 13, 1855 ("Seventy or eighty geese, in three harrows successively smaller, flying southwest—pretty well west—over the house. A completely overcast, occasionally drizzling forenoon. "); November 18, 1854 (" Sixty geese go over the Great Fields, in one waving line, broken from time to time by their crowding on each other and vainly endeavoring to form into a harrow, honking all the while."); November 20, 1853 ("Methinks the geese are wont to go south just before a storm");  December 1, 1857 ("I hear of two more flocks of geese going over to-day.”)