I hear the faintest possible quivet from a nuthatch, quite near me.

December 1 

P. M. —Walking in Ebby Hubbard's woods, I hear a red squirrel barking at me amid the pine and oak tops, and now I see him coursing from tree to tree. How securely he travels there, fifty feet from the ground, leaping from the slender, bending twig of one tree across an interval of three or four feet and catching at the nearest twig of the next, which so bends under him that it is at first hard to get up it. His travelling a succession of leaps in the air at that height without wings! And yet he gets along about as rapidly as on the ground. 

I hear the faintest possible quivet from a nuthatch, quite near me on a pine. I thus always begin to hear this bird on the approach of winter, as if it did not breed here, but wintered here.* 

I hear of two more flocks of geese going over to-day.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 1, 1857

*[Hear it all the fall (and occasionally through the summer of ’59).]

And now I see him coursing from tree to tree.  See October 26, 1855 (" I see a red squirrel dash out from the wall, snatch an apple from amid many on the ground, and, running swiftly up the tree with it, proceed to eat it, sitting on a smooth dead limb, with its back to the wind and its tail curled close over its back"); December 16, 1855 ("See two red squirrels. . . One sits twirling apparently a dried apple in his paws, with his tail curled close over his back as if to keep it warm, fitting its curve. How much smothered sunlight in their wholesome brown red this misty day! It is clear New England, Nov-anglia, like the red subsoil.") See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, The Red Squirrel. Compare May 7, 1855 ("Scare up two gray squirrels in the Holden wood, which run glibly up the tallest trees on the opposite side to me, and leap across from the extremity of the branches to the next trees, and so on very fast ahead of me.")

I thus always begin to hear this bird on the approach of winter. See December 31, 1853 ("Heard and saw together white-bellied nuthatches and chickadees, the former uttering a faint quank quank and making a loud tapping."); December 5, 1856 ("A pair of nuthatches flit by toward a walnut, flying low in mid- course and then ascending to the tree. I hear one's faint tut tut or gnah gnah — no doubt heard a good way by its mate now flown into the next tree . . . It is a chubby bird, white, slate-color, and black."); November 26, 1860 ("I hear the faint note of a nuthatch like the creak of a limb. I detect it on the trunk of an oak much nearer than I suspected, and its mate or companion not far off. This is a phenomenon of the late fall or early winter; for we do not hear them in summer that I remember."); 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

I hear of two more flocks of geese going over to-day. See note to November 30, 1857 ("The air is full of geese . . . According to my calculation a thousand or fifteen hundred may have gone over Concord to-day.”) See also  A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Geese in Autumn

December 1. See A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, December 1

I hear the faintest

quivet from a nuthatch – quite

near me on a pine.

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau,  A nuthatch, quite near me.

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 ©  2009-2025

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