Saw, January 20th, some tree sparrows in the yard.
Once or twice of late I have seen the mother-o'-pearl tints and rainbow flocks in the western sky. The usual time is when the air is clear and pretty cool, about an hour before sundown.
Yesterday I saw a very permanent specimen, like a long knife-handle of mother-of-pearl, very pale with an interior blue with the rosaceous tinges. Methinks the summer sky never exhibits this so finely.
When I was at C.'s the other evening, he punched his cat with the poker because she purred too loud for him.
R. Rice says he saw a white owl two or three weeks since.
Harris told me on the 19th that he had never found the snow-flea.
No second snow-storm in the winter can be so fair and interesting as the first.
Last night was very windy, and to-day I see the dry oak leaves collected in thick beds in the little hollows of the snow-crust. These later falls of the leaf.
A fine freezing rain on the night of the 19th produced a hard crust on the snow, which was but three inches deep and would not bear.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 22, 1854
Mother-o'-pearl tints in the western sky about an hour before sundown. . . .Methinks the summer sky never exhibits this so finely. See January 22, 1852 ("One mother-o'-pearl tint is common to the winter sky half an hour before sundown."); See also December 18, 1852("Loring's Pond beautifully froze . . . it was so exquisitely polished that the sky and scudding dun-colored clouds, with mother-o'-pearl tints, were reflected in it as in the calmest water."); December 26, 1855 ("The sun is gone before five. Just before I looked for rainbow flocks in the west, but saw none,"); December 27, 1853 ("I look far, but see no rainbow flocks in the sky."); December 30, 1855 ("Looking up over the top of the hill now, southwest, at 3.30 P.M., I see a few mother-o’-pearl tints, and methinks the same or rainbow tints in the drifting snow there, against the bright light of the unseen sun. Only in such clear cold air as this have the small clouds in the west that fine evanishing edge. It requires a state of the air that quickly dissipates all moisture. It must be rare in summer. In this rare atmosphere all cloud is quickly dissipated and mother-o’-pearl tinted as it passes away."); January 9, 1854 ("Looking for rainbow-tinted clouds, small whiffs of vapor which form and disperse, this clear, cold afternoon"); January 13, 1852 ("Here I am on the Cliffs at half past three or four o'clock. . . .I see. . .in the west, flitting mother-o'-pearl clouds, which change their loose-textured form and melt rapidly away, even while I write."); January 24, 1854 ("Once or twice of late I have seen the mother-o'-pearl tints and rainbow flocks in the western sky. The usual time is when the air is clear and pretty cool, about an hour before sundown . . . . .Methinks the summer sky never exhibits this so finely.); February 13, 1860 ("It is surprising what a variety of distinct colors the winter can show us . . .There is the red of the sunset sky, and of the snow at evening, and in rainbow flocks during the day, and in sun-dogs."); February 24, 1860 ("some [clouds]most brilliant mother-o'-pearl. I never saw the green in it more distinct. This on the thin white edges of clouds as if it were a small piece of a rainbow.").
Rice says he saw a white owl. See March 1, 1854 ("Have heard of two white owls, — one about Thanksgiving time and one in midwinter.")
Harris told me on the 19th that he had never found the snow-flea. See January 22, 1860 ("The snow-fleas are thickest along the edge of the wood here, but I find that they extend quite across the river . . . This must be as peculiarly a winter animal as any. It may truly be said to live in snow."). See also January 1, 1853 ("Agassiz told him that Harris [ the librarian of Harvard University, and one of Thoreau's professors] was the greatest entomologist in the world. "); January 15, 1852 ("For the first time this winter I notice snow-fleas this afternoon in Walden Wood . . .Their number is almost infinite."); February 2, 1854 ("As it is a melting day, the snow is everywhere peppered with snow-fleas.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Snow-flea
Last night was very windy, and to-day I see the dry oak leaves collected in thick beds. See January 8, 1852 (" I notice that almost every track which I made yesterday. . .has got a dead leaf in it.."); January 15, 1856 ("Seeing the tracks where a leaf had blown along and then tacked and finally doubled and returned on its trail, I think it must be the tracks of some creature new to me."); January 31, 1856 ("The fall of these withered leaves after each rude blast, so clean and dry that they do not soil the snow, is a phenomenon quite in harmony with the winter.") January 7, 1857("[E]ach track of the fox has proved a trap which has caught from three or four to eight or ten leaves each, snugly packed; and thus it is reprinted.")
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