A. M. – By river.
The tree sparrow is perhaps the sweetest and most melodious warbler at present and for some days. It is peculiar, too, for singing in concert along the hedge rows, much like a canary, especially in the mornings. Very clear, sweet, melodious notes, between a twitter and a warble, of which it is hard to catch the strain, for you commonly hear many at once.
The note of the F. hyemalis, or chill-lill, is a jingle, with also a shorter and drier crackling or shuffling chip as it flits by.
I hear now, at 7 A. M., from the hill across the water, probably the note of a woodpecker, I know not what species; not that very early gnah gnah, which I have not heard this year.
Now first I hear a very short robin's song.
P. M. — To Clematis Brook via Lee's with C.
We cross the Depot Field, which is fast becoming dry and hard. At Hubbard’s wall, how handsome the willow catkins! Those wonderfully bright silvery but tons, so regularly disposed in oval schools in the air, or, if you please, along the seams which their twigs make, in all degrees of forwardness, from the faintest, tiniest speck of silver, just peeping from beneath the black scales, to lusty pussies which have thrown off their scaly coats and show some redness at base on a close inspection. - These fixed swarms of arctic buds spot the air very prettily along the hedges. They remind me somewhat by their brilliancy of the snow flecks which are so bright by contrast at this season when the sun is high. Is not this, perhaps, the earliest, most obvious, awakening of vegetable life?
Farmer told me this morning that he found a bay wing’s egg yesterday, dropped in a footpath! I have not seen that bird yet.
In low grounds we feel from time to time the icy crust in the soil sink beneath us, but it is so dry that we need no rubbers now.
A small ant fallen on water and swimming. A small brown grasshopper jumps into a brook at our approach and, drifting down, clings to a stubble. I see another just like it two hours later.
We look into that pool on the south side of Hubbard’s Grove, and admire the green weeds, water purslane (?), at the bottom. There is, slowly moving along in it near the bottom, one of those bashaws with two tails, — in this case red tails, —something devil’s-needle-like.
The whole pool is full of a small gyrating insect. I took up from a weed within it, by a chance sweep of my hand, a minute bivalve clam-like shell hardly one twentieth of an inch long. Yet this dries up in summer. The other pool near by, within the woods, is still covered with black soggy ice.
The herbaceous plants have evidently suffered far more than usual the past wonderfully mild and snow less winter. Not only is there less green in the fields, but even less at the bottoms of the pools and ditches.
The foul flanks of the cattle remind me how early it is still in the spring.
On that same tree by Conant's orchard, I see a flock of cherry-birds with that alert, chieftain-like look, and hear their seringo note, as if made by their swift flight through the air. They have been seen a week or two.
Fair Haven is still closed. Near the open water where the river is eating up into it, the ice is very black, even sooty, here and there, from this point of view. You would not believe that mere water-logged ice could be so black. You cannot now get on to it, but you see the holes which pickerel-fishers cut in it a month ago.
We go looking in vain for ducks, – a semiriparial walk. From time to time we are deceived a moment by a shining cake of ice on its edge at a distance.
We go along behind Lee's, looking out over the Sudbury meadows. I see a distant roof at Round Hill. It is pleasant when we see thus only the roof of a house at a distance, a mere gray scale, diamond-shape, against the side of a hill, while all the lower part is lost in shade. It is more interesting than a full view.
The river but yesterday was a bright-blue artery between straight edgings of ice held by the bushes, but beyond, on each side, was a clear canal. To-day most of this ice is drifted down the stream or blown across it, so that often the straight edge is presented to the opposite meadow and is at first sight unaccountable.
The wind shifts to east or southeast, but still its rawness is agreeable. As C. says of the water insects, we too come out of our shells in the spring. Yes, we take off our greatcoats.
I had noticed from the Cliff by Lee's road an elevated sandy point above Pole Brook which I said must be Indian ground, and, walking there, I found a piece of a soapstone pot.
In the sluiceway of Pole Brook, by the road just beyond, I found another kind of Indian pot. It was an eel-pot (?) or creel, a wattled basket or wicker work, made of willow osiers with the bark on, very artfully. It was about four feet long and shaped thus: - Moore says that he used to find them in the brooks when he was trout-fishing, stopping them up so closely with sticks and stones on the sides that not a trout could pass, and he would cut them from end to end with his knife. About a dozen (or more) willow sticks, as big one's finger or larger, being set small end down in a circle, in a thin round board which made the bottom, and then smaller osiers interwoven at right angles with them, close and firm.
Another funnel-shaped basket was secured within this, extending about half-way down it, as represented by the dotted lines, with an opening hardly two inches wide at the bottom, where only a dozen sharped sticks approached each other. There was a square door in the board bottom, by which the fishes could be taken out.
This was set in that sluice way, with the mouth or broad end down-stream, all sunk beneath the surface, the fishes being now evidently running up the brooks from the river and ponds, the ice being mostly gone out of the meadows and brooks. We raised this and found eight or ten small pickerel in it, the biggest a foot long, and one good-sized perch. It was pleasant to find that any were practicing such cunning art in the outskirts.
I am not sure whether this invention is Indian or derived from our own ancestors. “Creel” appears to be an old English word. But I have no doubt that the Indians used something very like this.
How much more we might have learned of the aborigines if they had not been so reserved! Suppose they had generally become the laboring class among the whites, that my father had been a farmer and had an Indian for his hired man, how many aboriginal ways we children should have learned from them!
It was very pleasant to meet with this kind of textile or basket in our walk, to know that some had leisure for other things than farming and town meeting, and that they felt the spring influence in their way. That man was not fitting for the State prison when he was weaving that creel. He was meditating a small poem in his way. It was equal to a successful stanza whose subject was spring.
The fishes are going up the brooks as they open. They are dispersing themselves through the fields and woods, imparting new life into them. They are taking their places under the shelving banks and in the dark swamps. The water running down meets the fishes running up. They hear the latest news. Spring-aroused fishes are running up our veins too. Little fishes are seeking the sources of the brooks, seeking to disseminate their principles. Talk about a revival of religion! and business men's prayer-meetings! with which all the country goes mad now! What if it were as true and wholesome a revival as the little fishes feel which come out of the sluggish waters and run up the brooks toward their sources? All Nature revives at this season. With her it is really a new life, but with these churchgoers it is only a revival of religion or hypocrisy. They go down stream to still muddier waters. It cheers me more to behold the swarms of gnats which have revived in the spring sun. The fish lurks by the mouth of its native brook, watching its opportunity to dart up the stream by the cakes of ice.
Do the fishes stay to hold prayer-meetings in Fair Haven Bay, while some monstrous pike gulps them down? Or is it not rather each one privately, or with its kindred spirits, as soon as possible stemming the current of its native brook, making its way to more ethereal waters, burnishing his scaly armor by his speed, ofttimes running into osier creels and finding its salvation there even, as in the discharge of its duty?
No wonder we feel the spring influences. There is a motion in the very ground under our feet. Each rill is peopled with new life rushing up it.
If a man do not revive with nature in the spring, how shall he revive when a white-collared priest prays for him?
Small water-bugs in Clematis Brook.
We had turned in at the old Minott house. We kept on by Heron Pool and through the pitch pine wood be hind Baker's, down the path to Spanish Brook, and came out on to the railroad at Walden. Channing thought it was a suitably long stretch to wind up with, like one of our old Nashoba walks, so long drawn and taxing our legs so, in which it seemed that the nearer you got to home the farther you had to go.
That is a very handsome descent by the path to Spanish Brook, seeing the path below, between the trunks of the trees. How important the hemlock amid the pines, for its darker and wilder green!
We, too, are out, obeying the same law with all nature. Not less important are the observers of the birds than the birds themselves.
At last I see a small, straight flock of ducks going northeast in the distance.
In order that a house and grounds may be picturesque and interesting in the highest degree, they must suggest the idea of necessity, proving the devotion of the builder, not of luxury. We need to see the honest and naked life here and there protruding. What is a fort without any foe before it, that is not now sustaining and never has sustained a siege? The gentle man whose purse is always full, who can meet all demands, though he employs the most famous artists, can never make a very interesting seat. He does not carve from near enough to the bone. No man is rich enough to keep a poet in his pay.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 20, 1858
The note of the F. hyemalis, or chill-lill, is a jingle, with also a shorter and drier crackling or shuffling chip as it flits by. See March 19, 1858 (Hear the pleasant chill-lill of the F. hyemalis,the first time have heard this note.")
Fair Haven is still closed. See March 19, 1855 (" I am surprised to find that the river has not yet worn through Fair Haven Pond.”); March 26, 1860 ("Fair Haven Pond may be open by the 20th of March, as this year, or not till April 13 as in '56, or twenty-three days later."
The note of a woodpecker, not that very early gnah gnah, which I have not heard this year. See March 17, 1857 (" I notice that woodpecker-like whar-whar-whar-whar-whar-whar, earliest spring sound. “); February 18, 1857 ("When I step out into the yard I hear that earliest spring note from some bird, perhaps a pigeon woodpecker . . ., the rapid whar whar, whar whar, whar whar, which I have so often heard before any other note.”); February 17, 1855 (" Can it be a jay? or a pigeon woodpecker? Is it not the earliest springward note of a bird?”)
The pitch pine wood be hind Baker's. See July 16, 1851 ("I come through the pine plains behind James Baker's, where late was open pasture, now open pitch pine woods; only here and there the grass has given place to a carpet of pine-needles. These are among our pleasantest woods")
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