The ice is soggy and dangerous to be walked on.

March 16.

P. M. — To Conantum. 

A thick mist, spiriting away the snow. Very bad walking. This fog is one of the first decidedly spring signs; also the withered grass bedewed by it and wetting my feet. A still, foggy, and rather warm day. 

I heard this morning, also, quite a steady warbling from tree sparrows on the dripping bushes, and that peculiar drawling note of a hen, who has this peevish way of expressing her content at the sight of bare ground and mild weather. The crowing of cocks and the cawing of crows tell the same story. The ice is soggy and dangerous to be walked on. 

How conversant the Indian who lived out of doors, who lay on the ground, must have been with mouse-ear leaves, pine-needles, mosses, and lichens, which form the crust of the earth. No doubt he had names accordingly for many things for which we have no popular names. 

I walk in muddy fields, hearing the tinkling of new born rills. Where the melted snow has made a swift rill in the rut of a cart-path, flowing over an icy bottom and between icy banks, I see, just below a little fall of one inch, a circular mass of foam or white bubbles nearly two inches in diameter, slowly revolving but never moving off. The swift stream at the fall appears to strike one side, as it might the side of a water-wheel, and so cause it to revolve, but in the angle between this and the fall, and half an inch distant, is another circle of bubbles, individually larger and more evanescent, only half an inch in diameter, revolving very rapidly in the opposite direction. The laws, perchance, by which the world was made, and according to which the systems revolve, are seen in full operation in a rill of melted snow.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 16, 1858

The crowing of cocks and the cawing of crows tell the same story. See January 12, 1855 ("Perhaps what most moves us in winter is some reminiscence of far-off summer. . . .It is in the cawing of the crow, the crowing of the cock, the warmth of the sun on our backs.");  February 16, 1855 ("A thick fog without rain. Sounds sweet and musical through this air, as crows, cocks, and striking on the rails at a distance.”); December 17, 1855 ("the sound of cock-crowing is so sweet, and I hear the sound of the sawmill even at the door, also the cawing of crows."). See alsoA Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Signs of the Spring: The crowing of cocks, the cawing of crows

The ice is soggy and dangerous to be walked on. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Ice-Out

No doubt he had names accordingly for many things for which we have no popular names. See March 5, 1858 ("It was a new light when my; guide gave me Indian names for things for which had only scientific ones before. In proportion as I understood the language, I saw them from a new point of view."); January 15, 1853 ("Science suggests the value of mutual intelligence. I have long known this dust, but, as I did not know the name of it, i. e . what others called it, I therefore could not conveniently speak of it. . ."); May 21, 1851 ("You have a wild savage in you, and a savage name is perchance somewhere recorded as yours.")

I walk in muddy fields, hearing the tinkling of new born rills See March 16, 1854 ("Willows and alders along watercourses all alive these mornings and ringing with the trills and jingles and warbles of birds, even as the waters have lately broken loose and tinkle below.") See also February 18, 1855 ("I listen ever for something springlike in the notes of birds, some peculiar tinkling notes."); March 7, 1859 ("I walk, these first mild spring days, with my coat thrown open, stepping over tinkling rills of melting snow, excited by the sight of the bare ground"); March 13, 1853.("Listening for early birds, I hear a faint tinkling sound in the leafless woods, as if a piece of glass rattled against a stone."); March 18, 1858 (“Almost every bush has its song sparrow this morning, and their tinkling strains are heard on all sides.”); March 18, 1858 ("The note of the first bluebird in the air answers to the purling rill of melted snow beneath.")

A circular mass of foam or white bubbles nearly two inches in diameter. See February 13, 1852 ("I now sit by the little brook in Conant's meadow, where it falls over an oak rail . . .. Bubbles on the surface make a coarse foam. . . .")