A slight sea-turn, the wind coming cool and easterly this morning,

May 31. 

May 31,, 2018

A. M. – To Island.

Choke-cherry, a day or two.

Cornus florida, not yet for two or three days. I saw some in Connecticut with involucres much more rosaceous than ours.

A yellowbird’s nest of that grayish milkweed fibre, one egg, in alder by wall west of Indian burying(?)-ground.

P. M. — To Laurel Glen.

I see, running along on the flat side of a railroad rail on the causeway, a wild mouse with an exceedingly long tail. Perhaps it would be called the long-tailed meadow mouse. It has no white, only the feet are light flesh-color; but it is uniformly brown as far as I can see, — for it rests a long time on the rail within a rod, – but when I look at it from behind in the sun it is a very tawny almost golden brown, quite hand some. It finally runs, with a slight hop, — the tarsus of the hind legs being very long while the fore legs are short and its head accordingly low, – down the bank to the meadow.

I saw on the 29th white Viola pedata, and to-day a white V. cucullata.

There were severe frosts on the nights of the 28th and 29th, and now I see the hickories turned quite black, and in low ground the white oak shoots, though they do not show black in drying. Also many ferns are withered and black and some Prinos lavigatus tips, etc.

I find a chewink's nest with four eggs (fresh) on the side-hill at Jarvis’s wood-lot, twenty feet below wood-chuck’s hole at canoe birch. The nest is first of withered leaves, then stubble, thickly lined with withered grass and partly sheltered by dead leaves, shoved [?] up a huckleberry bush.

There was a slight sea-turn, the wind coming cool and easterly this morning, which at first I mistook for the newly leafing deciduous trees investing the evergreens, which is a kind of sea-turn in harmony with the other. I remember that the stage-drivers riding back and forth daily from Concord to Boston and becoming weather-wise perforce, often meeting the sea-breeze on its way into the country, were wont to show their weather wisdom by telling anxious travellers that it was nothing but a sea-turn.

At 5 P.M., go to see a gray squirrel's nest in the oak at the Island point. It is about fifteen feet from the ground, – the entrance, — where a limb has been broken off, and the tree is hollow above and below. One young one darted past downward under my face, with the speed of a bird. There is much short brown dung about, and a smell of urine, and the twigs around have been gnawed.

Does not the voice of the toad along the river sound differently now from what it did a month ago? I think it is much less sonorous and ringing, a more croaking and inquisitive or qui vive sound. Is it not less prolonged also?


H. D. Thoreau, Journal, May 31, 1858

A yellowbird’s nest of that grayish milkweed fibre. See  May 31, 1855 ("See a yellowbird building a nest on a white oak on the Island. She goes to a fern for the wool."); See also January 19, 1856 ("Knocked down the bottom of that summer yellow bird’s nest made on the oak at the Island last summer. It is chiefly of fern wool and also, apparently, some sheep’s wool (?), with a fine green moss (apparently that which grows on button-bushes) inmixed, and some milkweed fibre, and all very firmly agglutinated together.") and A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau The Summer Yellowbird

There were severe frosts on the nights of the 28th and 29th, and now I see the hickories turned quite black. See May 31, 1856 ("It has been very cold for two or three days, and to-night a frost is feared. The telegraph says it snowed in Bangor to-day. The hickory leaves are blackened by blowing in the cold wind.”); May 21, 1855 (“[C]old weather, indeed, from the 20th to 23d inclusive. Sit by fires, and sometimes wear a greatcoat and expect frosts.”); May 22, 1859 (“”I see that by the very severe frost of about the 15th, or full of the moon, a great many leaves were killed, . . .which now show brown or blackish.")

Does not the voice of the toad along the river sound differently now from what it did a month ago? See May 31, 1860 ("Hear the sprayey note of toads now more than ever, after the rain."); See also  May 13, 1860 ("It is so warm that I hear the peculiar sprayey note of the toad generally at night."); May 16, 1853 ("Nature’appears to have passed a crisis. . . . The sprayey dream of the toad has a new sound."); May 19, 1854 ("I hear the sprayey-note frog now at sunset."); May 25, 1859 ("Hear within a day or two what I call the sprayey note of the toad, different and later than its early ring.") and A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, The Ring of Toads

May 31. See A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, May 31

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 © 2009-2021