Heard Staples, Tuttle, E. Wood, N. Barrett, and others this morning at the post-office talking about the profit of milk-farming. The general conclusion seemed to be that it was less profitable than it was three years ago. Yet Staples thought he could name half a dozen who had done well. He named one. He thought he could name eight or ten who had paid off the mortgages on their farms by this means within a few years. Tuttle said he would give him a good supper if he would name three. Staples named only the one referred to above, David Buttrick, but he added, looking at Tuttle, “There is yourself. You know you came to town with nothing in your pocket but an old razor, a few pennies, and a damned dull jack-knife, and n’t used the razor so much.”
When it snowed yesterday very large flakes, an inch in diameter, Aunt said, “They are picking geese.” This, it seems, is an old saying.
Measure your health by your sympathy with morning and spring. If there is no response in you to the awakening of nature, — if the prospect of an early morning walk does not banish sleep, if the warble of the first bluebird does not thrill you,— know that the morning and spring of your life are past. Thus may you feel your pulse.
I heard this morning a nuthatch on the elms in the street. I think that they are heard oftener and again at the approach of spring, just as the phoebe note of the chickadee is; and so their gnah gnah is a herald of the spring.
Joe Smith says that he saw blackbirds this morning. I hear that robins were seen a week or more ago. So the birds are quite early this year.
P. M. —Up river on ice.
I see a handful of the scarlet Rosa Carolina hips in the crotch of a willow on some mud, a foot or more above the ice. They are partly eaten, and I think were placed there by a musquash. The rose bush, with a few hips on it, still stands in the ice within a few feet. Goodwin says he has seen their tracks eight or ten rods long to an apple tree near the water, where they have been for apples.
Along edge of Staples’s meadow sprout-land, the young maples, some three years old, are stripped down, i. e. the lower branches for a foot or two, by the ice falling. This barks and wounds the young trees severely.
The ice over the middle of the river is now alternately dark and whitish. I see the river beginning to show dark through the thinnest parts, in broad crescents convex up-stream, single or connected.
A good book is not made in the cheap and offhand manner of many of our scientific reports, ushered in by the message of the President communicating it to Congress, and the order of Congress that so many thousand copies be printed, with the letters of instruction for the Secretary of the Interior (or rather exterior); the bulk of the book being a journal of a picnic or sporting expedition by a brevet Lieutenant-Colonel, illustrated by photographs of the traveller’s footsteps across the plains and an admirable engraving of his native village as it appeared on leaving it, and followed by an appendix on the palaeontology of the route by a distinguished savant who was not there, the last illustrated by very finely executed engravings of some old broken shells picked up on the road.
There are several men of whose comings and goings the town knows little. I mean the trappers.
They may be seen coming from the woods and river, perhaps with nothing in their hands, and you do not suspect what they have been about. They go about their business in a stealthy manner for fear that any shall see out-of-the-way swamps and meadows and brooks to set or examine their traps for musquash or mink, and the owners of the land commonly know nothing of it. But, few as the trappers are here, it seems by Goodwin’s accounts that they steal one another’s traps.
All the criticism which I got on my lecture on Autumnal Tints at Worcester on the 22d was that I assumed that my audience had not seen so much of them as they had. But after reading it I am more than ever convinced that they have not seen much of them, — that there are very few persons who do see much of nature.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 25, 1859
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 25, 1859
I heard this morning a nuthatch on the elms in the street; and so their gnah gnah is a herald of the spring. See February 24, 1854 (“Nuthatches are faintly answering each other, — tit for tat, — on different keys, — a faint creak. Now and then one utters a loud distinct gnah.”); March 5, 1859 ("Going down-town this forenoon, I heard a white-bellied nuthatch on an elm within twenty feet, uttering peculiar notes and more like a song than I remember to have heard from it. . . . It was something like to-what what what what what, rapidly repeated, and not the usual gnah gnah; and this instant it occurs to me that this may be that earliest spring note which I hear, and have referred to a woodpecker! (This is before I have chanced to see a bluebird, blackbird, or robin in Concord this year.) It is the spring note of the nuthatch. . . . This herald of spring is commonly unseen, it sits so close to the bark.");April 25, 1859 (" I hear still the what what what of a nuthatch, and, directly after, its ordinary winter note of gnah gnah, quite distinct. I think the former is its spring note or breeding-note.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Nuthatch and A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Signs of the Spring: The Spring Note of the Nuthatch
I hear that robins were seen a week or more ago. February 25, 1857 ("Goodwin says he saw a robin this morning.”); February 28, 1860 ("C. saw a dozen robins to-day on the ground on Ebby Hubbard's hill by the Yellow Birch Swamp.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Robins in Spring
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