When the surface of the earth generally begins to be dry.

March 31. 

The frost is out of our garden, and I see one or two plowing early land. You walk dry now over this sandy land where the frost is melted, even after heavy rain, and there is no slumping in it, for there is no hard-pan and ice to hold the water and make a batter of the surface soil. This is a new condition of things when the surface of the earth generally begins to be dry. 

But there is still much frost in cold ground, and I often feel the crust which was heaved by it sink under me, and for some time have noticed the chinks where the frozen ground has gaped and erected itself from and over stones and sleepers. 

P. M. — To Holbrook's improvements. 

Many painted turtles out along a ditch in Moore's Swamp. These the first I have seen, the water is so high in the meadows. One drops into the water from some dead brush which lies in it, and leaves on the brush two of its scales. Perhaps the sun causes the loosened scales to curl up, and so helps the turtle to get rid of them. 

Humphrey Buttrick says that he has shot two kinds of little dippers, — the one black, the other with some white. 

I see, on a large ant-hill, largish ants at work, front half reddish, back half black, but on another, very large ant-hill near by (a rod to left of Holbrook's road, perhaps fifty rods this side of his clearing on the north side), five feet through, there none out. 

It will show how our prejudices interfere with our perception of color, to state that yesterday morning, after making a fire in the kitchen cooking-stove, as I sat over it I thought I saw a little bit of red or scarlet flannel on a chink near a bolt-head on the stove, and I tried to pick it out, — while I was a little surprised that I did not smell it burning. It was merely the reflection of the flame of the fire through a chink, on the dark stove. This showed me what the true color of the flame was, but when I knew what this was, it was not very easy to perceive it again. It appeared now more yellowish. I think that my senses made the truest report the first time. 

The wood frogs lie spread out on the surface of the sheltered pools in the woods, cool and windy as it is, dimpling the water by their motions, and as you approach you hear their lively wurk wurrk wur-r-k, but, seeing you, they suddenly hist and perhaps dive to the bottom. 

It is a very windy afternoon, wind northwest, and at length a dark cloud rises on that side, evidently of a windy structure, a dusky mass with lighter intervals, like a parcel of brushes lying side by side, — a parcel of "mare's-tails " perhaps. It winds up with a flurry of rain.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 31, 1859

Many painted turtles out along a ditch in Moore's Swamp. These the first I have seen,  See March 31, 1857 ("The tortoises now quite commonly lie out sunning on the sedge or the bank. As you float gently down the stream, you hear a slight rustling and, looking up, see the dark shining back of a picta sliding off some little bed of straw-colored coarse sedge...”); March 31, 1858 ("Ordinarily at this season, the meadows being flooded,. . . I first noticed them underwater on the meadow. But this year it is but a step for them to the sunny bank, and the shores of the Assabet and of ditches are lined with them “) See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Painted Turtle (Emys picta)

Humphrey Buttrick says that he has shot two kinds of little dippers, — the one black, the other with some white. See March 27, 1858 ("At length I detect two little dippers . . . They are male and female close together . . . The female is apparently uniformly black, or rather dark brown, but the male has a conspicuous crest, with, apparently, white on the hindhead, a white breast, and white line on the lower side of the neck; i. e., the head and breast are black and white conspicuously.”);  December 26, 1857 ("Humphrey Buttrick tells me that he has shot little dippers. He also saw the bird which Melvin shot last summer (a coot), but he never saw one of them before. The little dipper must, therefore, be different from a coot.”) . “Little dipper” is  Thoreau's name for various small diving birds, perhaps the buffle-head (Fuligulaalbeola), sometimes the pied billed or horned grebe (Podiceps auritus). See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Little Dipper

The wood frogs lie spread out on the surface of the sheltered pools in the woods, cool and windy as it is, dimpling the water by their motions, and as you approach you hear their lively wurk wurrk wur-r-k. See March 31, 1857 (“As I rise the east side of the Hill, I hear the distant faint peep of hylodes and the tut tut of croaking frogs from the west of the Hill. . . .  The dry croaking and tut tut of the frogs (a sound which ducks seem to imitate, a kind of quacking . . .) is plainly enough down there in some pool in the woods, but the shrill peeping of the hylodes locates itself nowhere in particular.”); March 24, 1859 ("I am sitting in Laurel Glen, listening to hear the earliest wood frogs croaking . . . Now, when the leaves get to be dry and rustle under your feet, dried by the March winds, the peculiar dry note, wurrk wurrk wur-r-r-k wurk of the wood frog is heard faintly by ears on the alert, borne up from some unseen pool in a woodland hollow which is open to the influences of the sun."); March 26, 1860 (“The wood frog [first] may be heard March 15, as this year, or not till April 13, as in '56,”). Compare March 31, 1855 (“I go listening for the croak of the first frog, or peep of a hylodes.. . .I listen in vain to hear a frog”). And see note to May 6, 1858 (the frogs of Massachusetts) and A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Wood Frog (Rana sylvatica)