P. M. — Sail to Holden Swamp.
April 30, 2019
The warmest afternoon yet. Sat in sun without fire this forenoon. The wind has at length been easterly without rain following.
Fishes, especially pickerel, lie up in greater numbers, though Haynes thinks the water is still too cold for them. See a bream.
A small willow some ten rods north of stone bridge, east side, bloomed yesterday. Salix alba leafing, or stipules a quarter of an inch wide; probably began a day or two.
Luzula campestris is almost out at Clamshell. Its now low purplish and silky-haired leaves are the blooming of moist ground and early meadow-edges.
See two or three strawberry flowers at Clamshell.
The 27th and to-day are weather for a half-thick single coat. This old name is still useful.
There is scarcely a puff of wind till I get to Clamshell; then it rises and comes from the northwest instead of northeast and blows quite hard and fresher.
See a stake-driver.
Land at Holden Wood.
That interesting small blue butterfly (size of small red) is apparently just out, fluttering over the warm dry oak leaves within the wood in the sun. Channing also first sees them to-day. The moment it rests and closes its wings, it looks merely whitish-slate, and you think at first that the deeper blue was produced by the motion of its wings, but the fact is you now see only their undersides which thus [sic] whitish spotted with black, with a dark waved line next the edge.
This first off-coat warmth just preceding the advent of the swamp warblers (parti-colored, red start, etc.) brings them out. I come here to listen for warblers, but hear or see only the black and white creeper and the chickadee.
Did I not hear a tree sparrow this forenoon?
The Viburnum nudum around the edge of the swamp, on the northern edge of the warm bays in sunny and sheltered places, has just expanded, say two days, the two diverging leafets being an inch long nearly, — pretty yellowish-brown leafets in the sun, the most noticeable leafiness here now, just spotting and enlivening the dead, dark, bare twigs, under the red blossoms of the maples.
It is a day for many small fuzzy gnats and other small insects. Insects swarm about the expanding buds.
The viburnum buds are so large and long, like a spear-head, that they are conspicuous the moment their two leafets diverge and they are lit up by the sun. They unfold their wings like insects and arriving warblers. These, too, mark the season well. You see them a few rods off in the sun, through the stems of the alders and maples.
That small curled grass in tufts in dry pastures and hills, spoken of about a month ago, is not early sedge.
I notice under the southern edge of the Holden Wood, on the Arrowhead Field, a great many little birches in the grass, apparently seedlings of last year, and I take up a hundred and ten from three to six or seven inches high. They are already leafed, the little rugose leafets more than half an inch wide, or larger than any wild shrubs or trees, while the larger white birches have not started. I could take up a thousand in two or three hours. I set ten in our yard.
Channing saw ducks — he thinks female sheldrakes ! — in Walden to-day.
Julius Smith says he saw a little hawk kill a robin yesterday.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 30, 1859
That interesting small blue butterfly fluttering over the warm dry oak leaves within the wood in the sun. See note to April 19, 1860 ("See the small blue butterfly hovering over the dry leaves")
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