The first thunder this afternoon.

May 9. 

Black birch May 9, 2015

Surveying for Stow near Flint's Pond. 

Hear the warbling vireo and oven-bird; yellow-throat vireo(?). 

One helping me says he scared up a whip-poor-will from the ground. 

See black birch bloom fallen effete. 

The first thunder this afternoon.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, May 9, 1859

Hear the warbling vireo and oven-bird; yellow-throat vireo See May 9, 1860 ("Oven-bird, how long? ). See also May 1, 1852 ("I think I heard an oven-bird just now, - wicher wicher whicher wich.");  May 6, 1852 ("Hear the first warbling vireo this morning on the elms. This almost makes a summer. "); May 6, 1859 ("  Hear yellow-throat vireo, and probably some new warblers."); May 10, 1858 ("As I paddle along, hear the Maryland yellow-throat, the bobolink, the oven-bird, and the yellow-throated vireo.")

The first thunder this afternoon. See May 11, 1859 (“In that first thunder-shower, the evening of the 9th, the grass evidently erected itself and grew darker, as it were instantaneously”); see also May 10, 1857 ("Before night a sudden shower with some thunder and lightning; the first.”); May 11, 1854 (“It is surprising what an electrifying effect this shower appears to have had. It is like the christening of the summer. I suspect that summer weather may be always ushered in in a similar manner, — thunder-shower, rainbow, smooth water, and warm night”); May 12, 1858 (“I see now, as I go forth on the river, the first summer shower coming up in the northwest, a dark and well defined cloud with rain falling sheaf-like from it, . . .The thunder-cloud is like the ovary of a perfect flower. Other showers are merely staminiferous or barren. There are twenty barren to one fertile. It is not commonly till thus late in the season that the fertile are seen. In the thunder-cloud, so distinct and condensed, there is a positive energy, and I notice the first as the bursting of the pollen-cells in the flower of the sky.”)