The winter diet of muskrat.

December 26. 

P. M. — Skate to Lee's Bridge and there measure back, by pacing, the breadth of the river. 

After being uniformly overcast all the forenoon, still and moderate weather, it begins to snow very gradually, at first imperceptibly, this afternoon, — at first I thought I imagined it, — and at length begins to snow in earnest about 6 p. m., but lasts only a few minutes. 

I see a brute with a gun in his hand, standing motionless over a musquash-house which he has destroyed. I find that he has visited every one in the neighborhood of Fair Haven Pond, above and below, and broken them all down, laying open the interior to the water, and then stood watchful, close by, for the poor creature to show its head there for a breath of air. There lies the red carcass of one whose pelt he has taken on the spot, flat on the bloody ice. 

And for his afternoon's cruelty that fellow will be rewarded with a ninepence, perchance. When I consider what are the opportunities of the civilized man for getting ninepences and getting light, this seems to me more savage than savages are. Depend on it that whoever thus treats the musquash's house, his refuge when the water is frozen thick, he and his family will not come to a good end. 

So many of these houses being broken open, — twenty or thirty I see, — I look into the open hole, and find in it, in almost every instance, many pieces of the white root with the little leaf-bud curled up which I take to be the yellow lily root, — the leaf- bud unrolled has the same scent with the yellow lily. There will be half a dozen of these pointed buds, more or less green, coming to a point at the end of the root. 

Also I see a little coarser, what I take to be green leaf -stalk of the pontederia, for I see a little of the stipule sheathing the stalk from within it? 

The first unrolls and off course it is yellow lily. In one hole there was a large quantity of this root, and these buds attached or bitten off, the root generally five or six eighths inch in diameter and one to four inches long. I think, therefore, that this root must be their principal food at this time. 

If you open twenty cabins you will find it in at least three quarters of them, and nothing else, unless a very little pontederia leaf-stem. 

I see no fresh clamshells in them, and places, nor are they probably deposited in a heap under the ice. It may be, however, that the shells are opened in this hole and then dropped in the water near by!! By eating or killing at least so many lily buds they must thin out that plant considerably. 

Twice this winter I have noticed a musquash floating in a placid open place in the river when it was frozen for a mile each side, looking at first like a bit of stump or frozen meadow, but showing its whole upper outline from nose to end of tail; perfectly still till he observed me, then suddenly diving and steering under the ice toward some cabin's entrance or other retreat half a dozen or more rods off. 

As some of the tales of our childhood, the invention of some Mother Goose, will haunt us when we are grown up, so the race itself still believes in some of the fables with which its infancy was amused and imposed on, e. g. the fable of the cranes and pygmies, which learned men endeavored to believe or explain in the last century. 

Aristotle, being almost if not quite the first to write systematically on animals, gives them, of course, only popular names, such as the hunters, fowlers, fishers, and farmers of his day used. He used no scientific terms. But he, having the priority and having, as it were, created science and given it its laws, those popular Greek names, even when the animal to which they were applied cannot be identified, have been in great part preserved and make those learned far-fetched and commonly unintelligible names of genera to-day. His History of Animals has thus become a very storehouse of scientific nomenclature.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 26, 1859

By eating or killing at least so many lily buds they must thin out that plant considerably. See April 10, 1855 ("I see much yellow lily root afloat, which the muskrats have dug up and nibbled.")