The last three have been true March days for wind.

March 4. 

Sunday. 2 P. M. – To Conantum via Clamshell. 

Thermometer 44; very strong and gusty northwest wind, with electric-looking wind-clouds. One spits a · little rain, but mostly clear. The frost is all out of the upper part of the garden. These wind-clouds come up and disappear fast, and have a more or less perpendicular fibre. 

Sit under Lupine Promontory again, to see the ripples. The wind is too strong, the waves run too high and incessantly, to allow the distinct puffs or gusts that drop from over the hill to be seen distinctly enough on tumultuous surface. Yet it is interesting. It spreads and runs as a bird spreads its tail suddenly, or it is as if a gust fell on a head of dark hair and made dimples or “crowns” in it, or it is as when dust before a brisk sweeper curls along over a floor. 

There is much less of that yellowish anchor ice than on the 2d. Cakes of it successively rise, being separated by warmth from the bottom, and are driven off to the leeward shore. In some places that shore is lined with such cakes now, which have risen and been blown clear across the meadow and river, — large masses. Some portions of them are singularly saturated, of a yellowish or clay-color, and an uneven upper surface, with a finely divided perpendicular grain, looking (in form) just like some kinds of fungi (that commonly yellowish kind). There strike against one another and make a pleasant musical, or tinkling, sound. 

Some of the ice will occasionally be lifted up on its edge two feet high and very conspicuous afar. 

That reddish-purple tinge in the meadow ripples appears to be owing to a reflection in some cases from the somewhat russet bottom. 

I see some curled dock, just started. 

The earth is never lighter - colored than now, — the hillsides reflecting the sun when first dried after the winter, — especially, methinks, where the sheep's fescue grows(?). It contrasts finely with the rich blue of the water. 

I saw half a dozen crows on a cake of ice in the middle of the Great Meadows yesterday, evidently looking for some favorite food which is washed on to it, - snails, or cranberries perhaps. 

I see a bush of the early willow — by wall far in front of the C. Miles house — whose catkins are conspicuous thirty rods off, very decidedly green, three eighths of an inch by measure. The bush at this distance had quite a silvery look, and the catkins show some redness within. Many of the scales as usual had fallen. 

A hen-hawk rises and sails away over the Holden Wood as in summer. Saw and heard one scream the 2d. 

I notice, where (ice or) snow has recently melted, a very thin dirty-white web like a dense cobweb, left flat on the grass, such as I saw some years ago. 

There is a broad and very black space extending through Fair Haven Pond over the channel, visible half a mile off, where the ice is thinnest and saturated with water. The channel is already open a little way at the upper end of the pond. This pond at its outlet contracts gradually into the river, so that you could hardly tell where the pond left off and the river began. I see that the ice at present extends that way only so far as I last year assumed that the pond did. In this sense the river hence to the Hubbard Bridge is pond-like compared with the portion below. 

See two apparently sternothærus eggs dropped in a slight hollow in the grass, evidently imperfectly planted by the turtle; still whole. 

The last three have been true March days for wind. 

The handsome and neat brown (pale-brown yet distinct on the lighter withered sod) of the lechea is now conspicuous as a shading in the drying fields.

See no ducks to-day, though much water. Nights too cold? 

Aspen down a quarter of an inch out.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 4, 1860

There is a broad and very black space extending through Fair Haven Pond over the channel, visible half a mile off, where the ice is thinnest and saturated with water. See March 30, 1852 (" From the Cliffs I see that Fair Haven Pond is open over the channel of the river, - which is in fact thus only revealed, of the same width as elsewhere, running from the end of Baker's Wood to the point of the Island. The slight current there has worn away the ice. I never knew before exactly where the channel was.") See also February 28, 1857 ("Nearly one third the channel is open in Fair Haven Pond. ");. March 26, 1860 ("Fair Haven Pond may be open by the 20th of March, as this year [1860], or not till April 13 as in '56, or twenty-three days later"); March 29, 1854 ("Fair Haven half open; channel wholly open. Thin cakes of ice at a distance now and then blown up on their edges glistening in the sun.").


I saw half a dozen crows on a cake of ice in the middle of the Great Meadows yesterday, evidently looking for some favorite food which is washed on to it, - snails, or cranberries perhaps. See March 22, 1854 ("See crows along the water's edge. What do they eat?"): March 22, 1855 (" I have noticed crows in the meadows ever since they were first partially bare, three weeks ago "); March 22, 1856 ("Many tracks of crows in snow along the edge of the open water against Merrick’s at Island. They thus visit the edge of water—this and brooks —before any ground is exposed. Is it for small shellfish?"); March 20, 1856 ("Perhaps these [Paludina decisa] make part of the food of the crows which visit this brook and whose tracks I now see on the edge, and have all winter. Probably they also pick up some dead frogs"); March 5, 1859 (" I see crows walking about on the ice half covered with snow in the middle of the meadows, where there is no grass, apparently to pick up the worms and other insects left there since the midwinter freshet .")


A hen-hawk rises and sails away over the Holden Wood as in summer. Saw and heard one scream the 2d. See March 15, 1856 ("Hear two hawks scream. There is something truly March-like in it, like a prolonged blast or whistling of the wind"); March 15, 1860 ("A hen-hawk sails away from the wood southward.

These hawks, as usual, began to be common about the first of March, showing that they were returning from their winter quarters.").

 Aspen down a quarter of an inch out. See February 6, 1856 (" The down is just peeping out from some of the aspen buds"); February 27. 1852 ("The buds of the aspen show a part of their down or silky catkins.")