The male Populus grandidentata appears to open very gradually.

April 8. 

6 A. M. – To Abel Hosmer's ring-post. 

The ground sprinkled, salted, with little snowlike pellets one tenth of an inch in diameter, from half an inch to one inch apart, sometimes cohering starwise together. As if it had spit so much snow only. I think it one form of frost merely, or frozen dew. Noticed the like a week or two ago. It was gone in half an hour, when I came back. What is the peculiar state of the atmosphere that determines these things? 

The spearer's light last night shone into my chamber on the wall and awakened me. 

Saw and heard my small pine warbler shaking out his trills, or jingle, even like money coming to its bearings. They appear much the smaller from perching high in the tops of white pines and flitting from tree to tree at that height. 

Is not my night-warbler the white-eyed vireo? — not yet here. 

Heard the field sparrow again. 

The male Populus grandidentata appears to open very gradually, beginning sooner than I supposed. It shows some of its red anthers long before it opens. There is a female on the left, on Warren's Path at Deep Cut. 

Is not the pollen of the P. tremuliformis like rye meal? Are not female flowers of more sober and modest colors, as the willows for instance? 

The hylas have fairly begun now.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 8, 1853

The ground sprinkled, salted, with little snowlike pellets one tenth of an inch in diameter. See December 14, 1859 ("Snow-storms might be classified. . . . there is the pellet or shot snow, which consists of little dry spherical pellets the size of robin-shot"); January 30, 1856 (“It has just begun to snow, — those little round dry pellets like shot. ”); March 22, 1860 ("Colder yet, and a whitening of snow, some of it in the form of pellets, — like my pellet frost! - but melts about as fast as it falls."); November 24, 1860 (“ The first spitting of snow. . .consisted almost entirely of pellets an eighth of an inch or less in diameter. . . .The air was so filled with these snow pellets that for an hour we could not see a hill half a mile off”)

The spearer's light last night shone into my chamber on the wall and awakened me. See April 16, 1855 ("The spearer’s light to-night, and, after dark, the sound of geese honking"); April 25, 1856 ("At evening see a spearer’s light.")

Saw and heard my small pine warbler shaking out his trills, or jingle. See April 2, 1853 ("T Hear and see what I call the pine warbler, --vetter vetter vetter vetter vet, -- the cool woodland sound. The first this year of the higher-colored birds, after the bluebird and the blackbird's wing. It so affects me as something more tender. ").  See also  A Book of Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Pine Warbler

The male Populus grandidentata appears to open very gradually, beginning sooner than I supposed. See. April 3, 1853 ("The female Populus tremuliformis catkins, narrower and at present more red and somewhat less downy than the male, west side of railroad at Deep Cut, quite as forward as the male in this situation") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Big-toothed Aspen (Populus grandidentata)

The hylas have fairly begun now. See March 31, 1857 ("The shrill peeping of the hylodes locates itself nowhere in particular."); April 1, 1860 ("I hear the first hylodes by chance, but no doubt they have been heard some time"); April 2, 1852 (" I hear a solitary hyla for the first time."); April 3, 1853 ("I hear hylas on two keys or notes. Heard one after the other, it might be mistaken for the varied note of one."); April 5, 1858 ("I hear the hylodes peeping now at evening, being at home, though I have not chanced to hear any during the day."); April 6, 1858 ("I hear hylas in full blast 2.30 P. M. "); April 7, 1861 ("Hylas are heard to-day")