Sunday, February 28, 2021

A Book of the Seasons: February 28. (The westering sun, arctic scenes, cakes of ice, bluebirds and robins, pine cones, nature's impressions)

The year is but a succession of days,
and I see that I could assign some office to each day
which, summed up, would be the history of the year.
Henry Thoreau, August 24, 1852


February 28, 2017

The westering sun
reflected from their edges
makes them shine finely.

A pleasant morning. February 28, 1854

Nearly two inches of snow in the night. February 28, 1857

The snow lies on the ice in large but very shallow drifts . . . broad crescents (apparently) convex to the northwest. February 28, 1857

Ever since the 23d inclusive a succession of clear but very cold days in which, for the most part, it has not melted perceptibly during the day. February 28, 1855

Our meadows present a very wild and arctic scene. February 28, 1855

Far on every side, over what is usually dry land, are scattered a stretching pack of great cakes of ice, often two or more upon each other and partly tilted up, a foot thick and one to two or more rods broad.  February 28, 1855

Many great cakes have lodged on a ridge of the meadow west of the river here, and suggest how such a ridge may be growing from year to year. February 28, 1855

This is a powerful agent at work. February 28, 1855

The westering sun reflected from their edges makes them shine finely. February 28, 1855

I go on the crust which we have had since the 13th, i. e. on the solid frozen snow, which settles very gradually in the sun, across the fields and brooks. February 28, 1856

Around the shore ice is covered with water and rests on the bottom, while the middle is raised with the water, and hence a ridge is heaved up where the two ices meet. February 28, 1854

Nearly one third the channel is open in Fair Haven Pond.  February 28, 1857

To-day it snows again, covering the ground. February 28, 1852

The snow finally turns to a drenching rain. February 28, 1852

2 P. M. — Thermometer 52; wind easterly. February 28, 1860

One tells me that George Hubbard told him he saw blackbirds go over this forenoon. February 28, 1860

One of the Corner Wheelers feels sure that he saw a bluebird on the 24th, and says he saw a sheldrake in the river at the factory "a month ago." I should say that the sheldrake was our hardiest duck.  February 28, 1860

Rice says he saw a whistler (?) duck to-day.  February 28, 1858

C. saw a dozen robins to-day on the ground on Ebby Hubbard's hill by the Yellow Birch Swamp.   February 28, 1860

Looking from Hubbard's Bridge, I see a great water bug even on the river, so forward is the season.  February 28, 1860

Air full of bluebirds as yesterday.  February 28. 1861

I suppose they are linarias which I still see flying about. February 28, 1860

Passed a very little boy in the street to-day, who had on a home-made cap of a woodchuck-skin . . .The great gray-tipped wind hairs were all preserved, and stood out above the brown only a little more loosely than in life.  February 28, 1860


I see the track, apparently of a muskrat (?), — about five inches wide with very sharp and distinct trail of tail, — on the snow and thin ice over the little rill in the Miles meadow.  February 28, 1857

It is interesting to see how every little rill like this will be haunted
by muskrats or minks. February 28, 1857

Does the mink ever leave a track of its tail? February 28, 1857

A millwright comes and builds a dam across the foot of the meadow, and a mill-pond is created. . . and muskrats and minks and otter frequent it.  February 28, 1856

I see twenty-four cones brought together under one pitch pine.   February 28, 1858

I take up a handsomely spread (or blossomed) pitch pine cone, but I find that a squirrel has begun to strip it first, having gnawed off a few of the scales at the base. The squirrel always begins to gnaw a cone thus at the base, as if it were a stringent law among the squirrel people, — as if the old squirrels taught the young ones a few simple rules like this. February 28, 1860 

Saw a mackerel in the market. The upper half of its sides is mottled blue and white like the mackerel sky, as stated January 19th.  February 28, 1859

At the Cliff, the tower-mustard, early crowfoot, and perhaps buttercup appear to have started of late. February 28, 1857

It takes several years' faithful search to learn where to look for the earliest flowers. February 28, 1857

You never will see by chance what he sees who goes on purpose to see it.  February 28, 1856

It is equally important often to ignore or forget all that men presume that they know, and take an original and unprejudiced view of Nature, letting her make what impression she will on you, as the first men, and all children and natural men still do.  February 28, 1860 

To get the value of the storm we must be out a long time and travel far in it, so that it may fairly penetrate our skin, and we be as it were turned inside out to it, and there be no part in us but is wet or weather beaten,– so that we become storm men instead of fair weather men. February 28, 1852
*****
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Ice-out
 A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,  the Earliest Flower
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Sheldrake (Merganser, Goosander
 A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Robins in Spring

*****

November 18 1851 ("The chopper who works in the woods all day is more open in some respects to the impressions they are fitted to make than the naturalist who goes to see them. He really forgets himself, forgets to observe, and at night he dreams of the swamp, its phenomena and events. Not so the naturalist; enough of his unconscious life does not pass there. A man can hardly be said to be there if he knows that he is there, or to go there if he knows where he is going. The man who is bent upon his work is frequently in the best attitude to observe what is irrelevant to his work.")
November 21, 1850(" I begin to see ... an object when I cease to understand it .")
December 11, 1855 ("I saw this familiar fact at a different angle. It is only necessary to behold thus the least fact or phenomenon, however familiar, from a point a hair’s breadth aside from our habitual path or routine, to be overcome, enchanted by its beauty and significance. To perceive freshly, with fresh senses, is to be inspired.”)
December 25, 1856 ("Take long walks in stormy weather or through deep snows in the fields and woods, if you would keep your spirits up. Deal with brute nature. Be cold and hungry and weary.”)
January 3, 1860 ("[Melvin] speaks of the mark of the tail, which is dragged behind them, in the snow.")
January 8, 1860 ("When I heard their note, I looked to find them on a birch, and lo, it was a black birch! [Were they not linarias? Vide Jan. 24, 27, 29.]") 
January 9, 1853 ("On the face of the Cliff the crowfoot buds lie unexpanded just beneath the surface. I dig one up with a stick, and, pulling it to pieces, I find deep in the centre of the plant, just beneath the ground, surrounded by all the tender leaves that are to precede it, the blossom-bud, about half is big as the head of a pin, perfectly white. There it patiently sits, or slumbers, how full of faith, informed of a spring which the world has never seen.”)
January 10, 1859 ("The middle of the river where narrow . . . is lifted up into a ridge considerably higher than on the sides and cracked broadly.")
January 21, 1853 (“I think it was January 20th that I saw that which I think an otter track . . . similar to a muskrat's only much larger.")
January 22, 1856 ("I count the cores of thirty-four cones on the snow there, and that is not all. Under another pine there are more than twenty, and a well-worn track from this to a fence post three rods distant, under which are the cores of eight cones and a corresponding amount of scales. . . They have gnawed off the cones which were perfectly closed. ")
January 31, 1856 ("See also the tracks, probably of a muskrat, for a few feet leading from hole to hole just under the bank.") 
February 6, 1856 ("He [Goodwin] thinks that what I call muskrat-tracks are mink-tracks by the Rock, and that muskrat do not come out at all this weather. ")
February 8, 1860 ("It will take a yet more genial and milder air before the bluebird's warble can be heard.")
February 14, 1851 ("We shall see but little way if we require to understand what we see")
February 18, 1857 ("The bluebird does not come till the air consents.")
February 21, 1861 ("Plucking and stripping a pine cone")
February 23, 1855 ("I see great cakes of ice, a rod or more in length and one foot thick, lying high and dry on the bare ground in the low fields some ten feet or more beyond the edge of the thinner ice, washed up by the last rise (the 18th).”)
February 24, 1855 ("The whole of the broad meadows is a rough, irregular checker-board of great cakes a rod square or more —arctic enough to look at.”)
February 24, 1857 ("A]s I cross from the causeway to the hill, thinking of the bluebird, I that instant hear one's note from deep in the softened air.")
February 25, 1857 ("Goodwin says he saw a robin this morning.”)
February 25, 1859 ("I hear that robins were seen a week or more ago.")
February 26, 1855 ("Those great cakes of ice which the last freshet floated up on to uplands now lie still further from the edge of the recent ice.")
February 27, 1860 ("This is the first bird of the spring that I have seen or heard of.”) 
February 27, 1857 ("Before I opened the window this cold morning, I heard the peep of a robin, that sound so often heard in cheerless or else rainy weather, so often heard first borne on the cutting March wind or through sleet or rain, as if its coming were premature.")
February 27, 1861 (" Mother hears a robin to-day.") 
February 27, 1853 ("The expanding of the pine cones, that, too, is a season.")
February 27, 1861 ("It occurs to me that I have just heard a bluebird. I stop and listen to hear it again, but cannot tell whither it comes.")

Snows again to-day
covering the ground then turns
to a drenching rain.
February 28, 1852


March 1, 1856 ("It is remarkable that though I have not been able to find any open place in the river almost all winter . . .Coombs should (as he says) have killed two sheldrakes at the falls by the factory, a place which I had forgotten, some four or six weeks ago. Singular that this hardy bird should have found this small opening . . . If there is a crack amid the rocks of some waterfall, this bright diver is sure to know it. Ask the sheldrake whether the rivers are completely sealed up.")
March 8, 1859 ("If the weather is thick and stormy enough, if there is a good chance to be cold and wet and uncomfortable, in other words to feel weather-beaten, you may consume the afternoon to advantage thus browsing along the edge of some near wood which would scarcely detain you at all in fair weather, and you will be as far away there as at the end of your longest fair-weather walk, and come home as if from an adventure.")
March 10, 1855 ("You are always surprised by the sight of the first spring bird or insect; they seem premature, and there is no such evidence of spring as themselves, so that they literally fetch the year about. It is thus when I hear the first robin or bluebird or, looking along the brooks, see the first water-bugs out circling. But you think, They have come, and Nature cannot recede.")
March 15, 1852 ("A mild spring day. The air is full of bluebirds . . . liquid with the bluebirds' warble. My life partakes of infinity.") 
March 17, 1858 ("The air is full of bluebirds. I hear them far and near on all sides of the hill.") 
March 23, 1856 ("I spend a considerable portion of my time observing the habits of the wild animals, my brute neighbors. By their various movements and migrations they fetch the year about to me.") 
March 23, 1853 ("Man cannot afford to be a naturalist, to look at Nature directly, but only with the side of his eye.”)
March 23, 1859 ("As we sail upward toward the pond, we scare up two or three golden-eyes, or whistlers, showing their large black heads and black backs, and afterward I watch one swimming not far before us and see the white spot, amid the black, on the side of his head.")
 March 27, 1858 ("Among them [sheldrakes], or near by, I at length detect three or four whistlers, by their wanting the red bill, being considerably smaller and less white, having a white spot on the head, a black back, and altogether less white, and also keeping more or less apart and not diving when the rest do.") 
March 29, 1854 ("Fair Haven half open; channel wholly open.")
March 29, 1855 ("Fair Haven Pond only just open over the channel of the river.") 
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 . . . I never knew before exactly where the channel was.")
April 2, 1856 (“It will take you half a lifetime to find out where to look for the earliest flower.”)
April 8, 1855 (“As to which are the earliest flowers, it depends on the character of the season, and ground bare or not, meadows wet or dry, etc., etc., also on the variety of soils and localities within your reach.”)
Apirl 8, 1856 ("Most countrymen might paddle five miles along the river now and not see one muskrat, while a sportsman a quarter of a mile before or behind would be shooting one or more every five minutes.")
April 13, 1860 (“It distinctly occurred to me that, perhaps, if I came against my will, as it were, to look at the sweet-gale as a matter of business, I might discover something else interesting.”)
April 29, 1855 ("See his shining black eyes and black snout and his little erect ears. He is of a light brown forward at this distance (hoary above, yellowish or sorrel beneath), gradually darkening backward to the end of the tail, which is dark-brown. The general aspect is grizzly.")
May 30, 1859 ("Its colors were gray, reddish brown, and blackish, the gray-tipped wind hairs giving it a grizzly look above, and when it stood up its distinct rust-color beneath was seen, while the top of its head was dark-brown, becoming black at snout, as also its paws and its little rounded ears.")
June 14, 1853 (". . . you are in that favorable frame of mind described by De Quincey, open to great impressions, and you see those rare sights with the unconscious side of the eye, which you could not see by a direct gaze before.”)
August 5, 1851 ("The question is not what you look at, but what you see.”)
August 21, 1851 ("You must walk sometimes perfectly free, not prying nor inquisitive, not bent upon seeing things")
September 13, 1852 ("I must walk more with free senses. I must let my senses wander as my thoughts, my eyes see without looking. Carlyle said that how to observe was to look, but I say that it is rather to see, and the more you look the less you will observe. Be not preoccupied with looking. Go not to the object; let it come to you. What I need is not to look at all, but a true sauntering of the eye.”)
October 4, 1859 (“It is only when we forget all our learning that we begin to know. I do not get nearer by a hair's breadth to any natural object so long as I presume that I have an introduction to it from some learned man. To conceive of it with a total apprehension I must for the thousandth time approach it as something totally strange. If you would make acquaintance with the ferns you must forget your botany. You must get rid of what is commonly called knowledge of them. Not a single scientific term or distinction is the least to the purpose, for you would fain perceive something, and you must approach the object totally unprejudiced You must be aware that no thing is what you have taken it to be. In what book is this world and its beauty described? Who has plotted the steps toward the discovery of beauty? You have got to be in a different state from common. Your greatest success will be simply to perceive that such things are.")


February 28, 2019
If you make the least correct 
observation of nature this year,
 you will have occasion to repeat it
 with illustrations the next, 
and the season and life itself is prolonged.

 February 27   <<<<<  February 28  >>>>> February 29
A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,  February 28 
A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau
 "A book, each page written in its own season,
out-of-doors, in its own locality."
 ~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx ©  2009-2024
tinyurl.com/hdt28feb
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Air full of bluebirds.

February 28. 

P. M. Down Boston road under the hill. 

Air full of bluebirds as yesterday. 

The sidewalk is bare and almost dry the whole distance under the hill. 

Turn in at the gate this side of Moore's and sit on the yellow stones rolled down in the bay of a digging, and examine the radical leaves, etc., etc. 

Where the edges of grassy banks have caved I see the fine fibrous roots of the grass which have been washed bare during the winter extending straight downward two feet (and how much further within the earth I know not), -- a pretty dense grayish mass. 

The buttonwood seed has apparently scarcely begun to fall yet — only two balls under one tree, but they loose and broken. [Almost entirely fallen March 7th, leaving the dangling stems and bare receptacles.]


H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 28. 1861

Air full of bluebirds as yesterday. See February 27, 1861 ("It occurs to me that I have just heard a bluebird. I stop and listen to hear it again, but cannot tell whither it comes."); see also February 8, 1860 ("It will take a yet more genial and milder air before the bluebird's warble can be heard."); February 18, 1857 ("The bluebird does not come till the air consents"); February 24, 1857 ("A]s I cross from the causeway to the hill, thinking of the bluebird, I that instant hear one's note from deep in the softened air."); March 15, 1852 ("A mild spring day.  The air is full of bluebirds. . . .  liquid with the bluebirds' warble. My life partakes of infinity. ") March 17, 1858 ("The air is full of bluebirds. I hear them far and near on all sides of the hill.") See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, the Bluebird in Early Spring.
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Saturday, February 27, 2021

A Book of the Seasons: February 27 (Bright and immortal the unfettered stream sparkles in the clear cool air.)

The year is but a succession of days,
and I see that I could assign some office to each day
which, summed up, would be the history of the year.
Henry Thoreau, August 24, 1852

Bright and immortal
the unfettered stream sparkles
in the clear cool air.


February 27, 2015

Half the ground is covered with snow. It is a moderately, cool and pleasant day near the end of winter. We have almost completely forgotten summer. February 27, 1852

Another cold, clear day, but the weather gradually moderating.  February 27, 1855 

C. saw a skater-insect on E. Hubbard's Close brook in woods to-day. February 27, 1860

Though it was a dry, powdery snow-storm yesterday, the sun is now so high that the snow is soft and sticky this afternoon. February 27, 1859

The sky, too, is soft to look at, and the air to feel on my cheek.   February 27, 1859

The abundance of light as reflected from clouds and the snow, etc., etc. is more springlike than anything of late.  February 27, 1860

Before I opened the window this cold morning, I heard the peep of a robin, that sound so often heard in cheerless or else rainy weather, so often heard first borne on the cutting March wind or through sleet or rain, as if its coming were premature. February 27, 1857 

I see a snow bunting, though it is pleasant and warm.  February 27, 1858

I see many crows on the hillside, with their sentinel on a tree.   February 27, 1857

I see many birch scales, freshly blown over the snow. They are falling all winter. February 27, 1856

Found, in the snow in E. Hosmer’s meadow, a gray rabbit’s hind leg, freshly left there, perhaps by a fox. February 27, 1856
 
The river has skimmed over again in many places. February 27, 1857

Am surprised to see how the ice lasts on the river . . . The river has been frozen solidly for seven weeks. February 27, 1856

Morning. — Rain over; water in great part run off; wind rising; river risen and meadows flooded. February 27, 1854

The rapidity with which water flowing over the icy ground seeks its level. All that rain would hardly have produced a puddle in midsummer, but now it produces a freshet, and will perhaps break up the river. February 27, 1854

Floating ice everywhere bridging the river, and then a broad meadowy flood above ice again. February 27, 1854

The river has been breaking up for several days . . . The channel is now open, at least from our neighborhood all the way to Ball's Hill. February 27, 1860 

White cakes of ice gliding swiftly down the stream are whiter than ever in this spring sun. February 27, 1860

E. Wood thinks that he has lost the surface of two acres of his meadow by the ice . . . Blue-joint was introduced into the first meadow where it did not grow before. February 27, 1851

Near Tarbell's and Harrington's the North Branch has burst its icy fetters. This restless and now swollen stream, flowing with with ice on either side, sparkles in the clear, cool air.   February 27, 1852 

As I stand looking up it westward for half a mile where it winds slightly under a high bank, its surface is lit up with a fine-grained silvery sparkle. February 27, 1852

If rivers come out of their icy prison thus bright and immortal, shall not I too resume my spring life with joy and hope? February 27, 1852

The sudden apparition of this dark-blue water on the surface of the earth is exciting. I must now walk where I can see the most water, as to the most living part of nature. February 27, 1860
 
The aspect of the meadow is sky-blue and dark-blue, the former a thin ice, the latter the spaces of open water which the wind has made, but it is chiefly ice still. February 27, 1860

I had noticed for some time, far in the middle of the Great Meadows, something dazzlingly white. . . .  the white breast of a male sheldrake accompanied perhaps by his mate (a darker one). February 27, 1860

Thus, as soon as the river breaks up or begins to break up fairly, and the strong wind widening the cracks makes at length open spaces in the ice of the meadow, this hardy bird appears, and is seen sailing in the first widened crack in the ice, February 27, 1860

This is the first bird of the spring that I have seen or heard of.  February 27, 1860


This has truly been a month of crusted snow. Now the snow-patches, which partially melt one part of the day or week, freeze at another, so that the walker traverses them with tolerable ease. February 27, 1852


February 27 , 2017

The mosses now are in fruit – or have sent up their filaments with calyptrae. February 27, 1852

Are not fungi the best hygrometers? February 27, 1857



February 27, 2020

I noticed yesterday that the skunk-cabbage had not started yet at Well Meadow, and had been considerably frost-bitten.  February 27, 1860

I have just heard a bluebird . . . but cannot tell whither it comes.  February 27, 1861

Miss Minott and Miss Potter have both died within a fortnight past , and the cottage on the hillside seems strangely deserted; but the first bluebird comes to warble there as usual. February 27, 1861

Mother hears a robin to-day. February 27, 1861

It looks as if Nature had a good deal of work on her hands between now and April, to break up and melt twenty-one inches of ice on the ponds, — beside melting all the snow, — and before planting-time to thaw from one to two and a half or three feet of frozen ground. February 27, 1854

It is the lighting up of the mist by the sun. February 27, 1851  See Walking

February 27, 2024

To-night a circle round the moon. February 27, 1852

*****

A Book of the Seasons by Henry Thoreau, Ice out
 A Book of Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Snow Bunting
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Sheldrake (Merganser, Goosander)


January 2, 1856 ("They have come with this deeper snow and colder weather. ") 
January 8, 1855 (" I hear a few chickadees near at hand, and hear and see jays further off, and, as yesterday, a crow sitting sentinel on an apple tree. Soon he gives the alarm, and several more take their places near him.. . .")
January 22, 1855 ("Great cakes of ice lodged and sometimes tilted up against the causeway bridges, over which the water pours as over a dam.”)
January 31, 1855 ("A clear, cold, beautiful day.") 
February 1, 1857 ("Warm as it is, I see a large flock of snow buntings on the railroad causeway.")
February 12, 1856 ("Forty three days of uninterrupted cold weather, . . .twenty-five days the snow was sixteen inches deep in open land!!”) 
February 12, 1860 ("Where the agitated surface of the river is exposed,[I see] the blue-black water.That dark-eyed water, especially when I see it at right angles with the direction of the sun, is it not the first sign of spring? How its darkness contrasts with the general lightness of the winter! It has more life in it than any part of the earth's surface. It is where one of the arteries of the earth is palpable, visible. . . .It excites me to see early in the spring that black artery leaping once more through the snow-clad town. All is tumult and life there, not to mention the rails and cranberries that are drifting in it. Where this artery is shallowest, i. e., comes nearest to the surface and runs swiftest, there it shows itself soonest and you may see its pulse beat. These are the wrists, temples, of the earth, where I feel its pulse with my eye. The living waters, not the dead earth. It is as if the dormant earth opened its dark and liquid eye upon us.")
February 13, 1851 ("Saw in a warm, muddy brook in Sudbury, quite open and exposed, the skunk-cabbage spathes above water. The tops of the spathes were frost- bitten, but the fruit sound. There was one partly expanded.The first flower of the season; for it is a flower. I doubt if there is [a] month without its flower. Examined by the botany all its parts, the first flower I have seen. The Ictodes fætidus.")
February 13, 1859 ("The old ice is covered with a dry, powdery snow about one inch deep, from which, as I walk toward the sun, this perfectly clear, bright afternoon, at 3.30 o’clock, the colors of the rainbow are reflected from a myriad fine facets. ")
February 17, 1857 ("The river is fairly breaking up . . . It is as open as the 3d of April last year, at least.")
February 18, 1851 (" See the skunk-cabbage in flower.”)
February 18, 1855 ("Now for the first time decidedly there is something spring-suggesting in the air and light.")
February 22, 1855 ("Pitch pine cones must be taken from the tree at the right season, else they will not open or “blossom” in a chamber.")
February 24, 1857 ("[A]s I cross from the causeway to the hill, thinking of the bluebird, I that instant hear one's note from deep in the softened air.")
February 25, 1851 ("The crust of the meadow afloat. . . .When the ice melts or the soil thaws, of course it falls to the bottom, wherever it may be. Here is another agent employed in the distribution of plants.")
February 25, 1857 ("Goodwin says he saw a robin this morning.”)

I must now walk where 
I can see the most water 
pulsing with new life. 


February 28, 1855 ("Our meadows present a very wild and arctic scene. Far on every side, over what is usually dry land, are scattered a stretching pack of great cakes of ice.”)
 February 28, 1855 ("Still cold and clear . Ever since the 23d inclusive a succession of clear but very cold days . .. Since the 25th it has been very slowly moderating.)
February 28, 1860 ("C. saw a dozen robins to-day on the ground on Ebby Hubbard's hill by the Yellow Birch Swamp.")
March 1, 1855 ("Banks of snow by the railroad reflect a wonderfully dazzling white due to the higher sun.")
March 1, 1856 ("Singular that this hardy bird should have found this small opening, which I had forgotten, while the ice everywhere else was from one to two feet thick, and the snow sixteen inches on a level . . . Ask the sheldrake whether the rivers are completely sealed up.”) 
March 2, 1854 ("What produces the peculiar softness of the air?")
March 8, 1855 ("I hear the hasty, shuffling, as if frightened, note of a robin from a dense birch wood . . . This sound reminds me of rainy, misty April days in past years.")
March 10, 1853 ("Something analogous to the thawing of the ice seems to have taken place in the air.")  
March 12, 1854 ("I hear my first robin peep distinctly at a distance. No singing yet.")
March 12, 1854 ("A new feature is being added to the landscape, and that is expanses and reaches of blue water. This great expanse of deep-blue water, deeper than the sky, why does it not blue my soul as of yore? It is hard to soften me now. The time was when this great blue scene would have tinged my spirit more.") 
March 18, 1860 (“Skunk-cabbage, now generally and abundantly in bloom all along under Clamshell.”)
March 20, 1853 ("The wind blows eastward over the opaque ice in vain till it slides on to the living water surface where it raises a myriad brilliant sparkles on the bare face of the pond, an expression of glee, of youth, of spring, as if it spoke the joy of the fishes within it and of the sands on its shore.")
March 21, 1858 (“The skunk-cabbage at Clamshell is well out, shedding pollen. The date of its flowering is very fluctuating.”)
March 22, 1855 ("The bluebird faintly warbles, with such ventriloquism that I thought him further off.")
March 26, 1857 (“At Well Meadow Head, am surprised to find the skunk-cabbage in flower, . . .The first croaking frogs, the hyla, the white maple blossoms, the skunk-cabbage, and the alder’s catkins are observed about the same time.”)
March 30, 1856 ("I am surprised to see the skunk cabbage, with its great spear-heads open and ready to blossom (i. e. shed pollen in a day or two)")
April 2, 1852 ("The robin now peeps with scared note in the heavy overcast air, among the apple trees. The hour is favorable to thought.")
April 2, 1854 ("Sitting on the rail over the brook, I hear something which reminds me of the song of the robin in rainy days in past springs.")
April 2, 1856 ("Robins are peeping and flitting about. Am surprised to hear one sing regularly their morning strain")
April 7, 1855 ("The skunk-cabbage open yesterday, — the earliest flower this season.") 
April 22, 1856 ("It requires wet weather, then, to expand and display them to advantage. They are hygrometers.")


February 27, 2020

If you make the least correct 
observation of nature this year,
 you will have occasion to repeat it
 with illustrations the next, 
and the season and life itself is prolonged.

February 26  <<<<<  February 27  >>>>> February 28 

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,   February 27 
A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau
 "A book, each page written in its own season,
out-of-doors, in its own locality."
 ~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx ©  2009-2024

tinyurl.com/hdt27feb
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