Nature will get her seeds along in due season.

March 8. 

I just heard peculiar faint sounds made by the air escaping from a stick which I had just put into my stove. It sounded to my ear exactly like the peeping of the hylodes in a distant pool, a cool and breezy spring evening, - as if it were designed to remind me of that season. 

Saw the F. hyemalis March 4th.

***

In short, Nature uses all sorts of conveyances, from the rudest drag to a balloon, but she will get her seeds along in due season.

Is it not possible that Loudon is right as it respects the primitive distribution of the birch? 

Are not the dense patches always such as have sprung up in open land (commonly old fields cleared by man), as is the case with the pitch pine? It disappears at length from a dense oak or pine wood.

Perhaps originally it formed dense woods only where a space had been cleared for it by a burning, as now at the eastward. Perhaps only the oaks and white pines could (originally) possess the soil here against all comers, maple succeeding because it does not mind a wet foot. 

Suppose one were to take such a boxful of birch seed as I have described into the meeting-house belfry in the fall, and let some of it drop in every wind, but always more in proportion as the wind was stronger, and yet so husband it that there should be some left for every gale even till far into spring; so that this seed might be blown toward every point of the compass and to various distances in each direction. Would not this represent a single birch tree on a hill? Of which trees (though only a part on hills) we have perhaps a million.

And yet some feel compelled to suppose that the birch trees which spring up after a burning are spontaneously generated -- for want of seed!

It is true [it] does not come up in great quantities at the distance I have spoken of, but, if only one comes up there this year, you may have a million seeds matured there a few years hence. It is true that the greater part of these seeds fall near the trees which bore them, and comparatively few germinate; yet, when the surface is in a favorable condition, they may spring up in very unexpected places.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 8, 1861

Saw the F. hyemalis. See October 5, 1857 ( F. hyemalis . . . only transiently visit us in spring and fall."); February 16, 1854 ("I have not seen F . hyemalis since last fall"); March 6, 1860 ("I hear the well-known note and see a flock of F. hyemalis flitting in a lively manner about trees, weeds, walls, and ground, by the roadside, showing their two white tail-feathers. . . . These attract notice by their numbers and incessant twittering in a social manner. "); March 7, 1853 ("The only birds I see to-day are the lesser redpolls. I have not seen a fox-colored sparrow or a Fringilla hyemalis"); March 14, 1858 (" I see a Fringilla hyemalis, the first bird, perchance, — unless one hawk, – which is an evidence of spring,. . .They are now getting back earlier than our permanent summer residents. It flits past with a rattling or grating chip, showing its two white tail-feathers") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Dark-eyed Junco

Nature will get her seeds along in due season. See March 2, 1856 ("The birches appear not to have lost a quarter of their seeds yet. As I went home up the river, I saw some of the seeds forty rods off, and perhaps, in a more favorable direction, I might have found them much further. It suggested how unwearied Nature is, spreading her seeds. Even the spring does not find her unprovided with birch, aye, and alder and pine seed. A great proportion of the seed that was carried to a distance lodged in the hollow over the river, and when the river breaks up will be carried far away, to distant shores and meadows.."); October 16, 1860 (Looking from a hilltop, I observe that pines, white birches, red maples, alders, etc., often grow in more or less regular rounded or oval or conical patches, while oaks, chestnuts, hickories, etc., simply form woods of greater or less extent, whether by themselves or mixed, and do not naturally spring up in an oval form. This is a consequence of the different manner in which trees which have winged seeds and those which have not are planted")  See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, , Birches in Season