7 P. M. – To Hubbard Bathing-Place.
The blue-eyed grass is shut up. When does it open?
Some blue flags are quite a red purple, — dark wine color.
Identified the Iris prismatica, Boston iris, with linear leaves and round stem.
The stake-driver is at it in his favorite meadow.
I followed the sound. At last I got within two rods, it seeming always to recede and drawing you like a will-o '-the-wisp further away into the meadows.
When thus near, I heard some lower sounds at the beginning, much more like striking on a stump or a stake, a dry hard sound; and then followed the gurgling, pumping notes, fit to come from a meadow.
This was just within the blueberry and Pyrus arbutifolia (choke-berry) bushes, and when the bird flew up alarmed, I went to the place, but could see no water, which makes me doubt if water is necessary to it in making the sound. Perhaps it thrusts its bill so deep as to reach the water where it is dry on the surface.
It sounds the more like wood chopping or pumping, because you seem to hear the echo of the stroke or the reverse motion of the pump handle.
I hear them morning and evening. After the warm weather has come, both morning and evening you hear the bittern pumping in the fens.
It does not sound loud near at hand, and it is remarkable that it should be heard so far. Perhaps it is pitched on a favorable key. Is it not a call to its mate? Methinks that in the resemblance of this note to rural sounds, to sounds made by farmers, the protection, the security, of the bird is designed.
Minott says: “I call them belcher-squelchers. They go slug-toot, slug-toot, slug-toot.”
Dry fields have now a reddish tinge from the seeds of the grass.
Lying with my window open, these warm, even sultry nights, I hear the sonorously musical trump of the bullfrogs from time to time, from some distant shore of the river, as if the world were given up to them. By those villagers who live on the street they are never seen and rarely heard by day, but in the quiet sultry nights their notes ring from one end of the town to another.
It is as if you had waked up in the infernal regions. I do not know for a time in what world I am. It affects my morals, and all questions take a new aspect from this sound.
At night bullfrogs lie on the pads and answer to one another all over North America; undoubtedly there is an incessant and uninterrupted chain of sound, troomp, troomp, troomp, from the Atlantic to the Pacific (vide if they reach so far west), further than Britain's morning gun.
It is the snoring music of nature at night. When you wake thus at midnight and hear this sonorous trump from far in the horizon, you need not go to Dante for an idea of the infernal regions. It requires the night air, this sound.
How allied to a pad in place, in color, --for his greenish back is the leaf and his yellow throat the flower, in form, with his sesquipedality of belly! (And other, white-bellied frogs are white lilies. Through the summer he lies on the pads, or with his head out, and in the winter buries himself at their roots (?).The bull paddock! His eyes like the buds of the Nuphar Kalmiana.
Methinks his skin would stand water without shrinking forever. Gloves made of it for rainy weather, for trout-fishers !
Frogs appear slow to make up their minds, but then they act precipitately. As long as they are here, they are here, and express no intention of removing; but the idea of removing fills them instantaneously, as nature, abhorring, fills a vacuum. Now they are fixed and imperturbable like the Sphinx, and now they go off with short, squatty leaps over the spatter-dock, on the irruption of the least idea.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 20, 1852
The stake-driver is at it in his favorite meadow. See April 24, 1854 (" As I stand still listening on the frosty sleepers at Wood's crossing by the lupines, I hear the loud and distinct pump-a-gor of a stake-driver. ”);. May 9, 1853 ("The pump-like note of a stake-driver from the fenny place across the Lee meadow. "); June 15, 1851 ("The sound of the stake-driver at a distance, — like that made by a man pumping in a neighboring farmyard, watering his cattle, or like chopping wood before his door on a frosty morning, and I can imagine like driving a stake in a meadow. The pumper. . . .before I was further off than I thought, so now I was nearer than I thought"); October 26, 1858 ("[Minott] says that some call the stake-driver “'belcher squelcher,” and some, “wollerkertoot.” I used to call them “pump-er-gor’. ” Some say “slug-toot.”) See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau American Bittern (the Stake-Diver)
June 20. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, June 20
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 © 2009-2021
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