November 5.
P. M. -- To Hubbard Bathing-Place for shrubs.
Most of the muskrat-cabins were lately covered by the flood, but now that it has gone down in a great measure, leaving the cranberries stranded amid the wreck of rushes, reeds, grass, etc., I notice that they have not been washed away or much injured, as a heap of manure would have been, they are so artificially constructed.
Moreover, for the most part they are protected, as well as concealed, by the button-bushes, willows, or weeds about them.
What exactly are they for?
This is not their breeding season.
I think that they are merely an artificial bank, an air-chamber near the water, houses of refuge.
But why do they need them more at this season than in the summer, it may be asked.
Perhaps they are constructed just before the rise of the water in the fall and winter, so that they may not have to swim so far as the flood would require in order to eat their clams.
I heard some pleasant notes from tree sparrows on the willows as I paddled by.
The buds of the rhodora are among the more conspicuous now, and yet more its seed-vessels, many if not most of which are not yet dry, but purplish.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 5, 1853
Most of the muskrat-cabins were lately covered by the flood, but I notice that they have not been washed away or much injured they are so artificially constructed. What exactly are they for? so that they may not have to swim so far as the flood would require in order to eat their clams? See September 20, 1855 ("Open a new and pretty sizable muskrat-house with no hollow yet made in it. "); September 26, 1857 ("I see musquash-houses"); October 15, 1851 ("The muskrat-houses appear now for the most part to be finished. Some, it is true, are still rising. They line the river all the way. "); October 16, 1859 ("I see the new musquash-houses erected, conspicuous on the now nearly leafless shores . .So surely as the sun appears to be in Libra or Scorpio, I see the conical winter lodges of the musquash rising above the withered pontederia and flags.") October 18, 1852 ("A few muskrat houses are going up abrupt and precipitous on one side sloped on the other I distinguish the dark moist layer of weeds deposited last night on what had dried in the sun."): November 2, 1851 ("The muskrat-houses are mostly covered by the rise of the river! — not a very unexpected one either"); November 4, 1855 ("Many new muskrat-houses have been erected this wet weather.");
November 7, 1855 ("Opened a muskrat-house nearly two feet high, but there was no hollow to it. Apparently they do not form that part yet.");
November 11, 1855 ("The bricks of which the muskrat builds his house are little masses or wads of the dead weedy rubbish on the muddy bottom, which it probably takes up with its mouth. It consists of various kinds of weeds, now agglutinated together by the slime and dried confervae threads, utricularia, hornwort, etc., — a streaming, tuft-like wad. The building of these cabins appears to be coincident with the commencement of their clam diet, for now their vegetable food, excepting roots, is cut off.”); November 15, 1859 ("I see several musquash-cabins off Hubbard Shore distinctly outlined as usual in the November light."); ;November 16, 1852 ("Muskrat-houses completed. Interesting objects looking down a river-reach at this season, and our river should not be represented without one or two of these cones. They are quite conspicuous half a mile distant, and are of too much importance to be omitted in the river landscape."); December 3, 1853 ("I see that muskrats have not only erected cabins, but, since the river rose, have in some places dug galleries a rod into the bank,") See also
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau,
the Musquash
I heard some pleasant notes from tree sparrows on the willows as I paddled by. See
November 4, 1860 ("White birch seed has but recently begun to fall. I see a quarter of an inch of many catkins bare. . . .To-day also I see distinctly the tree sparrows, and probably saw them, as supposed, some days ago. Thus the birch begins to shed its seed about the time our winter birds arrive from the north.")
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