Thursday, November 11, 2021

The geese of November.





Minott heard geese go over night before last, about 8 P. M. Therien, too, heard them “yelling like anything” over Walden, where he is cutting, the same evening. 

November 11, 2018

He cut down a tree with a flying squirrel on it; often sees them.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 11, 1854


Minott heard geese go over night before last, about 8 P. M. See November 8 , 1857 ("About 10 A.M. a long flock of geese are going over from northeast to southwest"); November 13, 1855 ("Seventy or eighty geese, in three harrows successively smaller, flying southwest—pretty well west—over the house. A completely overcast, occasionally drizzling forenoon. "); November 13, 1858 ("A large flock of geese go over just before night."); November 14, 1855 ("Minott hears geese to-day.""); November 18, 1854 (" Sixty geese go over the Great Fields, in one waving line, broken from time to time by their crowding on each other and vainly endeavoring to form into a harrow, honking all the while."); November 20, 1853 ("Methinks the geese are wont to go south just before a storm, and, in the spring, to go north just after one, say at the end of a long April storm.”); November 22, 1853 (“Geese went over yesterday, and to-day also.”); November 23, 1853 ("At 5 P. M. I saw, flying southwest high overhead, a flock of geese, and heard the faint honking of one or two. They were in the usual harrow form, . . . This is the sixth flock I have seen or heard of since the morning of the 17th , i . e . within a week ."); November 24, 1855 ("Geese went over on the 13th and 14th, on the 17th the first snow fell, and the 19th it began to be cold and blustering.”); November 25, 1852 ("At Walden. — I hear at sundown what I mistake for the squawking of a hen. . . but it proved to be a flock of wild geese going south"); November 30, 1857 ("The air is full of geese. I saw five flocks within an hour, about 10 A. M., containing from thirty to fifty each, and afterward two more flocks, making in all from two hundred and fifty to three hundred at least") See also A Book of Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Geese in Autumn

A tree with a flying squirrel on it; often sees them. See March 22, 1855 ("I observed a rotten and hollow hemlock stump about two feet high and six inches in diameter , and instinctively approached with my right hand ready to cover it . I found a flying squirrel in it , which , as my left hand had covered a small hole at the bottom , ran directly into my right hand ."); June 19, 1859 ("A flying squirrel's nest and young . . . Saw three young run out after the mother and up a slender oak. The young half-grown, very tender-looking and weak-tailed, yet one climbed quite to the top of an oak twenty-five feet high,") See also December 24, 1853 ("[Therien] said he often saw gray squirrels running about and jumping from tree to tree")

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