A very interesting purple with its fine waving top, mixed with blue-eyed grass.

July 3. 

P. M. — To Hubbard's Grove.

You see in rich moist mowing the yet slender, recurving unexpanded panicles or heads of the red-top (?), mixed with the upright, rigid herd's-grass. Much of it is out in dry places. 

Glyceria fluitans is very abundant in Depot Field Brook. 

Hypericum ellipticum out. 

I noticed the other day, I think the 30th, a large patch of Agrostis scabra in E. Hosmer's meadow, — the firmer ridges, — a very interesting purple with its fine waving top, mixed with blue-eyed grass.

July 3, 2019
partridge berry

The Mitchella repens, so abundant now in the north west part of Hubbard's Grove, emits a strong astringent cherry-like scent as I walk over it, now that it is so abundantly in bloom, which is agreeable to me, — spotting the ground with its downy-looking white flowers. 

Eleocharis obtusa and acicularis are now apparently in prime at water's edge by Hubbard's Grove bridge path. 

Also Juncus bufonius is very abundant in path there, fresh quite, though some shows seed. Juncus tenuis, though quite fresh, is also as much gone to seed.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 3, 1859

The yet slender, recurving unexpanded panicles or heads of the red-top. See July 6, 1851 ("The red-topped grass is in its prime, tingeing the fields with red.");  July 13, 1860 ("First we had the June grass reddish-brown, and the sorrel red, of June; now the red-top red of July.)

Hypericum ellipticum out. See July 26, 1856 ("Arranged the hypericums in bottles this morning and watched their opening. . . . The pod of the ellipticum, when cut, smells like a bee.") See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, St. Johns-wort (Hypericum)

A large patch of Agrostis scabra a very interesting purple with its fine waving top, mixed with blue-eyed grass. See July 11, 1860 (" I am interested now by patches of Agrostis scabra. Drooping and waving in the wind a rod or two over amid the red-top and herd's-grass of A.Wheeler's meadow, this grass gives a pale purple sheen to those parts, the most purple impression of any grass.")

Mixed with blue-eyed grass. See June 15, 1851 ("The blue-eyed grass, well named, looks up to heaven."); July 6, 1851("Blue-eyed grass is now rarely seen. ") See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, blue-eyed grass

The Mitchella repens, so abundant now in the north west part of Hubbard's Grove, emits a strong astringent cherry-like scent. See  July 2, 1859 ("Mitchella repens is abundantly out").  See also  A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Partridge-berry (Mitchella Repens)

Wth its white flowers

so abundantly in bloom

Mitchella repens

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, 

interesting purplemixed with blue-eyed grass

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 © 2009-2025

Oriole young.

July 1. 

P. M. — To Second Division Brook. 

July 1, 2019

Have heard the peculiar peep of young tailless golden robins for a day or more. 

White water ranunculus in full bloom at least a week, in Second Division Brook, near the dam, in the shade of the bank, a clear day. Its leaves and stems waving in the brook are interesting, — much cut and green. 

The Holcus lanatus, past prime, near J. P. Brown's little meadow beyond end of his moraine; also grows near southwest end of Hubbard's Grove. 

Agrostis, either vulgaris or alba (or both), now generally coming into bloom in fields both moist and dry, but I should say with considerable ligules and rather roughish sheaths.

H.. D. Thoreau, Journal,  July 1, 1859

The peculiar peep of young tailless golden robins for a day or more. See June 28, 1855 ("Hear and see young golden robins which have left the nest, now peeping with a peculiar tone."); June 28, 1857 ("I hear on all hands these days, from the elms and other trees, the twittering peep of young gold robins, which have recently left their nests, and apparently indicate their locality to their parents by thus incessantly peeping all day long."); July 2, 1860 ("Nowadays hear from my window the constant tittering of young golden robins, ")

White water ranunculus in full bloom at least a week, in Second Division Brook. See August 4, 1854 ("Ranunculus aquatilis var. fluviatilis, white petals with a yellow claw, small flowers on surface of Hosmer's ditch, west end, by Turnpike. A new plant.")

The barberry flower is now in prime.

June 1. 

Farmer has heard the quail a fortnight. Channing yesterday. 

The barberry flower is now in prime, and it is very handsome with its wreaths of flowers. 

Many low blackberry flowers at Lee's Cliff. 

June-grass there well out. 

Krigia, how long? 

Breams' nests begun at Hubbard's Grove shore. They have carefully cleaned the bottom, removing the conferva, small weeds, etc., leaving the naked stems of some coarse ones, as the bayonet rush, bare and red. 

Young Stewart tells me that when he visited again that gray squirrel's nest which I described about one month ago up the Assabet, the squirrels were gone, and he thought that the old ones had moved them, for he saw the old about another nest. He found another, similar nest with three dead blind gray squirrels in it, the old one probably having been killed. 

This makes three gray squirrels' nests that I have seen and heard of (seen two of them) this year, made thus of leaves and sticks open in the trees, and I hear of some more similar ones found in former years, so that I think this mode of nesting their young may be the rule with them here. 

Add to this one red squirrel's nest of the same kind.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 1, 1860


The barberry flower is now in prime, and it is very handsome with its wreaths of flowers. See May 29,  1852 ("Barberry in bloom. “); May 29, 1857 ("I perceive the buttery-like scent of barberry bloom from over the rock,”)

Many low blackberry flowers at Lee's Cliff.  See May 25, 1857 (“Also low blackberry on the rocks a day or two.”); May 28, 1859 (“Low blackberry in bloom on railroad bank.”); June 2, 1852 (“ Low blackberry in bloom. ”); June 5, 1855 (“Low blackberry out in low ground”); June 16, 1858 (“How agreeable and wholesome the fragrance of the low blackberry blossom,”)

Breams' nests begun. See June 6, 1855 (“I notice . . . two or three cleared or light-colored places, apparently bream-nests commenced.”); June 8, 1858 ("I see many breams’ nests”); June 11, 1856 (“See a bream’s nest two and a quarter feet diameter, laboriously scooped out, and the surrounding bottom for a diameter of eight feet (! !) comparatively white and clean”); June 26, 1857 (“Stand over a bream's nest close to the shore ”); July 1, 1852 (“From the bridge I see a bream's nest in soft sand on the edge of deeper water”); July 10, 1853 ("The bream poised over its sandy nest on waving fin”)


Three gray squirrels' nests that I have seen and heard of (seen two of them) this year, made thus of leaves and sticks open in the trees. See April 25, 1860 (“Mr. Stewart tells me that he has found a gray squirrel's nest up the Assabet, in a maple tree. I resolve that I too will find it.”);  May 29, 1860 (“In another white pine near by, some thirty feet up it, I found a gray squirrel's nest, with young”); . See also  January 24, 1856 (“That Wheeler swamp is a great place for squirrels. I observe many of their tracks along the riverside there. The nests are of leaves, and apparently of the gray species.”); March 6, 1856 (“ [A](probably) gray squirrel’s nest high in a pitch pine, and acorn shells about on it. ”); October 23, 1857 (“I see a squirrel's nest in a white pine, recently made, on the hillside near the witch-hazels.”); November 13, 1857 (“ I see, on a white oak on Egg Rock, where the squirrels have lately made a nest for the winter of the dry oak leaves . . . I suspect it is a gray squirrel's nest.”); May 31, 1858 (“go to see a gray squirrel's nest in the oak at the Island point. It is about fifteen feet from the ground,”); November 5, 1860 ([T]here are the nests of several gray squirrels in the trees.”)

Add to this one red squirrel's nest of the same kind. See May 29, 1860 ("Some eighteen feet high in a white pine in a swamp in the oak meadow lot, I climbed to a red squirrel’s nest. . . . This was a mass of rubbish covered with sticks, such as I commonly see (against the main stem), but not so large as a gray squirrel’s . . . I have thus found three squirrels’ nests this year, two gray and one red, in these masses of twigs and leaves and bark exposed in the tree-tops and not in a hollow tree, and methinks this is the rule and not the exception.")

The fall note of the eastern wood pewee.

August 18. 

P. M. — To Fair Haven Hill. 

August 18, 2018

Miss Caroline Pratt saw the white bobolink yesterday where Charming saw it the day before, in the midst of a large flock. [I hear also of a swallow (probably barn swallow), perfectly white, killed by John Flint’s son this year and set up by some one in the North Quarter.]

I go by the place this afternoon and see very large flocks of them, certainly several hundreds in all, and one has a little white on his back, but I do not see the white one. Almost every bush along this brook is now alive with these birds. You wonder where they were all hatched, for you may have failed to find a single nest. I know eight or ten active boys who have been searching for these nests the past season quite busily, and they have found but two at most. Surely but a small fraction of these birds will ever return from the South. Have they so many foes there? Hawks must fare well at present. They go off in a straggling flock, and it is a long time before the last loiterer has left the bushes near you. 

I also see large flocks of blackbirds, blackish birds with chattering notes. It is a fine sight when you can look down on them just as they are settling on the ground with outspread wings, — a hovering flock. 

Having left my note-book at home, I strip off a piece of birch bark for paper. It begins at once to curl up, yellow side out, but I hold that side to the sun, and as soon as it is dry it gives me no more trouble. 

I sit under the oaks at the east end of Hubbard’s Grove, and hear two wood pewees singing close by. They are perched on dead oak twigs four or five rods apart, and their notes are so exactly alike that at first I thought there was but one. One appeared to answer the other, and sometimes they both sung together, — even as if the old were teaching her young. It was not the usual spring note of this bird, but a simple, clear pe-e-eet, rising steadily with one impulse to the end. They were undistinguishable in tone and rhythm, though one which I thought might be the young was feebler. 

In the meanwhile, as it was perched on the twig, it was incessantly turning its head about, looking for insects, and suddenly would dart aside or downward a rod or two, and I could hear its bill snap as it caught one. Then it returned to the same or another perch. 

Heard a nuthatch.[And a week later. Not heard since spring.]

Last evening one of our neighbors, who has just completed a costly house and front yard, the most showy in the village, illuminated in honor of the Atlantic telegraph. I read in great letters before the house the sentence “Glory to God in the highest.” 

But it seemed to me that that was not a sentiment to be illuminated, but to keep dark about. A simple and genuine sentiment of reverence would not emblazon these words as on a signboard in the streets. They were exploding countless crackers beneath it, and gay company, passing in and out, made it a kind of housewarming. I felt a kind of shame for [it], and was inclined to pass quickly by, the ideas of indecent exposure and cant being suggested. 

What is religion? That which is never spoken.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 18, 1858


Miss Caroline Pratt saw the white bobolink yesterday where Charming saw it the day before, in the midst of a large flock. See ("Charming tells me that he saw a white bobolink in a large flock of them to-day. Almost all flowers and animals may be found white") 

I go by the place this afternoon and see very large flocks of them, certainly several hundreds in all . . . . ..Almost every bush along this brook is now alive with these birds. See August 18, 1854 ("The bobolinks alight on the wool-grass.") See also . August 15, 1854 (" I see large flocks of bobolinks on the Union Turnpike");  August 26, 1859  ("Bobolinks fly in flocks more and more.")

You wonder where they were all hatched, for you may have failed to find a single nest. See July 2, 1855 ("Young bobolinks are now fluttering over the meadow, but I have not been able to find a nest ..”); June 26, 1857 ("I must be near bobolinks' nests many times these days. . . but the birds are so overanxious . . .and so shy about visiting their nests while you are there, that you watch them in vain.”)

It was not the usual spring note of this bird, but a simple, clear pe-e-eet, rising steadily with one impulse to the end. See August 18, 1860 (“The note of the wood pewee sounds prominent of late.”); See also August 12, 1858 ("The note of the wood pewee is a prominent and common one now. You see old and young together."); J.J. Audubon ( "...at this season, their notes are heard at a very late hour, as in early spring. They may be expressed by the syllables pe-wee, pettowee, pe-wee, prolonged like the last sighs of a despondent lover, or rather like what you might imagine such sighs to be, it being, I believe, rare actually to hear them.”) and A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, the Eastern Wood-Pewee

Nuthatch not heard since spring. See July 12, 1860 ("Hear a nuthatch in the street. So they breed here."); August 6, 1856 (“Hear a nuthatch.”); September 15, 1858 (“I hear a nuthatch occasionally, but it reminds me of winter.”); September 21, 1854 ("The nuthatch is common in woods and on street.”);  October 20, 1856 (“Think I hear the very faint gnah of a nuthatch. Thus, of late, when the season is declining, many birds have departed, and our thoughts are turned towards winter . . . the nuthatch is heard again”); November 26, 1860 ("I hear the faint note of a nuthatch . . .a phenomenon of the late fall or early winter; for we do not hear them in summer that I remember. ...”); December 1, 1857 ("I thus always begin to hear this bird on the approach of winter, as if it did not breed here, but wintered here.”)

The Atlantic telegraph. On August 16, 1858, the first ever message was sent across the Atlantic by telegraph cable between the west coast of Ireland and Nova Scotia, Canada. Queen Victoria (1819–1901) and United States President James Buchannen (1791–1868) made the inaugural message, which read : “Glory to God in the highest; on earth, peace and good will toward men”

Frogs are strange creatures.

April 18.

April 18, 2018

P. M. – To Hubbard's Grove. 

A dandelion open; will shed pollen to-morrow. 

The Rana sylvatica tadpoles have mostly wiggled away from the ova. 

Put some R. halecina spawn which has flatted out in a ditch on Hubbard’s land. 

I saw in those ditches many small pickerel, landlocked, which appeared to be transversely barred! They bury themselves in the mud at my approach.

Examined the pools and ditches in that neighborhood, i.e. of Skull-Cap Ditch, for frogs. All that I saw distinctly, except two R. fontinalis, were what I have considered young bullfrogs, middling-sized frogs with a greenish-brown back and a throat commonly white or whitish. 

I saw in a deep and cold pool some spawn placed just like that of the R. sylvatica and the R. halecina, – it was in the open field, – and the only frog I could distinguish near it was a middling sized one, or larger, with a yellow throat, not distinctly green, but brown or greenish-brown above, but green along each upper jaw. A small portion of bright golden ring about the eye was to be seen in front. 

In the spring near by, I see two unquestionable R. fontinalis, one much the largest and with brighter mottlings, probably on account of the season. The upper and forward part of their bodies distinct green, but their throats, white or whitish, not yellow. 

There were also two small and dark-colored frogs, yet with a little green tinge about the snouts, in the same spring.

I suspect that all these frogs may be the R. fontinalis, and none of them bullfrogs. Certainly those two unquestionable R. fontinalis had no yellow to throats, and probably they vary very much in the greenness of the back. Those two were not so much barred on the legs as mottled, and in one the mottlings had quite bright halos. They had the yellow segment in front part of eye, as also had the two smallest. Have the bullfrogs this? I doubt if I have seen a bullfrog yet.

I should say, with regard to that spawn, that I heard in the neighboring pool the stertorous tut tut tut like the R. halecina, and also one dump sound.

Frogs are strange creatures. One would describe them as peculiarly wary and timid, another as equally bold and imperturbable. 

All that is required in studying them is patience. You will sometimes walk a long way along a ditch and hear twenty or more leap in one after another before you, and see where they rippled the water, without getting sight of one of them. 

Sometimes, as this afternoon the two R. fontinalis, when you approach a pool or spring a frog hops in and buries itself at the bottom. You sit down on the brink and wait patiently for his reappearance. After a quarter of an hour or more he is sure to rise to the surface and put out his nose quietly without making a ripple, eying you steadily. At length he becomes as curious about you as you can be about him. He suddenly hops straight toward [you], pausing within a foot, and takes a near and leisurely view of you.

Perchance you may now scratch its nose with your finger and examine it to your heart's content, for it is become as imperturbable as it was shy before. You conquer them by superior patience and immovableness; not by quickness, but by slowness; not by heat, but by coldness. 

You see only a pair of heels disappearing in the weedy bottom, and, saving a few insects, the pool becomes as smooth as a mirror and apparently as uninhabited. At length, after half an hour, you detect a frog's snout and a pair of eyes above the green slime, turned toward you, -etc.

It is evident that the frog spawn is not accidentally placed, simply adhering to the stubble that may be nearest, but the frog chooses a convenient place to deposit it; for in the above-named pool there was no stout stubble rising above the surface except at one side, and there the spawn was placed.

It is remarkable how much the musquash cuts up the weeds at the bottom of pools and ditches, – burreed, sweet flags, pontederia, yellow lily, fine, grass like rushes, and now you see it floating on the surface, sometimes apparently where it has merely burrowed along the bottom.

I see where a ditch was cut a few years ago in a winding course, and now a young hedge of alders is springing up from the bottom on one side, winding with the ditch. The seed has evidently been caught in it, as in a trap.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 18, 1858

A dandelion open; will shed pollen to-morrow. See April 18, 1860 ("Melvin has seen a dandelion in bloom. "). See also April 29, 1857 ("I commonly meet with the earliest dandelion set in the midst of some liquid green patch. It seems a sudden and decided progress in the season.")

I suspect that all these frogs may be the R. fontinalis, and none of them bullfrogs. See  April 5, 1858 ("What I call the young bullfrog, about two and a half inches long, — though it has no yellow on throat. It has a bright-golden ring outside of the iris as far as I can see round it. Is this the case with the bullfrog? May it not be a young Rana fontinalis?"); see also Peabody Museum,  Green Frog - Rana clamitans ("often green, however, dorsal coloration can also be brown, black or even grayish. The upper lip is usually bright green, but not always. ... Often confused with the American Bullfrog, which lacks the complete dorsolateral ridge and has a yellow-green belly.") and A Book of Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, Identifying the Green Frog in Spring (Rana Fontinalis)

You conquer them by superior patience and immovableness; not by quickness, but by slowness. See April 15, 1858 ("The naturalist accomplishes a great deal by patience, more perhaps than by activity. He must take his position, and then wait and watch. It is equally true of quadrupeds and reptiles. Sit still in the midst of their haunts. ")

Fish embryos suddenly hatched

April 16

My fish ova in a tumbler has gradually expanded till it is some three sixteenths of an inch in diameter, and for more than a week the embryos have been conspicuously active, hardly still enough to be observed with a microscope. Their tails, eyes, pectoral fins, etc., were early developed and conspicuous. They keep up a regular jerking motion as they lie curved in the egg, and so develop themselves. 

This morning I set them in the sun, and, looking again soon after, found that they were suddenly hatched, and more than half of them were free of the egg. They were nearly a quarter of an inch long, or longer than the diameter of a perfect egg. The substance of the egg-shell seemed to have expanded and softened, and the embryo by its incessant quirking elongated it so that it was able to extend itself at full length. It then almost incessantly kept up a vibratory motion of its tail and its pectoral fins, and every few moments it bunted against the side of the egg, wearing it away and extending it, till it broke through. Sometimes it got its head out first and then struggled many minutes before it escaped completely. 

It was a pretty sight to see them all rising immediately to the surface by means of the tail and pectoral fins, the first vibrating from one twentieth to one thirtieth of an inch, at an angle of about forty-five degrees, and then, ceasing their motions, they steadily settled down again. Think of the myriads of these minnows set free of a warm morning, and rising and falling in this wise in their native element!!

(Some are still in the egg on the 18th.) 

The incessant activity of these minnows, and apparent vigor, are surprising. Already they dart swiftly an inch one side like little pickerel, tender as they are, carrying the yolk with them, which gradually diminishes, as I notice, in a day or two after. They have no snouts yet, or only blunt and rounded ones. I have not detected any general resting even at night, though they often rest on the bottom day or night. 

They are remarkably aroused when placed in the morning sun. This sets them all in motion. Looking at them through a jar between you and the sun, a hundred at once, they reflect the colors of the rainbow, — some purple, others violet, green, etc., etc. It is a wonder how they survive the accidents of their condition. 

By what instinct do they keep together in a school? I think that the spawn could not have been laid long when I found it April 3d, it was so perfect and the embryo so slightly, if at all, developed. That was a sudden very warm day. In that case, they may be hatched in a fortnight. That appeared to have been a general breeding-place for this species of fish. I looked a good while on the 14th, but could find none near home. 

My hylodes in the tumbler will always hop to the side toward the window as fast as I turn it. 

We may think these days of the myriads of fishes just hatched which come rising to the surface. The water swarms with them as with the mosquito.

P. M. — To Conantum. 

The Rana sylvatica spawn at Hubbard's Grove begins to kick free. This is early. I put some in a bottle, which being shaken in my walk, I find the embryos all separated from the ova when I get home. These are now regular little pollywogs and wiggle about in a lively manner when the water is shaken. 

They are chiefly tail and head. They look like the samara of the ash, and in both cases this winged or feather-like tail it is that transports them. I can already see their little feet or fins. 

The bodkin-like bulb, considerably grown, in my tumbler and elsewhere, is probably the water-purslane. I see it floating free and sending out many rootlets, on pools and ditches. In this way it spreads itself. 

The earliest red maple I can see in this walk is well out, on the Hubbard Bridge causeway. Probably some was yesterday. 

I sat a long time by the little pool behind Lee's, to see the hylodes. Not one was heard there; only the skater insects were slightly rippling the surface, pursuing one another and breeding amid the grass. The bottom is covered with pretty proserpinaca. 

At length I see one hylodes with heels up, burying itself at the bottom. How wary they are! After nearly half an hour I see one sitting out on a blade of the floating purple grass, but down he goes again. They see or hear you three or four rods off. They are more active toward night.

H. D. Thoreau,  Journal, April 16, 1858


I think that the spawn could not have been laid long when I found it April 3d, it was so perfect and the embryo so slightly, if at all, developed. For more than a week the embryos have been conspicuously active, as they lie curved in the egg. This morning I  found that they were suddenly hatched, and more than half of them were free of the egg. See April 3, 1858 (“When returning, we discovered, on the south side of the river, just at the old crossing-place from the Great Meadows, north of the ludwigia pool, a curious kind of spawn. It was white, each ovum about as big as a robin-shot or larger, with mostly a very minute white core, no black core, and these were agglutinated together in the form of zigzag hollow cylinders, two or three inches in diameter and one or two feet long, looking like a lady's ruff or other muslin work, on the bottom or on roots and twigs of willow and button-bush, where the water was two or three feet deep. The greater part lay on the bottom, looking like a film, these cylinders being somewhat coiled about there. When you took it up, the two sides fell together, and it was flat in your hand like the leg of a stocking. In one place there were a dozen very large red-bellied and brown-backed leeches in it, evidently battening on it. ); April 7, 1858 ("I brought home t... two kinds of spawn in a pail. ... The other (probably fish) spawn is seen to be arranged in perfect hexagons; i. e., the ova so impinge on each other; but where there is a vent or free side, it is a regular arc of a circle. Is not this the form that spheres pressing on each other equally on all sides assume? I see the embryo, already fish-like (?), curved round the yolk, with a microscope.”); April 14, 1858 (“My Rana halecina spawn in tumbler is now flatted out and begins to betray the pollywog form. I had already noticed a little motion in it from time to time, but nothing like the incessant activity of the embryo fishes. . . .At Ed. Hoar's in the evening.. . .. with his microscope I see the heart beating in the embryo fish and the circulations distinctly along the body.”); April 22, 1858 (“The spawn of April 18th is gone! It was fresh there and apparently some creature has eaten it.”)April 24, 1858 (“I find that my fish ova were not all killed some weeks ago in the firkin, as I supposed, for many that were accidentally left in it have hatched, and they bore the cold of last night better than those hatched earlier and kept in the larger vessel (tub), which froze but thinly, while the firkin froze a quarter of an inch thick last night.”); April 27, 1858 (“I noticed yesterday that again the newly laid spawn at the cold pool on Hubbard's land was all gone, and that in the larger pool south of it was much diminished. What creature devours it? ”); April 27, 1858 (“My young fishes had the pectoral fins and tail very early developing, but not yet can I detect any other fins with my glass. They had mouths, which I saw them open as soon as hatched, and more and more a perch-like head. I think that with Hoar's microscope I detected two dorsal fins such as the perch have. ”); April 30, 2018 ("I carry the rest of my little fishes, fifteen or twenty, to the cold pool in Hubbard's ground. They are about a quarter-inch long still, and have scarcely increased in length.”); June 16, 1858 ("Looking into Hubbard's Pool, I at length see one of the minims which I put into it. I brought the last here April 30th. It is now a little perch about an inch and a quarter long; it was then about a quarter of an inch long. I can now see the transverse bars a rod off. It is swimming actively round and round the pool, but avoids the quite shallow water of the edges, so it does not get landlocked or lost in the weedy overflowed edges. I put twenty or thirty into this pool in all. They grow very fast, then, at last.”)

The earliest red maple I can see in this walk is well out. See April 24, 1854 ("The first red maple blossoms — so very red over the water — are very interesting");. April 26, 1855 ("The blossoms of the red maple (some a yellowish green) are now most generally conspicuous and handsome scarlet crescents over the swamps.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Red Maple

I sat a long time by the little pool behind Lee's, to see the hylodes. Not one was heard there; . . How wary they are! See March 31, 1857 (" If you do not listen carefully for its first note, you probably will not hear it, and, not having heard that, your ears become used to the sound, so that you will hardly notice it at last, however loud and universal.. . . The shrill peeping of the hylodes locates itself nowhere in particular.")

My hylodes in the tumbler will always hop to the side toward the window as fast as I turn it. See  April 15, 1858 ("Catch a peeper at Hayden’s Pool. I suspect it may have been a female . . . It was a pale fawn-color out of water, nine tenths of an inch long, marked with dusky like this though not so distinctly. It could easily climb up the side of a tumbler, and jumped eighteen inches at once.")

Wood frog pollywogs.

April 11. 

P. M. – To Lee's Cliff. 

The black spheres (rather dark brown) in the Rana sylvatica spawn by Hubbard's Grove have now opened and flatted out into a rude broad pollywog form. (This was an early specimen.) 

Yesterday saw moles working in a meadow, throwing up heaps. 

I notice at the Conantum house, of which only the chimney and frame now stand, a triangular mass of rubbish, more than half a bushel, resting on the great mantel-tree against an angle in the chimney. It being mixed with clay, I at first thought it a mass of clay and straw mortar, to fill up with, but, looking further, I found it composed of corn-cobs, etc., and the excrement probably of rats,  and of pure clay, looking like the cells of an insect. Either the wharf rat or this country rat. They had anciently chosen this warm place for their nest and carried a great store of eatables thither, and the clay of the chimney, washing down, had incrusted the whole mass over. 

So this was an old rats’ nest as well as human nest, and so it is with every old house. The rats’ nest may have been a hundred and fifty years old. Wherever you see an old house, there look for an old rats’ nest. In hard times they had, apparently, been compelled to eat the clay, or it may be that they love it. It is a wonder they had not set the house on fire with their nest. 

Conant says this house was built by Rufus Hosmer's great-grandfather. 

Slippery elm. 

Crowfoot (Ranunculus fascicularis) at Lee's since the 6th, apparently a day or two before this. 

Mouse-ear, not yet. 

What that large frog, bullfrog-like but with brown spots on a dirty-white throat, in a pool on Conantum? 

See thimble-berry and rose bush leafing under the rocks.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 11, 1858

The black spheres (rather dark brown) in the Rana sylvatica spawn. See April 4, 1857 "Caught a croaking frog . . .Nearby was its spawn, in very handsome spherical masses of transparent jelly, two and a half to three inches in diameter, suspended near the surface of some weed, as goldenrod or aster, and consisting of globules about a third of an inch in diameter, with a black or dark centre as big as a large shot. Only these black centres were visible at a little distance in the water, and so much the more surprising and interesting is the translucent jelly when you lift it to the light."); April 4, 1858 ("Go to the cold pond-hole south of J. P. Brown’s, to hear the croaking frogs.. ..[T]hey have dropped their spawn on the twigs.. . .. I see one or two pairs coupled, now sinking, now rising to the surface. The upper one, a male, quite dark brown and considerably smaller than the female, which is reddish--such part of her as I can see--and has quite distinct dark bars on its posterior extremities, while I cannot discern any on the male. .. . To my surprise the female was the ordinary light-reddish-brown wood frog (R. sylvatica), with legs distinctly barred with dark, while the male, whose note alone I have heard, methinks, was not only much smaller, but of a totally different color, a dark brown above with dark-slate colored sides, and the yet darker bars on its posterior extremities a. . . There was a good deal of spawn firmly attached to the brush close to the surface, and, as usual, in some lights you could not see the jelly, only the core.")

No doubt on almost every such warm bank now you will find a snake lying out.

April 2.

P. M. – To yew and R. W. E.'s Cliff. 

April 2, 2018

At Hubbard’s Grove I see a woodchuck. He waddles to his hole and then puts out his gray nose within thirty feet to reconnoitre.

It is too windy, and the surface of the croaker pool is too much ruffled, for any of the croakers to be lying out, but I notice a large mass of their spawn there well advanced.

At the first little sluiceway just beyond, I catch a large Rana halecina, which puffs itself up considerably, as if it might be full of spawn. I must look there for its spawn. It is rather sluggish; cannot jump much yet. It allows me to stroke it and at length take it up in my hand, squatting still in it.

Who would believe that out of these dry and withered banks will come violets, lupines, etc., in profusion?

At the spring on the west side of Fair Haven Hill, I startle a striped snake. It is a large one with a white stripe down the dorsal ridge between two broad black ones, and on each side the last a buff one, and then blotchy brown sides, darker toward tail; beneath, greenish-yellow. This snake generally has a pinkish cast.

There is another, evidently the same species but not half so large, with its neck lying affectionately across the first, — I may have separated them by my approach, – which, seen by itself, you might have thought a distinct species. The dorsal line in this one is bright-yellow, though not so bright as the lateral ones, and the yellow about the head; also the black is more glossy, and this snake has no pink cast.

No doubt on almost every such warm bank now you will find a snake lying out. The first notice I had of them was a slight rustling in the leaves, as if made by a squirrel, though I did not see them for five minutes after. The biggest at length dropped straight down into a hole, within a foot of where he lay. They allowed me to lift their heads with a stick four or five inches without stirring, nor did they mind the flies that alighted on them, looking steadily at me without the slightest motion of head, body, or eyes, as if they were of marble; and as you looked hard at them, you continually forgot that they were real and not imaginary.

The hazel has just begun to shed pollen here, perhaps yesterday in some other places. This loosening and elongating of its catkins is a sufficiently pleasing sight, in dry and warm hollows on the hillsides. It is an unexpected evidence of life in so dry a shrub.

On the side of Fair Haven Hill I go looking for bay wings, turning my glass to each sparrow on a rock or tree. At last I see one, which flies right up straight from a rock eighty [or] one hundred feet and warbles a peculiar long and pleasant strain, after the manner of the skylark, methinks, and close by I see another, apparently a bay-wing, though I do not see its white in tail, and it utters while sitting the same subdued, rather peculiar strain.

See how those black ducks, swimming in pairs far off on the river, are disturbed by our appearance, swimming away in alarm, and now, when we advance again, they rise and fly up-stream and about, uttering regularly a crack cr-r-rack of alarm, even for five or ten minutes, as they circle about, long after we have lost sight of them. Now we hear it on this side, now on that.

The yew shows its bundles of anthers plainly, as if it might open in four or five days.

Just as I get home, I think I see crow blackbirds about a willow by the river.

It is not important that the poet should say some particular thing, but should speak in harmony with nature. The tone and pitch of his voice is the main thing. It appears to me that the wisest philosophers that I know are as foolish as Sancho Panza dreaming of his Island. Considering the ends they propose and the obstructions in their path, they are even. One philosopher is feeble enough alone, but observe how each multiplies his difficulties, – by how many unnecessary links he allies himself to the existing state of things. He girds himself for his enterprise with fasting and prayer, and then, instead of pressing forward like a light-armed soldier, with the fewest possible hindrances, he at once hooks himself on to some immovable institution, as a family, the very rottenest of them all, and begins to sing and scratch gravel towards his objects. Why, it is as much as the strongest man can do decently to bury his friends and relations without making a new world of it. But if the philosopher is as foolish as Sancho Panza, he is also as wise, and nothing so truly makes a thing so or so as thinking it so.

Approaching the side of a wood on which were some pines, this afternoon, I heard the note of the pine warbler, calling the pines to life, though I did not see it. It has probably been here as long as I said before.

Returning, I saw a sparrow-like bird flit by in an orchard, and, turning my glass upon it, was surprised by its burning yellow. This higher color in birds surprises us like an increase of warmth in the day.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 2, 1858

A woodchuck waddles to his hole and then puts out his gray nose. See April 2, 1856 ("A woodchuck has been out under the Cliff, and patted the sand, cleared out the entrance to his burrow.”)

A bay wing warbles a peculiar long and pleasant strain. Close by I see another, and it utters while sitting the same subdued, rather peculiar strain. See  April 13, 1856 (“I hear a bay-wing on the railroad fence sing, the rhythm somewhat like, char char (or here here), che che, chip chip chip (fast), chitter chitter chitter chit (very fast and jingling), tchea tchea (jinglingly). It has another strain, considerably different, but a second also sings the above. Two on different posts are steadily singing the same, as if contending with each other, notwithstanding the cold wind”); See also April 8, 1859 (“ See the first bay-wing hopping and flitting along the railroad bank, but hear no note as yet.”); April 12, 1857 (“I think I hear the bay-wing here.”); April 13, 1855(“See a sparrow without marks on throat or breast, running peculiarly in the dry grass in the open field beyond, and hear its song, and then see its white feathers in tail; the bay-wing”);  April 15, 1859 (“The bay-wing now sings — the first I have been able to hear”). See April 13, 1854 ("Did I see a bay-wing?"); May 12, 1857 ("As the bay-wing sang many thousand years ago, so sang he to-night.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Bay-Wing Sparrow

It is not important that the poet should say some particular thing, but should speak in harmony with nature. See  May 23, 1853 (“The poet must bring to Nature the smooth mirror in which she is to be reflected.”)

Approaching the side of a wood on which were some pines, this afternoon, I heard the note of the pine warbler, calling the pines to life, though I did not see it. See April 2, 1853 ("The edge of the wood is not a plane surface, but has depth. Hear and see what I call the pine warbler, --vetter vetter vetter vetter vet, -- the cool woodland sound.”) See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, the Pine Warbler

I break my way into the midst of Holden Swamp to get a specimen of Kalmia glauca leaf

November 15. 

The obvious falling of leaves (i.e., not to include the fall of the pitch pines and larches and the complete fall of the birches, white willows, etc.) ended about the first of November. 

A very few bright-colored leaves on small shrubs, such as oak sprouts, black cherry, blueberry, etc., have lingered up to this time in favorable places. By the first of November, or at most a few days later, the trees generally wear, in the main, their winter aspect, their leaves gradually falling until spring. 

P. M. — To Holden Swamp and C. Miles Swamp. 

Where the earth has been freshly exposed and so lies light, it is now heaved up and white with asbestos like crystals two or three inches long, which sink and are crunched by my feet. Cold pools in shady woods and under the north sides of walls are now skimmed over. Ice a quarter of an inch thick. I see its large flaky crystals like low undulations, a mosaic of slightly concave, perhaps triangular pieces. The paths whose surface was frozen each night are now thawing and wet. 

The water of the brook beyond Hubbard’s Grove, where it spreads out a little, though not frozen, is clear, cold, and deserted of life. There are no water-bugs nor skaters on it. Rennie, in “ Library of Entertaining Knowledge,” says they are seen all winter on some pools in England, i. e. the Gyrinus natator. 

I see no ants on the great ant-hills, and methinks I have not for three weeks at least. There is but little insect-life abroad now. You wonder what nourishment the cattle can extract from the withered and bleached grass. This cold blast has swept the water-bugs from the pools. My walk is the more lonely when I perceive that there are no ants now upon their hillocks in field or wood. These are deserted mounds. They have commenced their winter's sleep. 

I break my way into the midst of Holden Swamp to get a specimen of Kalmia glauca leaf. The surface is composed of great porous tussocks, or hummocks, of sphagnum, fifteen or twenty inches high or more, about the stems of blueberry bushes, choke-berry, water andromeda, swamp-pink, spruce, etc., etc., in which my feet sink five or six inches, and my shoes are filled with the rubbish. The water is frozen solid in the leaves of the pitcher plants. This is the thickest ice I’ve seen. This water was most exposed in the cool swamp. I part the scraggy bushes with my hands and press my way through them. I come out covered with the fragments of lichens and rotten twigs and sphagnum.

Going by my owl-nest oak, I saw that it had broken off at the hole and the top fallen, but, seeing in the cavity some leaves, I climbed up to see what kind of nest it was and what traces of the owls were left. Having shinned up with some difficulty to the top of this great. stump some fifteen or eighteen feet high, I took out the leaves slowly, watching to see what spoils had been left with them. Some were pretty green, and all had evidently been placed there this fall. 

When I had taken all out with my left hand, holding on to the top of the stump with my right, I looked round into the cleft, and there I saw, sitting nearly erect at the bottom in one corner, a little Mus leucopus, panting with fear and with its large black eyes upon me. I held my face thus within seven or eight inches of it as long as I cared to hold on there, and it showed no sign of retreating. When I put in my hand, it merely withdrew downward into a snug little nest of hypnum and apparently the dirty-white wool-like pappus of some plant as big as a batting-ball. 

Wishing to see its tail, I stirred it up again, when it suddenly rushed up the side of the cleft, out over my shoulder and right arm, and leaped off, falling down through a thin hemlock spray some fifteen or eighteen feet to the ground, on the hillside, where I lost sight of it, but heard it strike. It will thus make its nest at least sixteen feet up a tree, improving some cleft or hollow, or probably bird's nest, for this purpose. These nests, I suppose, are made when the trees are losing their leaves, as those of the squirrels are. 

At C. Miles Swamp, I see that the larches have finished falling since the 8th (say the 12th ?). 

Find plenty of Andromeda Polifolia there, where you can walk dry-shod in the spruce wood, together with Kalmia glauca. The former is linear, about twice as long and two thirds as broad as the latter, alternate mucronate, round-stemmed. The Kalmia glauca has fewer leaves now, opposite, glossy above; a very sharp two-edged twig, the edges springing from the base of the leaves and decussating like them, so that when the twig is held up to the light it appears alternately thicker and thinner. This plant is commonly seen now with only a few narrow and erect young leaves in a tuft near the end of the twigs, but in many cases older, broader, and nearly horizontal ones, half a dozen of them along the last four or five inches of the twig. The andromeda is most white beneath; the other is more greenish. 

The white willows, which retain many of their leaves even yet, are of a peculiar buff (?) or fawn (?) color. 

Raspberry shoots, too, have their bloom like the thimble-berry, but they are not so rank nor smooth. 

Of the evergreen trees described by Loudon, methinks these it would be worth the while to have on one's premises: — 

• Pinus sylvestris, Scotch pine or fir; the most valuable pine of Europe. Looks like our pitch pine. 
• Pinus Pinaster, which is planted on the sands in France. 
• Abies excelsa, the lofty or Norway spruce fir. 
• Perhaps Picea pectinata, the comb-like-leaved sil ver fir. 
• The Scotch larch, which is not indigenous in Britain, but on the mountains of the middle of Europe. I have, 

Of western American trees: — 

• The Pinus Lambertiana, the gigantic or Lambert's pine, Columbia River, one hundred and fifty to two hundred feet high, twenty to near sixty in circumference, allied closely to P. Strobus. 
• Abies Douglassii, northwestern America, one hundred to one hundred and eighty feet high. 
• Picea grandis, great silver fir, northern California, one hundred and seventy to two hundred feet high.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 15, 1857


Going by my owl-nest oak . . .   See May 26, 1855 ("At Kalmia Swemp ... At the screech owl’s nest I now find two young slumbering."); May 7, 1855 ("I observe a middling-sized red oak standing a little aslant on the side-hill over the swamp, with a pretty large hole in one side about fifteen feet from the ground, where apparently a limb on which a felled tree lodged had been cut some years before and so broke out a cavity. . . .This is a very fit place for hawks and owls to dwell in, — the thick woods just over a white spruce swamp, in which the glaucous kalmia grows.").

Find plenty of Andromeda Polifolia there, where you can walk dry-shod in the spruce wood, together with Kalmia glauca. See December 6, 1856 ("I can walk through the spruce swamp now dry-shod, amid the water andromeda and Kalmia glauca.")

The Kalmia glauca has fewer leaves now, opposite, glossy above; a very sharp two-edged twig ... See January 9, 1855 ("Make a splendid discovery this afternoon. Walking through Holden’s white spruce swamp, I see peeping above the snow-crust some slender delicate evergreen shoots . . .the Kalmia glauca var.rosmarinifolia.Very delicate evergreen opposite linear leaves, strongly revolute, somewhat reddish-green above, the blossom-buds quite conspicuous. . . .The pretty little blossom-buds arranged crosswise in the axils of the leaves as you look down on them.")

.At C. Miles Swamp, I see that the larches have finished falling since the 8th (say the 12th?). See November 1, 1857 ("The larches are at the height of their change."); November 4, 1855 ("Larches are now quite yellow, — in the midst of their fall.") November 5, 1857 ("The pitch pines generally have lost their leaves now, and the larches are fast falling.”); November 16, 1858 (“Probably the larch about fallen.”)

We are baptized into nature.

May 25.

P. M. — With Ricketson to my boat under Fair Haven Hill. 

In Hubbard's Grove, hear the shrill chattering of downy woodpeckers, very like the red squirrel's tche tche. 

Thermometer at 87° at 2.30 p. m. 

It is interesting to hear the bobolinks from the meadow sprinkle their lively strain along amid the tree-tops as they fly over the wood above our heads. It resounds in a novel manner through the aisles of the wood, and at the end that fine buzzing, wiry note. 

The black spruce of Holden's, apparently yesterday, but not the 23d. 

What a glorious crimson fire as you look up to the sunlight through the thin edges of the scales of its cones! So intensely glowing in their cool green beds! while their purplish sterile blossoms shed pollen on you. 

Took up four young spruce and brought them home in the boat. 

After all, I seem to have distinguished only one spruce, and that the black, judging by the cones, — perhaps the dark and light varieties of it, for the last is said to be very like the white spruce. The white spruce cones are cylindrical and have an entire firm edge to the scales, and the needles are longer. 

Though the river is thus high, we bathe at Cardinal Shore and find the water unexpectedly warm and the air also delicious. Thus we are baptized into nature.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, May 25, 1857

What a glorious crimson fire as you look up to the sunlight through the thin edges of the scales of its cones! . . . while their purplish sterile blossoms shed pollen on you. See May 21, 1857 ("The staminate buds of the black spruce are quite a bright red."); May 22, 1856 ("The red and cream-colored cone-shaped staminate buds of the black spruce will apparently shed pollen in one to three days?"); June 10, 1855 (" The white spruce cones are now a rich dark purple, more than a half inch long.")

Thus we are baptized into nature. See May 23, 1857 ("I wade in the swamp for the kalmia, amid the water andromeda and the sphagnum, scratching my legs with the first and sinking deep in the last. The water is now gratefully cool to my legs, so far from being poisoned in the strong water of the swamp. It is a sort of baptism for which I had waited. ")