Going down-town this morning, I am surprised by the rich strain of the purple finch from the elms. Three or four have arrived and lodged against the elms of our street, which runs east and west across their course, and they are now mingling their loud and rich strains with that of the tree sparrows, robins, bluebirds, etc.
The hearing of this note implies some improvement in the acoustics of the air. It reminds me of that genial state of the air when the elms are in bloom.
They sit still over the street and make a business of warbling. They advertise me surely of some additional warmth and serenity. How their note rings over the roofs of the village! You wonder that even the sleepers are not awakened by it to inquire who is there, and yet probably not another than myself in all the town observes their coming, and not half a dozen ever distinguished them in their lives. And yet the very mob of the town know the hard names of Germanians or Swiss families which once sang here or elsewhere.
About 9 A. M., C. and I paddle down the river.
It is a remarkably warm and pleasant day. The shore is alive with tree sparrows sweetly warbling, also black birds, etc. The crow blackbirds which I saw last night are hoarsely clucking from time to time.
Approaching the island, we hear the air full of the hum of bees, which at first we refer to the near trees. It comes from the white maples across the North Branch, fifteen rods off. We hear it from time to time, as we paddle along all day, down to the Bedford line. There is no pause to the hum of the bees all this warm day. It is a very simple but pleasing and soothing sound, this susurrus, thus early in the spring.
When off the mouth of the Mill Brook, we hear the stertorous tut tut tut of frogs from the meadow, with an occasional faint bullfrog-like er er er intermingled. I land there to reconnoitre.
The river is remarkably low, quite down to summer level, and there is but very little water anywhere on the meadows. I see some shallow lagoons (west of the brook), whence the sound comes.
There, too, are countless painted turtles out, around on the banks and hummocks left by the ice. Their black and muddy backs shine afar in the sun, and though now fifteen to twenty rods off, I see through my glass that they are already alarmed, have their necks stretched out and are beginning to slip into the water, where many heads are seen.
Resolved to identify this frog, one or two of whose heads I could already see above the surface with my glass, I picked my way to the nearest pool. Close where I landed, an R. halecina lay out on some sedge. In went all the turtles immediately, and soon after the frogs sank to the bottom, and their note was heard only from more distant pools.
I stood perfectly still, and ere long they began to reappear one by one, and spread themselves out on the surface. They were the R. halecina. I could see very plainly the two very prominent yellow lines along the sides of the head and the large dark ocellated marks, even under water, on the thighs, etc. Gradually they begin to recover their voices, but it is hard to say at first which one of the dozen within twenty feet is speaking. They begin to swim and hop along the surface toward each other. Their note is a hard dry tut tut tut tut, not at all ringing like the toad’s, and produced with very little swelling or motion of the throat, but as much trembling of the whole body; and from time to time one makes that faint somewhat bullfrog-like er er er. Both these sounds, then, are made by one frog, and what I have formerly thought an early bullfrog note was this.
This, I think, is the first frog sound I have heard from the river meadows or anywhere, except the croaking leaf-pool frogs and the hylodes. They are evidently breeding now like toads, and probably are about the water as exclusively as the toads will soon be.
This sound we continue to hear all day long, especially from the broad meadows in Bedford. Close at hand a single one does not sound loud, yet it is surprising how far a hundred or thousand croaking ( ? ) at once can be heard. It comes borne on the breeze from north over the Bedford meadows a quarter of a mile off, filling the air. It is like the rattling of a wagon along some highway, or more like a distant train on a railroad, or else of many rills emptying in, or more yet like the sound of a factory, and it comes with an echo which makes it seem yet more distant and universal. At this distance it is a soft and almost purring sound, yet with the above-named bullfrog-like variation in it.
Sometimes the meadow will be almost still; then they will begin in earnest, and plainly excite one an other into a general snoring or eructation over a quarter of a mile of meadow. It is unusually early to hear them so numerously, and by day, but the water, being so very low and shallow on the meadows, is unusually warm this pleasant day. This might be called the Day of the Snoring Frogs, or the Awakening of the Meadows.
Probably the frost is out of the meadows very early this year. It is a remarkable spring for reptile life.
It remains now to detect the note of the palustris, wood frog, and fontinalis. I am not sure but I heard one kind of bullfrog’s note along the river once or twice. I saw several middle-sized frogs with green noses and dark bodies, small, bullfrog-like (? ?), sitting along the shore.
At what perhaps is called the Holt just below N. Barrett’s, many grackles and red-wings together flit along the willows by our side, or a little ahead, keeping up a great chattering, while countless painted turtles are as steadily rustling and dropping into the water from the willows, etc., just ahead.
We land at Ball's Hill and eat our dinners. It is so warm we would fain bathe. We seek some shade and cannot easily find it. You wonder that all birds and insects are not out at once in such a heat. We find it delicious to take off our shoes and stockings and wade far through the shallows on the meadow to the Bedford shore, to let our legs drink air.
How pretty the white fibrous roots of the eriocaulon, floating in tufts on the meadow, like beaded chains!
In the hazy atmosphere yesterday we could hardly see Garfield's old unpainted farmhouse. It was only betrayed by its elms. This would be the right color for painters to imitate. When the sun went into a cloud we detected the outlines of the windows only.
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. This must be frog or fish spawn.
If frog-spawn, I think it must be that of the Rana halecina [No. Vide April 5th. Is it not fish-spawn?], the only ones fairly awake along the river; but how are leeches propagated? There was a great abundance of it, many bushels, for at least a dozen rods along the shore, and it must afford food to many creatures. The consistency of a jelly we eat. We saw one perch there. Some on the ruts was quite up to the surface, but most lower. When you had taken up a handful and broken it, on dropping it into the water it recovered its form for the most part. I noticed that the fine willow root-fibres and weeds, potamogeton, etc., there were thickly covered with a whitish film or fuzz, an eighth to a quarter of an inch deep, or long, apparently connected with this spawn, which made them look like plants covered with frost in a winter morning, though it was a duller white; but out of water you did not perceive anything. Probably this was the milt.
When I have been out thus the whole day and spend the whole afternoon returning, it seems to me pitiful and ineffectual to be out as usual only in the afternoon, – as if you had come late to a feast, after your betters had done. The afternoon seems coarse and reversed, or at best a long twilight, after the fresh and bright forenoon.
The gregariousness of men is their most contemptible and discouraging aspect. See how they follow each other like sheep, not knowing why. Day & Martin's blacking was preferred by the last generation, and also is by this. They have not so good a reason for preferring this or that religion as in this case even. Apparently in ancient times several parties were nearly equally matched. They appointed a committee and made a compromise, agreeing to vote or believe so and so, and they still helplessly abide by that. Men are the inveterate foes of all improvement. Generally speaking, they think more of their hen-houses than of any desirable heaven. If you aspire to anything better than politics, expect no cooperation from men. They will not further anything good. You must prevail of your own force, as a plant springs and grows by its own vitality.
Hear the Rana halecina in the evening also, from my window.
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| Rana halecina I could see very plainly the two very prominent yellow lines along the sides of the head and the large dark ocellated marks, even under water, on the thighs, etc. |
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 3, 1858
We hear the air full of the hum of bees, which . . .comes from the white maples across the North Branch, fifteen rods off. . .It is a very simple but pleasing and soothing sound, this susurrus, thus early in the spring. See April 6, 1854 ("I am surprised to find so much of the white maples already out. . . . They resound with the hum of honey-bees, heard a dozen rods off, and you see thousands of them about the flowers against the sky. . . .This susurrus carries me forward some months toward summer --"); April 6, 1853 ("Notice a white maple with almost all the staminate flowers above or on the top, most of the stamens now withered, before the red maple has blossomed. Another maple, all or nearly all female. The staminiferous flowers look light yellowish, the female dark crimson”); April 6,1855 ("A very few white maple stamens stand out already loosely enough to blow in the wind.") White maple stamens stand out already loosely enough to blow in the wind."); April 7, 1861 (" The white maple at the bridge not quite out.”); April 8, 1855 (I find some anthers effete and dark, and others still mealy with pollen. There are many in this condition. The crimson female stigmas also peeping forth. It evidently began to shed pollen yesterday.”); April 9, 1852 ("The maple by the bridge in bloom”);
This might be called the Day of the Snoring Frogs, or the Awakening of the Meadows. See April 5, 1855 ("Hear from one half-flooded meadow that low, general, hard, stuttering tut tut tut of frogs,—the awakening of the meadow.”); April 5, 1858 ("The woods resound with the one [R. sylvatica], and the meadows day and night with the other [R. halecina], so that it amounts to a general awakening of the pools and meadows. "); April 5, 1860 (" a very faint distant ring of toads."); April 9, 1853 (“The whole meadow resounds, probably from one end of the river to the other, this evening, with this faint, stertorous breathing. It is the waking up of the meadows.");
Rana halecina (Lithobates pipiens) – Northern Leopard Frog. See April 8, 1852 ("To-day I hear the croak of frogs in small pond-holes in the woods"); August 22, 1854 ("There are now hopping all over this meadow small Rana palustris, and also some more beautifully spotted halecina or shad frogs.");April 13, 1855 ("The small croaking frogs are now generally heard in all those stagnant ponds or pools in woods floored with leaves, which are mainly dried up in the summer."); April 15, 1855 ("That general tut tut tut tut, or snoring, of frogs on the shallow meadow heard first slightly the 5th. There is a very faint er er er now and then mixed with it."); April 13, 1856 ("As I go by the Andromeda Ponds, I hear the tut tut of a few croaking frogs. . ."); June 17, 1856 ("Went to Rev. Horace James’s reptiles (Orthodox). . . . He distinguished the Rana halecina in the alcohol by more squarish (?) spots."); March 31,1857 ("The dry croaking and tut tut of the frogs"); April 4, 1857 ("Caught a croaking frog in some smooth water in the railroad gutter. Above it was a uniform (perhaps olive?) brown, without green, and a yellowish line along the edge of the lower jaws.. . .What frog can it be?"); September 6, 1857 ("I observe to-day, away at the south end of our dry garden, a moist and handsome Rana halecina. It is the only frog that I ever see in such localities. He is quite a traveller."); April 1, 1858 ("A Rana halecina on the bank"); April 2, 1858 ("I catch a large Rana halecina, which puffs itself up “); April 5, 1858 (“I go to the meadow at the mouth of the Mill Brook to find the spawn of the R. halecina. They are croaking and coupling there by thousands")
We could hardly see Garfield's old unpainted farmhouse. See August 26, 1858 ("A weather-painted house and barn, with an orchard by its side, in midst of a sandy field surrounded by green woods, with a small blue lake on one side. A sympathy between the color of the weather-painted house and that of the lake and sky. . . .The weather-painted house. This is the New England color.")
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 © 2009-2022
