This country is so new that species of fishes and birds and quadrupeds inhabit it which science has not yet detected.

November 27. 

Those barren hollows and plains in the neighborhood of Walden are singular places. I see many which were heavily wooded fifteen or thirty years ago now covered only with fine sedge, sweet-fern, or a few birches, willows, poplars, small wild cherries, panicled cornels, etc. 

They need not amount to hollows at all: many of them are glades merely, and all that region is elevated, but the surrounding higher ground, though it may be only five or ten feet higher, will be covered with a good growth. 

One should think twice before he cut off such places. Perhaps they had better never be laid bare, but merely thinned out. We do not begin to understand the treatment of woodland yet. 

On such spots you will see various young trees—and some of them which I have named —dead as if a fire had run through them, killed apparently by frost. 

I find scarlet oak acorns like this

in form not essentially different from those of the black oak, except that the scales of the black stand out more loose and bristling about the fruit. So all scarlet oak acorns do not regularly taper to a point from a broad base, and Emerson represents but one form of the fruit. The leaf of this was not very deeply cut, was broad for its length. 

I got seventeen more of those little bream of yesterday. As I now count, the dorsal fin-rays are 9-10 (Girard says 9-11), caudal 17 (with apparently 4 short on each side), anal 3-11, pectoral 11, ventral 1-5. They have about seven transverse dark bars, a vertical dark mark under eye, and a dark spot on edge of operculum. They appear to be the young of the Pomotis obesus, described by Charles Girard to the Natural History Society in April, ’54, obtained by Baird in fresh water about Hingham and Charles River in Holliston. 

I got more perfect specimens than the bream drawn above. They are exceedingly pretty seen floating dead on their sides in a bowl of water, with all their fins spread out. From their size and form and position they cannot fail to remind you of coins in the basin.

The conspicuous transverse bars distinguish them at once. The dorsal fin consists of two parts, the foremost of shorter stiff, spiny rays, the other eleven at least half as long again and quite flexible and waving, falling together like a wet rag out of water. So, with the anal fin, the three foremost rays are short (and spiny, as I see, and one of each of the ventral (according to Girard, and to me). These foremost rays in each case look like slender raking masts, and their points project beyond the thin web of the fin, whose edge looks like the ropes which stretch from masthead to masthead, loopwise. 

The stiff and spiny foremost part of the fins evidently serves for a cut-water which bears the brunt of any concussion and perhaps may serve for weapons of offense, while the more ample and gently waving flexible after part more especially guides the motions of the fish. 

The transverse bars are continued across these parts of the dorsal and anal fins, as the markings of a turtle across its feet or flippers; methinks the fins of the minnows are peculiarly beautiful. 

How much more remote the newly discovered species seems to dwell than the old and familiar ones, though both inhabit the same pond! Where the Pomotis obesus swims must be a new country, unexplored by science. The seashore may be settled, but aborigines dwell unseen only thus far inland. This country is so new that species of fishes and birds and quadrupeds inhabit it which science has not yet detected. The water which such a fish swims in must still have a primitive forest decaying in it.



H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 27, 1858

I got seventeen more of those little bream of yesterday. See November 26, 1858 (" a great many minnows about one inch long . . . shaped like bream, but had the transverse bars of perch.")

So all scarlet oak acorns do not regularly taper to a point from a broad base. See September 12, 1854 ("[White oak acorns] are small and very neat light-green acorns, with small cups, commonly arranged two by two close together, often with a leaf growing between them"); January 19, 1859 ("Gathered a scarlet oak acorn . . .with distinct fine dark stripes or  rays, such as a Quercus ilicifolia has.");  September 18, 1858 ("the small shrub oak . . .with its pretty acorns striped dark and light alternately. [The black oak acorns also slightly marked thus.]") also  September 30, 1854 ("The conventional acorn of art is of course of no particular species, but the artist might find it worth his while to study Nature’s varieties again.")

This country is so new that species of fishes and birds and quadrupeds inhabit it which science has not yet detected. See September 9, 1856 ("The skin and skull of a panther (Felis concolor) (cougar, catamount, painter, American lion, puma) . . . gave one a new idea of our American forests and the vigor of nature here.").

November 27. See A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,  November 27

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,  

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau

 "A book, each page written in its own season, 

out-of-doors, in its own locality."

The indistinct trail of wild animals — foxes, etc. — and sportsmen.

September 19

Sunday. P. M. -— To Cassandra Ponds. 

We go through Sedge Hollow. See a small hole, perhaps a skunk’s, in that hollow, and, about the mouth, fragments of a hornets’ or wasps’ nest. I knew that foxes were said to tear in pieces these nests for the sake of the grubs or old hornets left in them. Perhaps the skunk does. 

These dry, sedgy hollows are peculiar and interesting to me. The fine, thick sedge makes a soft bed to recline on, and is recurved and lodging like a curly head. These dry hollows, side by side with the deeper and wet ones, are surrounded by hazel bushes and panicled andromeda instead of alders and willows. There is this sort of analogy to the wet ones, or ponds. In the lowest part, even here, I perceive that a different and coarser kind of sedge grows. 

Along the middle and bottom of the hollows is the indistinct trail of wild animals — foxes, etc. — and sportsmen. C. thinks this might be called Fox Path.

As I stand on the shore of the most westerly Cassandra Pond but one, I see in the air between me and the sun those interesting swarms of minute light-colored gnats, looking like motes in the sun. These may be allied to the winter gnat of Kirby and Spence. Do they not first appear with cooler and frosty weather, when we have had a slight foretaste of winter? Then in the clear, cool air they are seen to dance. These are about an eighth of an inch long, with a greenish body and two light-colored plumes in front; the wings not so long as the body. So I think they are different from those over the river in the spring. I see a dozen of these choirs within two or three rods, their centres about six feet above the surface of the water andromeda. These separate communities are narrow horizontally and long vertically, about eighteen inches wide and densest in the middle, regularly thinning to nothing at the edges. These individuals are constantly gyrating up and down, cutting figures of 8 like the water-bug, but keeping nearly about the same place. It is to me a very agreeable reminder of cooler weather. 

Hear a chewink’s chewink. But how ineffectual is the note of a bird now! We hear it as if we heard it not, and forget it immediately. In spring it makes its due impression, and for a long time will not have done echoing, as it were, through our minds. It is even as if the atmosphere were in an unfavorable condition for this kind of music. Every musician knows how much depends on this. 

Going through low woods I see a white, dusty or mealy-looking mildew on the leaves, — oaks, etc., — the effects of the dog-days or mould season.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 19, 1858

These dry, sedgy hollows are peculiar and interesting to me. Surrounded by hazel bushes and panicled andromeda there is this sort of analogy to the wet ones, or ponds. See November 24, 1857 ("You have clear open water, but shallow; then, in course of time, a shallow lake with much sedge standing in it; then, after a while, a dense andromeda bed with blueberry bushes and perhaps a wet border of sedge (as here at present); and finally, a maple swamp.")

I see in the air between me and the sun those interesting swarms of minute light-colored gnats, looking like motes in the sun. These may be allied to the winter gnat. See October 19, 1856 ("I noticed, two or three days ago, after one of those frosty mornings, half an hour before sunset of a clear and pleasant day, a swarm, — were they not of winter gnats ? — between me and the sun like so many motes,. . .Each insect was acting its part in a ceaseless dance, rising and falling a few inches while the swarm kept its place. Is not this a forerunner of winter? "); March 19, 1858 ("Are not these the winter gnat? They keep up a circulation in the air like water-bugs on the water. ") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Fuzzy Gnats (tipulidæ)

Hear a chewink’s chewink. But how ineffectual is the note of a bird now! See September 21, 1856 ("I hear of late faint chewink notes in the shrubbery, as if they were meditating their strains in a subdued tone against another year.")

I go across lots like a hunting dog.

August 10

Sunday. 

The weather is fair and clear at last. The dog-days over at present, which have lasted since July 30th. 

P. M. — To Fair Haven Hill and Walden.

Fragrant everlasting, maybe some days. 

Rhus copallina not yet for two or three days. 

The Pycnanthemum incanum, the handsomest of the pycnanthemums, grows also at the west end the Knoll with the R. copallina. All the upper leaves are equally hoary there in the light. The corymbs are an inch across, and the flowers large and very prettily purple-spotted. They are swarming with great wasps of different kinds, and bees.

Hear the wood thrush still.

I go across lots like a hunting dog. With what tireless energy and abandonment they dash through the brush and up the sides of hills! I meet two white foxhounds, led by an old red one. How full of it they are! How their tails work! They are not tied to paths; they burst forth from the thickest shrub oak lot, and immediately dive into another as the fox did.

There are more varieties of blackberries between the low and the high than I take notice of. Vide that kind in the Well Meadow Field.

The fine (early sedge?) grass in the frosty hollows about Walden (where no bushes have sprung up) looks like an unkempt head. 

Vernonia, how long? 

The river has been rising all day. It is between two and a half and three feet higher than ten days ago. Even the white umbels of the sium are drowned, except here and there where they stand over the water. It is within nine and a half inches of the top of Hoar's wall at 6 p. m. 

The meadows have quite a springlike look, yet the grass conceals the extent of the flood. It appears chiefly where it is mown. Yet a quarter part as much rain would have raised the river more in the spring, so much of it was soaked up by the thirsty earth. 

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 10, 1856

Fragrant everlasting, maybe some days. See August 4, 1851 ("I scent the sweet-scented life-everlasting, which is half expanded."); August 4, 1852. ("I smell the fragrant life-everlasting, now almost out; another scent that reminds me of the autumn."); August 11, 1858 ("I smell the fragrant everlasting concealed in the higher grass and weeds there, some distance off. It reminds me of the lateness of the season.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Aromatic Herbs

The Pycnanthemum incanum, the handsomest of the pycnanthemums, . . .swarming with great wasps of different kinds: See July 31, 1856 ("Again I am attracted by the hoary, as it were misty morning light on the base of the upper leaves of the velvety Pycnanthemum incanum. It is the most interesting of this genus here. ) [Pycnanthemum incanum, with the common name hoary mountain-mint, wild basil or hoary basil, is a herbaceous perennial in the mint family. Pycnanthemum means "dense flower-clusters" in Greek, and the flowers are favored by butterflies, moths, and some species of wasps. ~ wikipedia]

Hear the wood thrush [sic] still.  See August 10, 1854 ("The woods are comparatively still at this season"); August 12, 1851("I hear a wood thrush even now, long before sunrise . . . inviting the day once more to enter his pine woods."); August 12, 1854 ("Have not heard a wood thrush since last week of July."); August 14, 1853 ("I hear no wood thrushes for a week"); August 18, 1852 ("The woods are very still. I hear only a faint peep or twitter from one bird, then the never-failing wood thrush, it being about sunrise");  September 3, 1852 ("Of late I have not heard the wood thrush."); September 29, 1855 ("At Natural History Library saw Dr. Cabot, who says that he has heard either the hermit, or else the olivaceous, thrush sing,—very like a wood thrush, but softer."); October 22, 1857 ("I see what I call a hermit thrush on the bushes by the shore of Flint’s Pond; pretty tame . . . Can it be the Turdus olivaceus of Giraud [Swainson's Thrush]?")

I go across lots like a hunting dog. See April 22, 1852 ("A strange dog accompanies us today, a hunting dog, gyrating about us at a great distance, beating every bush and barking at the birds, with great speed, gyrating his tail too all the while. Our dog sends off a partridge with a whir, far across the open field and the river, like a winged bullet. This stranger dog has good habits for a companion, he keeps so distant. He never trusts himself near us, though he accompanies us for miles.").

There are more varieties of blackberries between the low and the high than I take notice of.  See August 10, 1853  ("August, royal and rich . . .  It is glorious to see those great shining high blackberries, now partly ripe there, bending the bushes in moist, rocky sprout-lands, down amid the strong, bracing scented, tender ferns, which you crush with your feet ") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Blackberries

August 10. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau , August 10

The weather is fair 

and clear at last. The dog-days 

over at present.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, I go across lots like a hunting dog.

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 © 2009-2026

https://tinyurl.com/hdt-560810 

That fine, dry, wiry wild grass in hollows in woods and sprout-lands

June 11

What if we feel a yearning to which no breast answers? I walk alone. My heart is full. Feelings impede the current of my thoughts. I knock on the earth but no friend appears, and perhaps none is dreaming of me. 

Now (September 16, ’55), after four or five months of invalidity and worthlessness, I begin to feel some stirrings of life in me. 

Is not that carex, Pennsylvanica-like, with a long spike (one inch long by one half-inch wide), C. bullata? 

What a difference between one red-wing blackbird’s egg and another’s! C. finds one long as a robin’s, but narrow, with large black spots on larger end and on side, on or between the bushes by riverside; another much shorter, with a large black spot on the side. Both pale-blue ground. 

The early willows at the bridge are apparently either S. discolor or eriocephala, or both. 

I have noticed the green oak-balls some days. 

Now observe the dark evergreen of June. 

The target leaf is eaten above. 

In order to get the deserted tanager’s nest at the top [of] a pitch pine which was too weak to climb, we carried a rope in our pockets and took three rails a quarter of a mile into the woods, and there rigged a derrick, by which I climbed to a level with the nest, and I could see if there were eggs in it. I have the nest. Tied the three tops together and spread the bottoms. 

Carex cephalophora (?) on Heywood’s Peak. 

That fine, dry, wiry wild grass in hollows in woods and sprout-lands, never mown, is apparently the C. Pennsylvanica, or early sedge. 

There are young bluebirds.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 11, 1855

No friend appears, and perhaps none is dreaming of me. See March 28, 1856 ("Farewell, my friends, my path inclines to this side the mountain, yours to that."): February 8, 1857 ("I know that in love there is no mistake, and that every estrangement is well founded."); November 3, 1858 ("How long we will follow an illusion! On meeting that one whom I call my friend, I find that I had imagined something that was not there.")

What a difference between one red-wing blackbird’s egg and another’s! See May 20, 1853 ("Probably a red-wing blackbird's nest, of grass, hung between two button-bushes; whitish eggs with irregular black marks"); May 25, 1855 ("Red-wing’s nest with four eggs — white, very faintly tinged with (perhaps) green and curiously and neatly marked with brown-black spots and lines on the large end.”); June 1, 1857 ("A red-wing's nest, four eggs, low in a tuft of sedge in an open meadow. What Champollion can translate the hieroglyphics on these eggs? It is always writing of the same character, though much diversified. While the bird picks up the material and lays the egg, who determines the style of the marking?"); June 12, 1855 ("At mouth of Mill Brook, a red-wing’s nest tied on to that thick, high grass and some low willow, eighteen inches from ground, with four eggs variously marked, full of young.”) ; June 28, 1855 ('Two red-wings’ nests, four eggs and three —one without any black marks.")  See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Red-wing in Spring

The tanager’s nest at the top of a pitch pine. See June 8, 1855 ("A tanager’s nest in the topmost forks of a pitch pine about fifteen feet high, by Thrush Alley; the nest very slight, apparently of pine needles, twigs, etc.; can see through it; bird on.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Scarlet Tanager

That fine, dry, wiry wild grass in hollows in woods and sprout-lands, never mown, is apparently the C. Pennsylvanica, or early sedge. See July 10, 1860 ("I was exhilarated by the mass of cheerful bright-yellowish light reflected from the sedge (Carex Pennsylvanica) growing densely on the hillsides laid bare within a year or two there. It is of a distinct cheerful yellow color even this overcast day, even as if they were reflecting a bright sunlight, though no sun is visible")

Young bluebirds. See  June 13, 1852 ("I hear the feeble plaintive note of young bluebirds, just trying their wings or getting used to them");  June 13, 1858 ("I hear the peculiar notes of young bluebirds that have flown. "); July 12, 1856 ("Hear the plaintive note of young bluebirds.") See also  A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Young Birds

June 11. See A Book of the Seasons by Henry Thoreau, June 11

What a difference

between one red-wing blackbird’s

egg and another’s! 

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, 

That fine, dry, wiry wild grass in hollows in woods and sprout-lands

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

https://tinyurl.com/hdt-550611