The uses of the cyanometer .

May 4.

Cattle are going up country.

Hear the tull-lull of the chickadee (?) [white-throated sparrow].

The currant in bloom.

The Canada plum just ready, probably to-day.

8 A. M.-To Walden and Cliffs.

The sound of the oven-bird.

Caterpillar nests two or three inches in diameter on wild cherries; caterpillars one third of an inch long.

The Vaccinium Pennsylvanicum appeared yesterday.

The vacillans, resinosum ( ? ), and early high blueberry will bloom in a few days.

Vide Cerasus pumila by shanty path, and wild red ditto, as early.

The white birch leaves are beginning to expand and are shining with some sticky matter. I must attend to their fragrance.  In a warm place on the Cliffs one of their catkins shows its anthers, the golden pendant.

The woods and paths next them now ring with the silver jingle of the field sparrow, the medley of the brown thrasher, the honest qui vive of the chewink, or his jingle from the top of a low copse tree, while his mate scratches in the dry leaves beneath; the black and white creeper is hopping along the oak boughs, head downward, pausing from time to time to utter its note like a fine, delicate saw-sharpening; and ever and anon rises clear over all the smooth, rich melody of the wood thrush.

Could that have been a jay? I think it was some large, uncommon woodpecker that uttered that very loud, strange, cackling note.

The dry woods have the smell of fragrant everlasting.

I am surprised by the cool drops which now, at 10 o'clock, drop from the flowers of the amelanchier, while other plants are dry, as if these had attracted more moisture.

The white pines have started.

The indigo-bird and mate; dark throat and light beneath, and white spot on wings, which is not described; a hoarse note, and rapid the first two or three syllables,-twe twe twee, dwelling on the last, or twe twe twe twee-e, or as if an rin it, tre, etc., not musical.

The myrtle-bird, which makes me think the more that I saw the black and yellow warbler on Sunday.

I find apparently two varieties of the amelanchier, the first I noticed, with smooth reddish delicate leaves and somewhat linear petals and loose racemes, petals sometimes pinkish; the second to-day, perhaps a little later than the first, leaves light-colored and downy and petals broader and perhaps not quite so long as the first, racemes more crowded. I am not sure that this is the variety oblongifolium of Gray.[This appears to be the Pyrus ovalis or swamp pyrus of Bigelow and Willdeming.]

It is stated in the Life of Humboldt that he proved "that the expression, 'the ocean reflects the sky,' was a purely poetical, but not a scientifically correct one, as the sea is often blue when the sky is almost totally covered with light white clouds.” 

He used Saussure's cyanometer even to measure the color of the sea. This might probably be used to measure the intensity of the color of blue flowers like lupines at a distance.

Humboldt speaks of its having been proved that pine pollen falls from the atmosphere.


H. D. Thoreau, Journal, May 4, 1853.

Cattle are going up country. See May 10, 1852 ("This Monday the streets are full of cattle being driven up-country, — cows and calves and colts."); May 8, 1854 ("I hear the voices of farmers driving their cows past to their up-country pastures now.");; May 6, 1855 ("Road full of cattle going up country.”); May 7, 1856 ("For a week the road has been full of cattle going up country ")

The sound of the oven-bird. See May 1, 1852 ("I think I heard an oven-bird just now, - wicher wicher whicher wich"): May 7, 1853 ("The woods now begin to ring with the woodland note of the oven-bird.")

The myrtle-bird, which makes me think the more that I saw the black and yellow warbler on Sunday. See May 1, 1853 ("Was it not the black and yellow or spotted warbler I saw by the Corner Spring? . . . I think it much too dark for the myrtle-bird."); May 10, 1853 (" Is it the redstart? I now see one of these. The first I have distinguished. And now I feel pretty certain that my black and yellow warbler of May 1st was this.")

I find apparently two varieties of the amelanchier, . . . ; the second to-day, perhaps a little later than the first. See May 4, 1855 ("The second amelanchier, , , begin to leaf to-day.") See also April 26, 1860 ("The Amelanchier Botryapium . . . will apparently bloom tomorrow or next day."); May 1, 1853 ("Is not the Botryapium our earliest variety of amelanchier?"); May 5, 1860 ("Amelanchier Botryapium flower in prime."); May 8, 1854 ("The early Amelanchier Botryapium overhangs the rocks and grows in the shelves, with its loose, open-flowered racemes, curving downward, of narrow-petalled white flowers, red on the back and innocently cherry-scented"); May 9, 1852 ("The first shad-bush, June- berry, or service-berry (Amelanchier Canadensis), in blossom."); May 13, 1852 ("The amelanchiers are now the prevailing flowers in the woods and swamps and sprout-lands, a very beautiful flower, with its purplish stipules and delicate drooping white blossoms. The shad-blossom days in the woods."); May 13, 1855 ("Saw an amelanchier with downy leaf (apparently oblongifolia) on the southeast edge of Yellow Birch Swamp, about eighteen feet high and five or six inches in diameter, —a clump of them about as big as an apple tree).May 21, 1857 ("It seems to be a common variety of the variety Botryapium and quite downy, though not so downy as those of the oblongifolia.")

The indigo-bird and mate; dark throat and light beneath, and white spot on wings. See June 9, 1857 ("In the sprout-land beyond the red huckleberry, an indigo-bird, which chips about me as if it had a nest there. This is a splendid and marked bird, high-colored as is the tanager, looking strange in this latitude. Glowing indigo."); July 21, 1851 ("a perfect embodiment of the darkest blue that ever fills the valleys at this season")

The black and white creeper is hopping along the oak boughs, head downward, pausing from time to time to utter its note. See May 11, 1856 ("The black and white creeper also is descending the oaks, etc., and uttering from time to time his seeser seeser seeser. "); May 12, 1855 ("Watch a black and white creeper from Bittern Cliff, a very neat and active bird, exploring the limbs on all sides and looking three or four ways almost at once for insects. Now and then it raises its head a little, opens its bill, and, without closing it, utters its faint seeser seeser seeser.");  May 30, 1857  ("In the midst of the shower, though it was not raining very hard, a black and white creeper came and inspected the limbs of a tree before my rock, in his usual zigzag, prying way, head downward often, and when it thundered loudest, heeded it not.") See alsoA Book of the Seasons,   by Henry Thoreau, The Black and White Creeper

He used the instrument also to measure the colour of the sea, which is generally green, and here he also found changes which often turned the sea during fine weather from the deepest indigo blue to the darkest green, or slate grey, without any atmospheric change being perceptible. He proved also that the expression “the ocean reflects the sky", was a purely poetical, but not a scientifically correct one, as the sea is often blue when the sky is almost totally covered with light white clouds

Lives of the Brothers Humbold 46 (1852) See Atlas Obscura ("In 1802, Humboldt took the tool on an ascent of the Andean mountain Chimborazo, where he set a new record, at the 46th degree of blue, for the darkest sky ever measured.") See also James Jeans “Why the Sky is Blue” (1931)

Humboldt speaks of its having been proved that pine pollen falls from the atmosphere:

Organic life is active everywhere on the surface of the earth, in its precipices and its atmospheric altitudes; the great ocean contains minute microscopic life far into the polar circles of the arctic ocean. It has been proved by direct observation, that "in the eternal night of oceanic depths," as Humboldt expresses himself, more animal than vegetable life is developed, while on terra firma, the vegetable principle prevails; yet the bulk of the latter far exceeds that of the former, although there is less land than sea. Modern naturalists believe they have discovered infusoria in the air. Humboldt considers this discovery still doubtful, but not impossible; he thinks that just as well as it has been proved that pine pollen falls from the atmosphere, it is possible that little infusoria may be raised upwards in vapour, and be retained floating in the air for some time.* Ehrenberg has also discovered that the misty dust rain which clouds the atmosphere near the Cape Verd islands, 380 leagues from the African coast, consists of the remains of eighteen different silicious, polygastric infusoria ~Lives of the Brothers Humboldt, (1852)by Hermann Klencke, Gustav Schlesier

The slender black birches, with their catkined twigs gracefully drooping on all sides, express more life than most trees

March 6. 

Sunday. P. M. — To Yellow Birch Swamp. 

We go through the swamp near Bee-Tree, or Oak, Ridge, listening for blackbirds or robins and, in the old orchards, for bluebirds. 

Found between two of the little birches in the path (where they grow densely), in Indigo-bird Sprout-land, a small nest suspended between one and two feet above the ground, between two of the little birches. This is where I have seen the indigo-bird in summer, and the nest apparently answers to Wilson's account of that bird's, being fastened with saliva to the birch on each side. 

Wilson says it is "built in a low bush . . . suspended between two twigs, one passing up each side." This is about the diameter of a hair-bird's nest within, composed chiefly of fine bark-shreds looking like grass and one or two strips of grape-vine bark, and very securely fastened to the birch on each side by a whitish silk or cobweb and saliva. It is thin, the lining being prob ably gone. 

There is a very picturesque large black oak on the  the Bee-Tree Ridge, of this form: 

The genista is not evergreen, having turned brown, though it is still quite leafy. I could not find a single green shoot. It is correctly represented in Loudon's "Arboretum," in '44, as "a deciduous under-shrub." Yet in his "Encyclopaedia," in '55, it is represented as "an evergreen shrub." 

Measured a thorn which, at six inches from the ground, or the smallest place below the branches, — for it branches soon, — was two feet three inches in circumference.

Cut off a barberry on which I counted some twenty-six rings, the broadest diameter being about three and a half inches. Both these were on the west side the Yellow Birch Swamp. 

The slender black birches, with their catkined twigs gracefully drooping on all sides, are very pretty. Like the alders, with their reddish catkins, they express more life than most trees. Most trees look completely at rest, if not dead, now, but these look as if the sap must be already flowing in them, — and in winter as well. 

In woodland roads you see where the trees which were bent down by ice, and obstructed the way, were cut off the past winter; their tops lie on one side.

H.D. Thoreau, Journal, March 6, 1859

Yellow Birch Swamp.  This is also known as Fever-bush Swamp, Rattlesnake Fern Swamp and Botrychium Swamp,   See note to July 13, 1857 ("Rattlesnake Fern Swamp'); February 18, 1854 ("Yellow Birch Swamp"); July 10, 1857 ("He found, about a week ago, the Botrychium Virginianum in bloom, about the bass in Fever-bush Swamp.”); September 2, 1857 ("In the botrychium swamp, where the fever-bush is the prevailing underwood "); September 16, 1857 ("Botrychium Swamp"); .May 4, 1859 ("Am struck by the beauty of the yellow birches, now fairly begun to be in bloom, at Yellow Birch, or Botrychium, Swamp.");.

Measured a thorn which, at six inches from the groundwas two feet three inches in circumference. See September 2, 1857 ("Measured the thorn at Yellow Birch Swamp. At one foot from ground it is a foot and ten inches in circumference.")

The slender black birches, with their catkined twigs gracefully drooping on all sides. See May 8, 1853 ("The catkins of the black birch gracefully drooping at the ends of the twigs bent down by their weight, conspicuous at a distance.") 

The alders, with their reddish catkins. See March 6, 1853 ("the alder catkins were relaxed and began to lengthen and open, and by the second day to drop their pollen;")

See also: A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, I Have Seen Signs of the Spring:

• Listening for the bluebird
• Catkins expanding

Already the elms with denser foliage begin to hang dark against the glaucous mist.

July 13. 

Very hot weather. 

P. M. — To Rattlesnake Fern Swamp. 

I hear before I start the distant mutterings of thunder in the northwest, though I see no cloud. The haymakers are busy raking their hay, to be ready for a shower. They would rather have their grass wet a little than not have the rain. 

I keep on, regardless of the prospect. 

See the indigo-bird still, chirping anxiously on the bushes in that sprout-land beyond the red huckleberry. 

Vaccinium Pennsylvanicum berries pretty thick there, and one lass is picking them with a dipper tied to her girdle. The first thought is, What a good school this lass goes to! 

Rattlesnake fern just done. 

I make haste home, expecting a thunder-shower, which we need, but it goes by. The grass by the roadside is burnt yellow and is quite dusty. This, with the sultry air, the parched fields, and the languid inhabitants, marks the season. Already the elms with denser foliage begin to hang dark against the glaucous mist. 

The price of friendship is the total surrender of yourself; no lesser kindness, no ordinary attentions and offerings will buy it. There is forever that purchase to be made with that wealth which you possess, yet only once in a long while are you advertised of such a commodity. 

I sometimes awake in the night and think of friendship and its possibilities, a new life and revelation to me, which perhaps I had not experienced for many months. Such transient thoughts have been my nearest approach to realization of it, thoughts which I know of no one to communicate to. 

I suddenly erect myself in my thoughts, or find myself erected, infinite degrees above the possibility of ordinary endeavors, and see for what grand stakes the game of life may be played. 

Men, with their indiscriminate attentions and ceremonious good-will, offer you trivial baits, which do not tempt; they are not serious enough either for success or failure. 

I wake up in the night to these higher levels of life, as to a day that begins to dawn, as if my intervening life had been a long night. 

I catch an echo of the great strain of Friendship played somewhere, and feel compensated for months and years of commonplace. I rise into a diviner atmosphere, in which simply to exist and breathe is a triumph, and my thoughts inevitably tend toward the grand and infinite, as aeronauts report that there is ever an upper current hereabouts which sets toward the ocean. If they rise high enough they go out to sea, and be hold the vessels seemingly in mid-air like themselves. It is as if I were serenaded, and the highest and truest compliments were paid me. 

The universe gives me three cheers. 

Friendship is the fruit which the year should bear; it lends its fragrance to the flowers, and it is in vain if we get only a large crop of apples without it. 

This experience makes us unavailable for the ordinary courtesy and intercourse of men. We can only recognize them when they rise to that level and realize our dream.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 13, 1857

Rattlesnake fern swamp. This is Fever-bush Swamp, which HDT today names “Rattlesnake Fern Swamp”. On September 16, 1857 HDT begins to refer to it as Botrychium Swamp. It is the same as his Yellow Birch Swamp See May 5, 1859 and  Vascular Flora of Concord, Massachusetts ( "Rattlesnake Fern")

The grass by the roadside is burnt yellow and is quite dusty. This, with the sultry air, the parched fields, and the languid inhabitants, marks the season. See July 13, 1860 ("For a week past. . the season has had a more advanced look, from the reddening, imbrowning, or yellowing, and ripening of many grasses")

Already the elms with denser foliage begin to hang dark . . .See July 7, 1851 (". . .the heavy shadows of the elms covering the ground with their rich tracery . . . like chandeliers of darkness.")

I sometimes awake in the night and think of friendship and its possibilities. . . See June 11, 1855 ("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.")

July 13. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, July 13.

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 © 2009-2021

Three steps into the swamp barelegged.

June 9. 

June 9, 2017

A large fog. 

Celastrus scandens, maybe a day. 

Triosteum, apparently several days (not at all June 1st). 

Both kinds of sap, yellow birch and black, are now, in some bottles, quite aromatic and alike; but this year, methinks, it has a more swampy taste and musty, and most of the bottles are merely sour. 

P. M. — To Violet Sorrel and Calla Swamp. 

A peetweet's nest near wall by Shattuck's barn, Merrick's pasture, at base of a dock; four eggs just on the point of being hatched. A regular nest of weak stubble set in ground. 

In the sprout-land beyond the red huckleberry, an indigo-bird, which chips about me as if it had a nest there. This is a splendid and marked bird, high-colored as is the tanager, looking strange in this latitude. Glowing indigo. It flits from top of one bush to another, chirping as if anxious. Wilson says it sings, not like most other birds in the morning and evening chiefly, but also in the middle of the day. In this I notice it is like the tanager, the other fiery-plumaged bird. They seem to love the heat. It probably had its nest in one of those bushes. 

The calla is generally past prime and going to seed. I had said to Pratt, "It will be worth the while to look for other rare plants in Calla Swamp, for I have observed that where one rare plant grows there will commonly be others." Carrying out this design, this afternoon, I had not taken three steps into the swamp barelegged before I found the Naumbergia thyrsiflora in sphagnum and water, which I had not seen growing before. (Channing brought one to me from Hubbard's Great Meadow once.) It is hardly beginning yet. (In prime June 24th. Vide June 24th.)

The water in this Calla Swamp feels cold to my feet, and perhaps this is a peculiarity of it; on the north side a hill. 

When I was at the yellow-throat's nest (as above) I heard that very loud sharp pheet pheet of a wood- chuck (?) or rabbit which I have often heard before. 

The hellebore was very much eaten off about the wall whence it proceeded. It was kept up from time to time while I stayed.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 9, 1857

June 9, 2017

I had not taken three steps into the swamp barelegged . . . See August 30, 1856 (“I left my shoes and stockings on the bank far off and waded barelegged through rigid andromeda.and other bushes a long way, to the soft open sphagnous centre of the swamp. ”)

Both kinds of sap, yellow birch and black, are now, in some bottles, quite aromatic and alike; but this year, methinks, it has a more swampy taste . . . See  April 16, 1857 ("Get birch sap, — two bottles yellow birch and five of black birch"). Also see April 12, 1856 ("According to Rees’s Cyclopaedia, the sap of the birches is fermentable in its natural state.");   April 11, 1856 ("I have now got four kinds of birch sap. . . .I do not think I could distinguish the different kinds of birch with my eyes shut. I drank some of the black birch wine with my dinner for the name of it; but, as a steady drink, it is only to be recommended to outdoor men and foresters. ");  May 27, 1856 ("My three kinds of birch sap have now become more acid, especially the white and canoe birch. The black birch is milder and more agreeable. With sugar it is an agreeable drink. . . ."); June 21, 1856 ("My canoe birch wine smells and tastes like mead considerably. All my birch wines are now more acid and very good indeed with sugar. Am surprised to see it effervesce, all white with white sugar only, like a soda water."); July 26, 1856 ( "Drank up the last of my birch wine. It is an exceedingly grateful drink now, especially the aromatic, mead like, apparently checkerberry-flavored one, which on the whole I think must be the black birch. It is a surprisingly high-flavored drink, thus easily obtained, and considering that it had so little taste at first. Perhaps it would have continued to improve.")

June 9. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, June 9

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 © 2009-2021

The cedar swamp, source of Assabet.

June 17
(avesong)

June 17. 

Go to Blake’s. Indigo-bird on his trees. 

A. M. — Ride with him and Brown and Sophia round a part of Quinsigamond Pond into Shrewsbury. 

The southerly end of the pond covered for a great distance with pads of yellow and white lily. Measured one of the last: nine and seven eighths inches long by nine and six eighths, with sharp lobes, etc., and a. reddish petiole. Small primrose well out; how long?

The cedar swamp, source of Assabet, must be partly in Grafton, as well as Westboro near railroad, according to a farmer in Shrewsbury. 

P. M. —Went to Rev. Horace James’s reptiles (Orthodox). He had, set up, a barred owl, without horns and a little less than the cat owl. Also a large lobe-footed bird which I think must have been a large grebe, killed in Fitchburg. 

He distinguished the Rana halecina in the alcohol by more squarish (?) spots. Showed me the horned frog (?), (or toad ?); also alive in bottle, with moss and water, the violet-colored salamander (S. venenosa) with yellow spots (five or six inches long), probably same I found in stump at Walden; and, in spirits, smaller, the S. erythronota, with a conspicuous red back. What looked like mine, or the common one in springs here, was Triton niger. I think he said Holbrook made the water ones tritons and land ones salamanders. Another small one, all red, with spots; another with a line of red spots on each side; and others. 

He finds a variety of Emys guttata with striated scales (mentioned by Holbrook and Storer). Saw a common box turtle shell with initials in sternum. One thought that what ever was cut in the scale was renewed in the new scale. Saw, in spirits, the Heterodon platyrhinus from Smithfield, R. I., flat-snouted, somewhat like a striped snake; and a very small brown snake. James gave me some of the spawn of a shellfish from a string of them a foot long.

At Natural History Rooms, a great cone from a southern pine and a monstrous nutshell from the East Indies (?); seed of the Lodoicea Sechellarum, Seychelles Islands.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 17, 1856

 The cedar swamp, source of Assabet, must be partly in Grafton, as well as Westboro near railroad, according to a farmer in Shrewsbury. Compare See June 10, 1853 ("We continued on, round the head of “Cedar Swamp,” and may say that we drank at the source of it or of Saw Mill Brook, where a spring is conducted through a hollow log to a tub for cattle. . . .What shall this great wild tract over which we strolled be called? ") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Cedar Swamps

A morning walk.

July 21.

8 A.M. - I thought to walk this forenoon instead of this after noon, for I have not been in the fields and woods much of late except when surveying. To go forth before the heat is intolerable, and see what is the difference between forenoon and afternoon.

It seems there is a little more coolness in the air; there is still some dew, even on this short grass in the shade of the walls and woods; and a feeling of vigor the walker has.

There are few sounds but the slight twittering of swallows, and the springy note of the sparrow in the grass or trees, and a lark in the meadow (now at 8 A.M.), and the cricket under all to ally the hour to night. Day is, in fact, about as still as night.

It threatens to be a hot day, and the haymakers are whetting their scythes in the fields, where they have been out since 4 o'clock. By 2 o'clock it will be warmer and hazier, obscuring the mountains, and the leaves will curl, and the dust will rise more readily.

Every herb is fresher now, has recovered from yesterday's drought. The cooler air of night still lingers in the fields, as by night the warm air of day.

9 A.M. On Conantum. – Berries are now thick enough to pick. A quarter of a mile is distance enough to make the atmosphere look blue now. It was fit that I should see an indigo-bird here, concerned about its young, a perfect embodiment of the darkest blue that ever fills the valleys at this season. The meadow-grass reflecting the light has a bluish cast also. I eat these berries as simply and naturally as thoughts come to my mind.

10 A. M. - The air grows more and more blue, making pretty effects when one wood is seen from another through a little interval. 

The white lily has opened. 

Some pigeons here are resting in the thickest of the white pines during the heat of the day, migrating, no doubt. 

Flies buzz and rain about my hat. 

The mountains can scarcely be seen for the blue haze, - only Wachusett and the near ones.

The dusty mayweed now blooms by the roadside. The rough hawkweed, too,, resembling in its flower the autumnal dandelion. The Antirrhinum Canadense, Canada snapdragon, in the Corner road; and the ragged orchis on Conantum.

I now return through Conant's leafy woods by the spring, whose floor is sprinkled with sunlight.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 21, 1851

The mountains can scarcely be seen for the blue haze, - only Wachusett and the near ones. See August 19, 1854 (“There is such a haze we see not further than our Annursnack, which is blue as a mountain”)