A Book of the Seasons, Signs of the Spring: The gobbling of turkeys

No mortal is alert enough to be present at the first dawn of the spring. 

Henry Thoreau, March 17, 1857

For two or three days 

I have heard the first spring sound –

 gobbling of turkeys.

March 20, 1856

March 20, 2016

January 30. There are certain sounds invariably heard in warm and thawing days in winter, such as the crowing of cocks, the cawing of crows,  and sometimes the gobbling of turkeys. January 30, 1860

February 23. I have seen signs of the spring. February 23, 1857

March 2. We listen to the February cock-crowing and turkey-gobbling as to a first course, or prelude. March 2, 1859

March 19. I hear turkeys gobble. This too, I suppose, is a spring sound. March 19, 1858

March 20. For two or three days I have heard the gobbling of turkeys, the first spring sound, after the chickadees and hens, that I think of. March 20, 1856

March 22.  The phenomena of an average March . . . About twenty-nine migratory birds arrive (including hawks and crows), and two or three more utter their spring notes and sounds, as nuthatch and chickadee, turkeys, and woodpecker tapping. March 22, 1860

March 23. I spend a considerable portion of my time observing the habits of the wild animals, my brute neighbors. By their various movements and migrations they fetch the year about to me . . . But when I consider that the nobler animals have been exterminated here, — the cougar, panther, lynx, wolverene, wolf, bear, moose, deer, the beaver, the turkey, etc., etc., — I cannot but feel as if I lived in a tamed, and, as it were, emasculated country. March 23, 1856 

*****

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

• A Change in the Air
• A Sunny Nook in Spring
• Alder and Willow Catkins Expanding
• Braided Ripples of Melting Snow Shine in the Ruts
• Bright Blue Water
• Buzzing Flies
•  The crowing of cocks, the cawing of crows
• Ducks Afar, Sailing on the Meadow
• Frogs, and Turtles Stirring
• My greatcoat on my arm
• Greening Grasses and Sedges
• Insects and Worms Come Forth and are Active
• Listening for the Bluebird
• March is famous for its Winds
• Mosses Bright Green
• My Greatcoat on my Arm
• Perla-like Insects Appear
• Red Maple Sap Flows
• Ripples made by Fishes
• The Anxious Peep of the Early Robin
• The Crowing of Cocks, the Cawing of crows
• The Gobbling of Turkeys
• The Grackle Arrives
• The Hawks of March
• The Note of the Dark-eyed Junco Going Northward
• The Red-Wing Arrives
• The Skunk Cabbage Blooms
• The Softened Air of these Warm February Days
• The Song Sparrow Sings
• The Spring Note of the Chickadee
• The Spring Note of the Nuthatch
• The Striped Squirrel Comes Out
• Walking without Gloves
• Woodpeckers Tapping

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, Signs of the Spring: 

The gobbling of turkeys

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 ©  2009-2023

https://tinyurl.com/HDTurkey

A Book of the Seasons: January 30 (Winter, different snows, voices, silence)

The year is but a succession of days,

and I see that I could assign some office to each day

which, summed up, would be the history of the year.

Henry Thoreau, August 24, 1852

January 30.

Winter was made to

concentrate and harden the

kernel of man's brain.

January 30, 1854

January 30, 2019

The snow collects upon the plumes of the pitch pine in the form of a pineapple.  January 30, 1841

8 A. M. -- It has just begun to snow, — those little round dry pellets like shot. Stops snowing before noon, not having amounted to anything. January 30, 1856

Another cold morning. Mercury down to 13° below zero. January 30, 1854

This morning, though not so cold by a degree or two as yesterday morning, the cold has got more into the house, and the frost visits nooks never known to be visited before. January 30, 1854

The sheets are frozen about the sleeper's face; the teamster's beard is white with ice. The windows are all closed up with frost, as if they were ground glass. January 30, 1854

Clear and not cold, and now fine skating, the river rising again to the height it had attained the 24th, which (with this) I think remarkable for this season. January 30, 1855

It is unusual for the river to be so much swollen in midwinter, because it is unusual to have so much rain at this season. January 30, 1855

It is up to the hubs on the causeways, and foot—travellers have to cross on the river and meadows. January 30, 1855

As I walked above the old stone bridge on the 27th, I saw where the river had recently been open under the wooded bank on the west side; and recent sawdust and shavings from the pail-factory, and also the ends of saplings and limbs of trees which had been bent down by the ice, were frozen in. January 30, 1856

In some places some water stood above the ice, and as I stood there, I saw and heard it gurgle up through a crevice and spread over the ice. This was the influence of Loring’s Brook, far above. January 30, 1856

 
P. M. -- Measure to see what difference there is in the depth of the snow. January 30, 1856

In an ordinary storm the depth of the snow will be affected by a wood twenty or more rods distant, or as far as the wood is a fence. January 30, 1856

The Andromeda calyculata is now quite covered, and I walk on the crust over an almost uninterrupted plain there; only a few blueberries and last, I break through. January 30, 1856

It is so light beneath that the crust breaks there in great cakes under my feet, and immediately falls about a foot, making a great hole. January 30, 1856

I suspect that on meadows the snow is not so deep and has a firmer crust. January 30, 1856

There is a strong wind this afternoon from northwest, and the snow of the 28th is driving like steam over the fields, drifting into the roads. January 30, 1856

On the railroad causeway it lies in perfectly straight and regular ridges a few feet apart, northwest and southeast. It is dry and scaly, like coarse bran. January 30, 1856

Now that there is so much snow, it slopes up to the tops of the walls on both sides. January 30, 1856

Walden Pond [is] a spotless field of snow surrounded by woods, whose intensely blue shadows and your own are the only objects. January 30, 1856

What a solemn silence reigns here! January 30, 1856

The snow is dry and squeaks under the feet, and the teams creak as if they needed greasing, — sounds associated with extremely cold weather. January 30, 1854

The surface of the snow, especially on hillsides, has a peculiarly combed or worn appearance where water has run in a thaw; i. e., the whole surface shows regular furrows at a distance, as if it had been scraped with an immense comb. January 30, 1859

Up river on ice and snow to Fair Haven Pond. January 30, 1854

It is much easier and pleasanter to walk thus on the river, the snow being shallow and level, and there is no such loud squeaking or cronching of the snow as in the road, and this road is so wide that you do not feel confined in it, and you never meet travellers with whom you have no sympathy. January 30, 1854

By the railroad against Walden I hear the lisping of a chickadee, and see it on a sumach. January 30, 1856

It repeatedly hops to a bunch of berries, takes one, and, hopping to a more horizontal twig, places it under one foot and hammers at it with its bill. January 30, 1856

The snow is strewn with the berries under its foot, but I can see no shells of the fruit. January 30, 1856

As we walk up the river, a little flock of chickadees flies to us from a wood-side fifteen rods off, and utters their lively day day day, and follows us along a considerable distance, flitting by our side on the button-bushes and willows. January 30, 1854

It is the most, if not the only, sociable bird we have. January 30, 1854

There is a few inches of snow, perfectly level, which now for nearly a week has covered the ice. January 30, 1854

We look at every track in the snow. January 30, 1854

Every little while there is the track of a fox — maybe the same one — across the river, turning aside some times to a muskrat's cabin or a point of ice, where he has left some traces, and frequently the larger track of a hound, which has followed his trail. January 30, 1854

Minott to-day enumerates the red, gray, black, and what he calls the Sampson fox. January 30, 1855 

He never saw one, but the hunters have told him of them. He never saw a gray nor a black one. January 30, 1855

Told how Jake Lakin lost a dog, a very valuable one, by a fox leading him on to the ice on the Great Meadows and drowning him.
January 30, 1855

Said the raccoon made a track very much like a young child’s foot. He had often seen it in the mud of a ditch. January 30, 1855

How retired an otter manages to live! He grows to be four feet long without any mortal getting a glimpse of him. January 30, 1854

There are certain sounds invariably heard in warm and thawing days in winter, such as the crowing of cocks, the cawing of crows, and sometimes the gobbling of turkeys. January 30, 1860

Crows have singular wild and suspicious ways. January 30, 1860

You will [see] a couple flying high, as if about their business, but lo, they turn and circle and caw over your head again and again for a mile; and this is their business, — as if a mile and an afternoon were nothing for them to throw away. January 30, 1860

The crow, flying high, touches the tympanum of the sky for us, and reveals the tone of it. January 30, 1860

He informs me that Nature is in the tenderest mood possible, and I hear the very flutterings of her heart. January 30, 1860

How peculiar the hooting of an owl! . . . full, round, and sonorous, waking the echoes of the wood. January 30, 1859

Yesterday's slight snow is all gone, leaving the ice, old snow, and bare ground; and as I walk up the river side, there is a brilliant sheen from the wet ice toward the sun, instead of the crystalline rainbow of yesterday. January 30, 1860

Think of that (of yesterday), — to have constantly before you, receding as fast as you advance, a bow formed of a myriad crystalline mirrors on the surface of the snow! ! January 30, 1860

Then, another day, to do all your walking knee-deep in perfect six-rayed crystals of surpassing beauty but of ephemeral duration, which have fallen from the sky. January 30, 1860

What miracles, what beauty surrounds us! January 30, 1860

Six-rayed crystals of 

ephemeral duration 

fallen from the sky. 

January 30, 1860 

Walking knee-deep in

these perfect six-rayed crystals --

Miracles! Beauty!

January 30, 1860

The snow-flea seems to be a creature whose summer and prime of life is a thaw in the winter. It seems not merely to enjoy this interval like other animals, but then chiefly to exist. It is the creature of the thaw. Moist snow is its element. January 30, 1860

The small water-bugs are gyrating abundantly in Nut Meadow Brook. January 30, 1860

The seasons were not made in vain. It is for man the seasons and all their fruits exist. The winter was not given to us for no purpose. January 30, 1854

The winter, cold and bound out as it is, is thrown to us like a bone to a famishing dog, and we are expected to get the marrow out of it. January 30, 1854

While the milkmen in the outskirts are milking so many scores of cows before sunrise these winter mornings, it is our task to milk the winter itself. January 30, 1854

We are tasked to find out and appropriate all the nutriment it yields. January 30, 1854

The winter was made to concentrate and harden and mature the kernel of man's brain, to give tone and firmness and consistency to his thought. January 30, 1854

This harvest of thought the great harvest of the year. January 30, 1854

I knew a crazy man who walked into an empty pulpit one Sunday and, taking up a hymn-book, remarked:

"We have had a good fall for getting in corn and potatoes. Let us sing Winter."

So I say, 

"Let us sing winter." 

January 30, 1854

What else can we sing, and our voices be in harmony with the season? January 30, 1854

Discipline yourself only to yield to love; suffer yourself to be attracted. It is in vain to write on chosen themes. We must wait till they have kindled a flame in our minds.  January 30, 1852

The human brain is the kernel which the winter itself matures. January 30, 1854

Now we burn with a purer flame like the stars. January 30, 1854

*****

 

A Book of Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, The Pitch Pine

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Fox

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, The Otter

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Chickadee in Winter

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Water-bug (Gyrinus) and Skaters (Hydrometridae)

A Book of Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Voice of the Barred Owl.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, The Otter

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The snow-flea

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Snow-storms might be classified

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, Nature is genial to man

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The world can never be more beautiful than now

January 30, 2019

May 11, 1855 ("You can hardly walk in a thick pine wood now, especially a swamp, but presently you will have a crow or two over your head, either silently flitting over, to spy what you would be at and if its nest is in danger, or angrily cawing.")

August 2, 1854 ("As I go up the hill, surrounded by its shadow, while the sun is setting, I am soothed by the delicious stillness of the evening, . . . .It is the first silence I have heard for a month")
August 7, 1854 ("Do you not feel the fruit of your spring and summer beginning to ripen, to harden its seed within you? ...A man may hear strains in his thought far surpassing any oratorio. “)
August 11, 1853 ("What shall we name this season? — this very late afternoon, or very early evening, this season of the day most favorable for reflection, . . ..The few sounds now heard, far or near, are delicious. Each sound has a broad and deep relief of silence.")
September 10, 1860 ("My host, yesterday, told me that he was accustomed once to chase a black fox from Lowell over this way and lost him at Chelmsford. . . .A Carlisle man also tells me since that this fox used to turn off and run northwest from Chelmsford, but that he would soon after return.")

September 18, 1852 ("The crows congregate and pursue me through the half-covered woodland path, cawing loud and angrily above me, and when they cease, I hear the winnowing sound of their wings.") October 9, 1858 ("Crows fly over and caw at you now."); 

The chickadee

Hops near to me.

November 8, 1857

November 18, 1857 (" Crows will often come flying much out of their way to caw at me.")

December 14, 1859 ("Also there is the pellet or shot snow, which consists of little dry spherical pellets the size of robin-shot. This, I think, belongs to cold weather. Probably never have much of it.")

December 19, 1856 (“From out the depths of the wood, it sounds peculiarly hollow and drum-like, as if it struck on a tense skin drawn around, the tympanum of the wood, . . .more than the voice of the owl, the voice of the wood as well.”)

December 25, 1858 (“How glad I am to hear him rather than the most eloquent man of the age!”)

December 29, 1851 (" What a fine and measureless joy the gods grant us thus, letting us know nothing about the day that is to dawn! This day, yesterday, was as incredible as any other miracle.")

January 2, 1859 ("Minott says that a fox will lead a dog on to thin ice in order that he may get in. Tells of Jake Lakin losing a hound so, which went under the ice and was drowned below the Holt; was found afterward by Sted Buttrick, his collar taken off and given to Lakin")

January 7, 1854 (“I went to these woods partly to hear an owl, but did not; but, now that I have left them nearly a mile behind, I hear one distinctly, hoorer hoo.. . .t is a sound which the wood or horizon makes.")

January 12, 1855 ("Perhaps what most moves us in winter is some reminiscence of far-off summer. . . .It is in the cawing of the crow, the crowing of the cock, the warmth of the sun on our backs.")

January 17, 1860 ("See In the spring-hole ditches of the Close I see many little water-bugs (Gyrinus) gyrating, and some under water. It must be a common phenomenon there in mild weather in the winter.")

January 18, 1860 ("Several chickadees, uttering their faint notes, come flitting near to me as usual")

January 21, 1853 ("The silence rings; it is musical and thrills me. A night in which the silence was audible.")

January 22, 1860 ("This must be as peculiarly a winter animal as any. It may truly be said to live in snow.")

January 24, 1858 (" At Nut Meadow Brook the small-sized water-bugs are as abundant and active as in summer.")

January 29, 1852 ("The forcible writer does not go far for his themes")

January 29, 1860 ("That conical rainbow, or parabola of rainbow-colored reflections, from the myriad reflecting crystals of the snow, . . . as I walk toward the sun, — always a little in advance of me")

January 31, 1855 ("A clear, cold, beautiful day.")
January 31, 1854 ("We too have our thaws. They come to our January moods, when our ice cracks, and our sluices break loose. Thought that was frozen up under stern experience gushes forth in feeling and expression.")

February 5, 1854 (“It turned aside to every muskrat-house or the like prominence near its route and left its mark there.”)

March 16, 1858 ("The crowing of cocks and the cawing of crows tell the same story. The ice is soggy and dangerous to be walked on.")

January 30, 2019

If you make the least correct 

observation of nature this year,

 you will have occasion to repeat it

 with illustrations the next, 

and the season and life itself is prolonged.

  April 7, 1853 

January 29 <<<<<<<<      January 30.   >>>>>>>>  January 31

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau  January 30

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 ©  2009-2023

https://tinyurl.com/HDTJan30

The most common and conspicuous green leaf on the ground when the snow is off at this season.

January 30.  

Buda  January 30 2021

The most common and conspicuous green leaf on the ground when the snow is off at this season, as at present, is that of the buttercup. 

Sorrel is also very common, and johnswort, and the purplish gnaphaliums. There is also the early crowfoot in some places, strawberry, mullein, and thistle leaves, and hawkweeds, etc., etc.

On Cliffs.

The westering sun is yet high above the horizon, but, concealed by clouds, shoots down to earth on every side vast misty rays like the frame of a tent, to which clouds perchance are the canvas, under which a whole country rests. 

BTV February 1, 2023

The northern and southern rays appear very much slanted and long; those between us and the west, steeper and shorter.

What I have called the Shrub Oak Plain contains comparatively few shrub oaks, — rather, young red and white and, it may be, some scarlet (?).

The shrub oak leaf is the firmest and best preserved. The white oak is the most sere and curled and brittle, frequently with discolored, mould-like spots.

H. D Thoreau, Journal, January 30, 1853

The most common and conspicuous green leaf on the ground when the snow is off at this season, as at present, is that of the buttercup. See November 8, 1858 ("The now more noticeable green radical leaves of the buttercup in the russet pastures remind me of the early spring to come, of which they will offer the first evidence."); January 9, 1853 ("On the face of the Cliff the crowfoot buds lie unexpanded just beneath the surface"); January 25, 1853 ("The buttercup leaves appear everywhere when the ground is bare.);  February 18, 1857 ("The snow is nearly all gone, and . . . I step excited over the moist mossy ground, dotted with the green stars of thistles, crowfoot, etc., the outsides of which are withered."); February 23, 1860 ("I walk over the moist Nawshawtuct hillside and see the green radical leaves of the buttercup"); February 28, 1857 ("At the Cliff, the tower-mustard, early crowfoot, and perhaps buttercup appear to have started of late.")

The westering sun, concealed by clouds, shoots down to earth on every side vast misty rays. See August 9, 1851 ("It was a splendid sunset that day, a celestial light on all the land, so that all people went to their doors and windows to look on the grass and leaves and buildings and the sky. . . We were in the westernmost edge of the shower at the moment the sun was setting, and its rays shone through the cloud and the falling rain. We were, in fact, in a rainbow.")

The shrub oak leaf is the firmest and best preserved. The white oak is the most sere and curled and brittle. See October 2, 1852 ("From Cliffs the shrub oak plain has now a bright-red ground, perhaps of maples.");  October 13, 1852 ("The shrub oak plain is now a deep red, with grayish, withered, apparently white oak leaves intermixed."); November 3, 1852 ("The shrub oak plain is all withered."); May 14, 1855 ("All the oak leaves off the shrub oak plain, except apparently a few white oaks.")

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,  January 30

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 ©  2009-2023

What miracles, what beauty surrounds us!

January 30. 

January 30, 2022, 7:00AM

2 p. m. — To Nut Meadow and White Pond road. 

Thermometer 45°. Fair with a few cumuli of indefinite outline in the north and south, and dusky under sides. A gentle west wind and a blue haze. Thaws. 

The river has opened to an unusual extent, owing to the very long warm spell, — almost all this month. Even from Hubbard's Bridge up and down it is breaking up, is all mackerelled, with lunar-shaped openings  and some like a thick bow. * They [are] from one to twelve feet long. 

Yesterday's slight snow is all gone, leaving the ice, old snow, and bare ground; and as I walk up the river side, there is a brilliant sheen from the wet ice toward the sun, instead of the crystalline rainbow of yesterday. 

Think of that (of yesterday), — to have constantly before you, receding as fast as you advance, a bow formed of a myriad crystalline mirrors on the surface of the snow! ! What miracles, what beauty surrounds us! 

Then, another day, to do all your walking knee-deep in perfect six-rayed crystals of surpassing beauty but of ephemeral duration, which have fallen from the sky. 

The ice has so melted on the meadows that I see where the musquash has left his clamshells in a heap near the riverside, where there was a hollow in the bank. 

The small water-bugs are gyrating abundantly in Nut Meadow Brook. 

It is pleasant also to see the very distinct ripple-marks in the sand at its bottom, of late so rare a sight. 

I go through the piny field northwest of M. Miles's. There are no more beautiful natural parks than these pastures in which the white pines have sprung up spontaneously, standing at handsome intervals, where the wind chanced to let the seed lie at last, and the grass and blackberry vines have not yet been killed by them. 

There are certain sounds invariably heard in warm and thawing days in winter, such as the crowing of cocks, the cawing of crows, and sometimes the gobbling of turkeys. 

The crow, flying high, touches the tympanum of the sky for us, and reveals the tone of it. What does it avail to look at a thermometer or barometer compared with listening to his note? He informs me that Nature is in the tenderest mood possible, and I hear the very flutterings of her heart. Crows have singular wild and suspicious ways. You will [see] a couple flying high, as if about their business, but lo, they turn and circle and caw over your head again and again for a mile; and this is their business, — as if a mile and an afternoon were nothing for them to throw away. This even in winter, when they have no nests to be anxious about. 

But it is affecting to hear them cawing about their ancient seat (as at F. Wheeler's wood) which the choppers are laying low. 

I saw the other day (apparently) mouse(?)-tracks which had been made in slosh  on the Andromeda Ponds and then frozen, — little gutters about two inches wide and nearly one deep, looking very artificial with the nicks on the sides. 

I sit on the high hilltop south of Nut Meadow, near the pond. This hazy day even Nobscot is so blue that it looks like a mighty mountain. 

See how man has cleared commonly the most level ground, and left the woods to grow on the more uneven and rocky, or in the swamps.

I see, when I look over our landscape from any eminence as far as the horizon, certain rounded hills, amid the plains and ridges and cliffs, which have a marked family likeness, like eggs that belong to one nest though scattered. They suggest a relation geologically. Such are, for instance, Nashoba, Annursnack, Nawshawtuct, and Ponkawtasset, all which have Indian names, as if the Indian, too, had regarded them as peculiarly distinct. 

There is also Round Hill in Sudbury, and perhaps a hill in Acton. Perhaps one in Chelmsford. They are not apparently rocky. 

The snow-flea seems to be a creature whose summer and prime of life is a thaw in the winter. It seems not merely to enjoy this interval like other animals, but then chiefly to exist. It is the creature of the thaw. Moist snow is its element. That thaw which merely excites the cock to sound his clarion as it were calls to life the snow-flea.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 30, 1860

The crystalline rainbow of yesterday. See January 29, 1860 ("that conical rainbow, or parabola of rainbow-colored reflections, from the myriad reflecting crystals of the snow, . . . as I walk toward the sun, — always a little in advance of me")

The small water-bugs are gyrating abundantly in Nut Meadow Brook.  See January 17, 1860 ("See In the spring-hole ditches of the Close I see many little water-bugs (Gyrinus) gyrating, and some under water. It must be a common phenomenon there in mild weather in the winter. "); January 24, 1858 (" At Nut Meadow Brook the small-sized water-bugs are as abundant and active as in summer.") See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, the Water-bug (Gyrinus) and  Skaters (Hydrometridae)

It is pleasant also to see the very distinct ripple-marks in the sand at its bottom, of late so rare a sight. See July 30, 1852 ("The ripple-marks on the east shore of Flint's are nearly parallel firm ridges in the white sand, one inch or more apart. They are very distinctly felt by the naked feet of the wader."); March 10, 1853 ("At Nut Meadow Brook . . . gazing into the eddying stream. The ripple-marks on the sandy bottom [and].the shadows of the invisible dimples reflecting prismatic colors on the bottom,"); April 3, 1859 ("The water being quite shallow on [White Pond], it is very handsomely and freshly ripple-marked for a rod or more in width, the ripples only two or three inches apart and very regular and parallel.") August 1, 1859 ("The [river] bottom is occasionally — though quite rarely in Concord — of soft shifting sand, ripple-marked, in which the paddle sinks, under four or five feet of water (as below the ash tree hole)")

There are certain sounds invariably heard in warm and thawing days in winter, such as the crowing of cocks, the cawing of crows, and sometimes the gobbling of turkeys. See January 12, 1855 ("Perhaps what most moves us in winter is some reminiscence of far-off summer. . . .It is in the cawing of the crow, the crowing of the cock, the warmth of the sun on our backs. "); March 16, 1858 (" The crowing of cocks and the cawing of crows tell the same story. The ice is soggy and dangerous to be walked on.")

But lo, they turn and circle and caw over your head again and again for a mile. See May 11, 1855 ("You can hardly walk in a thick pine wood now, especially a swamp, but presently you will have a crow or two over your head, either silently flitting over, to spy what you would be at and if its nest is in danger, or angrily cawing.") September 18, 1852 ("The crows congregate and pursue me through the half-covered woodland path, cawing loud and angrily above me, and when they cease, I hear the winnowing sound of their wings."); October 9, 1858 (" Crows fly over and caw at you now."); November 18, 1857 (" Crows will often come flying much out of their way to caw at me.")

Mouse-tracks which had been made in slosh on the Andromeda Ponds and then frozen, — little gutters about two inches wide and nearly one deep. See December 27, 1853 (“ I had not seen a meadow mouse all summer, but no sooner does the snow come and spread its mantle over the earth than it is printed with the tracks of countless mice"); January 15, 1857 ("And for a week, or fortnight even, of pretty still weather the tracks will remain, to tell of the nocturnal adventures of a tiny mouse")

This hazy day even Nobscot is so blue that it looks like a mighty mountain. Compare June 26, 1853 ("Nobscot has lost all its blue, and the northwest mountains are too . . .firmly defined to be mistaken for clouds.")

The snow-flea is the creature of the thaw. Moist snow is its element. See January 22, 1860 ("This must be as peculiarly a winter animal as any. It may truly be said to live in snow."). See also A Book of the Seasons: The snow-flea

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,  January 30

Beauty surrounds us!

Crystalline mirrors on the

surface of the snow.

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 ©  2009-2023

The hooting of an owl!

January 30. 

January 30, 2019

How peculiar the hooting of an owl! It is not shrill and sharp like the scream of a hawk, but full, round, and sonorous, waking the echoes of the wood. 

The surface of the snow, especially on hillsides, has a peculiarly combed or worn appearance where water has run in a thaw; i. e., the whole surface shows regular furrows at a distance, as if it had been scraped with an immense comb.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 30, 1859


Full, round, and sonorous, waking the echoes of the wood. See  December 19, 1856 (“From out the depths of the wood, it sounds peculiarly hollow and drum-like, as if it struck on a tense skin drawn around, the tympanum of the wood, . . .more than the voice of the owl, the voice of the wood as well.”); December 25, 1858 (“How glad I am to hear him rather than the most eloquent man of the age!”); January 7, 1854 (“It is a sound which the wood or horizon makes.")

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,  January 30

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 ©  2009-2023