A Book of the Seasons: January 8 (winter birds, January thaw, tracks in snow, winter sky)

 

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 8

January 8, 2022

The light of the sun

on the snow-banks make them

glow almost yellow.

January 8, 1851

Almost every track

made yesterday in the snow –

A dead leaf in it.

January 8, 1852

The sky reflected

in the open river-reach,

now perfectly smooth.

 January 8, 1855

Tracks of white rabbits 

that run and frisk in the night 

along the pond-side.

January 8, 1856

Along the pond-side

a man’s tracks perhaps my own

like white stepping stones.

January 8, 1860

January 8, 2017

To-day it is very warm and pleasant. January 8, 1860

It is now a clear warm and sunny day. January 8, 1855

The streets are washed bare down to the ice. January 8, 1855

I see the jay and hear his scream oftener for the thaw. January 8, 1860

Walden, which was covered with snow, is now covered with shallow puddles and slosh of a pale glaucous slate-color. January 8, 1860

The sloshy edges of the puddles are the frames of so many wave-shaped mirrors in which the leather-colored oak leaves, and the dark-green pines and their stems, on the hillside, are reflected.  January 8, 1860 

The morning hope is soon lost in what becomes the routine of the day, and we do not recover ourselves again until we land on the pensive shores of evening, shores which skirt the great western continent of the night. January 8, 1854

Still warm and cloudy, but with a great crescent of clear sky increasing in the north by west. January 8, 1855

We discover a new world every time that we see the earth again after it has been covered for a season with snow. January 8, 1860

How changed are our feelings and thoughts by this more genial sky! January 8, 1860

After December all weather that is not wintry is springlike. January 8, 1860

There is a healthy earthy sound of cock-crowing. January 8, 1855

You cannot listen a moment such a day as this but you will hear, from far or near, the clarion of the cock celebrating this new season, yielding to the influence of the south wind. January 8, 1860

All of the pitch pine cones that I see, but one, are open. January 8, 1856

Many white pine cones had been eaten in the neighborhood. January 8, 1854

Walk up on the river a piece above the Holden Swamp, though there are very few places where I can get on to it, it has so melted along the shore and on the meadows. The ice over the channel looks dangerously dark and rotten in spots. January 8, 1855

The fine dry snow is driving over the fields like steam, if you look toward the sun. January 8, 1856

Can go across both rivers now. New routes are more practicable. January 8, 1854

Going through the swamp, the snow balled so as to raise me three inches higher than usual. January 8, 1858

I notice that almost every track which I made yesterday in the snow - perhaps ten inches deep - has got a dead leaf in it, though none is to be seen on the snow around. January 8, 1852

We see no fresh tracks. January 8, 1860

I see the great tracks of white rabbits that have run and frisked in the night along the pond-side. January 8, 1856

The old tracks of the rabbit, now after the thaw, are shaped exactly like a horse shoe, an unbroken curve. January 8, 1860

The old tracks . . . of the fox which has run along the side of the pond are now so many snowballs, raised as much above the level of the water-darkened snow as at first they sank beneath it. The snow, having been compressed by their weight, resists the melting longer. January 8, 1860

There are a man's tracks, perhaps my own, along the pond-side there, looking not only larger than reality, but more elevated . . . they look like white stepping-stones January 8, 1860

I picked up on the bare ice of the river, opposite the oak in Shattuck's land, on a small space blown bare of snow, a fuzzy caterpillar, black at the two ends and red-brown in the middle, rolled into a ball. January 8, 1857

Black at the two ends 

and red-brown in the middle -- 

rolled into a ball.

January 8, 1857

I see various caterpillars and grubs on the snow and in one place a reddish ant about a third of an inch long walking off. In the swamps you see the mouths of squirrels’ holes in the snow, with dirt and leaves and perhaps pine scales about them. January 8, 1855

The surface of the snow on the pond is finely scored in many places by the oak leaves which have been blown across it. They have furrowed deeper than a mouses track and might puzzle a citizen. January 8, 1856

The fever-bush is betrayed by its little spherical buds. January 8, 1855

I see what are probably the anther cells distinctly in the large buds of the poplar, which for a long time have shown their wool one sixth of an inch long. January 8, 1853

Also similar cells in the alder catkins, but greener and less springlike. January 8, 1853

The birch ones are the yellowest. January 8, 1853

I see prying into the black fruit of the alder, along the pond-side, a single probably lesser redpoll yellowish breast and distinct white bar on wing. January 8, 1856

Hear the goldfinch notes (they may be linarias), and see a few on the top of a small black birch by the pond-shore, of course eating the seed. Thus they distinguish its fruit from afar. When I heard their note, I looked to find them on a birch, and lo, it was a black birch! [Were they not linarias?] January 8, 1860

Stood within a rod of a downy woodpecker on an apple tree. How curious and exciting the blood-red spot on its hindhead! I ask why it is there, but no answer is rendered by these snow-clad fields. It is so close to the bark I do not see its feet. It looks behind as if it had on a black cassock open behind and showing a white undergarment between the shoulders and down the back. It is briskly and incessantly tapping all round the dead limbs, but rarely twice in a place, as if to sound the tree and so see if it has any worm in it, or perchance to start them. How much he deals with the bark of trees, all his life long tapping and inspecting it! He it is that scatters those fragments of bark and lichens about on the snow at the base of trees. What a lichenist he must be! Or rather, perhaps it is fungi makes his favorite study, for he deals most with dead limbs. How briskly he glides up or drops himself down a limb, creeping round and round, and hopping from limb to limb, and now flitting with a rippling sound of his wings to another tree! January 8, 1854

I hear a few chickadees near at hand, and hear and see jays further off. January 8, 1855

And,  as yesterday, a crow sitting sentinel on an apple tree. Soon he gives the alarm, and several more take their places near him. Then off they flap with their caw of various hoarseness. January 8, 1855

It is pleasant to see the sky reflected in the open river-reach, now perfectly smooth. January 8, 1855

We love not so well the landscape represented as in broad noon, but in a morning or evening twilight, those seasons when the imagination is most active, the more hopeful or pensive seasons of the day. Our mood may then possess the whole landscape, or be in harmony with it, as the hue of twilight prevails over the whole scene. January 8, 1854

The light of the setting sun falling on the snow-banks today make them glow almost yellow. January 8, 1851

Even as early as 3 o'clock these winter afternoons the axes in the woods sound like nightfall, like the sound of a twilight labor. January 8, 1852

When returning from Walden at sunset, the only cloud we saw was a small purplish one, exactly conforming to the outline of Wachusett. January 8, 1860

We love . . .morning or evening twilight, those seasons when the imagination is most active, the more hopeful or pensive seasons of the day. Our mood may then possess the whole landscape, or be in harmony with it, as the hue of twilight prevails over the whole scene. January 8 1854

Gilpin, in his essay on the "Art of Sketching Landscape," says: "When you have finished your sketch . . . tinge the whole over with some light horizon hue." . . . I have often been attracted by this harmonious tint in his and other drawings, and sometimes, especially, have observed it in nature when at sunset I inverted my head. January 8, 1854

We have a fine moonlight evening after, and . . . I am struck by the brighter sheen from the snow in the moonlight. January 8, 1860

*****

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

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

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, The Blue Jay

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the American Crow

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

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Lesser Redpoll

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Downy Woodpecker

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, First Ice

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

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

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, Winter Colors

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

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, the Inverted Head experiment

*****

January 8, 2024

September 18, 1858 ("Some long amber clouds in the horizon, all on fire with gold, were more glittering than any jewelry. . . .And when you looked with head inverted the effect was increased tenfold, till it seemed a world of enchantment.")

August 30, 1854("I see with new pleasure to distant hillsides and farmhouses and a river-reach shining in the sun, and to the mountains in the horizon.")

August 31, 1852 ("Morning is full of promise and vigor. Evening is pensive.")
September 13, 1851 ("The morning is not pensive like the evening, but joyous and youthful, and its blush is soon gone.")
December 14, 1854 ("The river is open almost its whole length. It is a beautifully smooth mirror within an icy frame . . . distinguished from the surrounding ice only by its reflections.")
December 20, 1854 ("in some places, where the sun falls on it, the snow has a pinkish tinge"); January 2, 1855 ("Yesterday we saw the pink light on the snow within a rod of us.")
December 21, 1854 ("The last rays of the sun falling on the Baker Farm reflect a clear pink color.")

December 24, 1850 (" I notice  that the fine, dry snow blown over the surface of the frozen fields looks like steam curling up,')

December 29, 1859 ("To-night I notice the rose-color in the snow and the green in the ice at the same time, having been looking out for them.")
January 4, 1860 (" In Hosmer's pitch pine wood just north of the bridge, I find myself on the track of a fox.")
January 5, 1858 ("I see one of those fuzzy winter caterpillars, black at the two ends and brown-red in middle, crawling on a rock by the Hunt's Bridge causeway.")

 January 6, 1854 ("There was a low, narrow, clear segment of sky in the west at sunset, or just after (all the rest overcast), of the coppery yellow, perhaps, of some of Gilpin's pictures, all spotted coarsely with clouds like a leopard's skin.")

January 6, 1857 ("When I get home after that slumping walk on the river, I find that the slush has balled and frozen on my boots two or three inches thick, and can only be thawed off by the fire, it is so solid.")
January 7, 1857 ("Though the rest of the broad path is else perfectly unspotted white, each track of the fox has proved a trap which has caught from three or four to eight or ten leaves each, snugly packed; and thus it is reprinted.")
January 7, 1857 ("In the wood-path [the snow] is all scored with the tracks of leaves that have scurried over it. Some might not suspect the cause of these fine and delicate traces, for the cause is no longer obvious").
January 7, 1851 ("January thaw. Take away the snow and it would not be winter but like many days in the fall. The birds acknowledge the difference in the air; the jays are more noisy, and the chickadees are oftener heard.")

January 7, 1855 ("Here comes a little flock of titmice, plainly to keep me company, with their black caps and throats making them look top-heavy, restlessly hopping along the alders, with a sharp, clear, lisping note")

January 9, 1858 ("Some chickadees come flitting close to me, and one utters its spring note, phe-be, for which I feel under obligations to him.")
January 9, 1860 ("After the January thaw our thoughts cease to refer to autumn and we look forward to spring.")
January 10, 1859 ("I come across to the road south of the hill to see the pink on the snow-clad hill at sunset. . . .This is one of the phenomena of the winter sunset, this distinct pink light reflected from the brows of snow-clad hills on one side of you as you are facing the sun. ")
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. I hear faintly the cawing of a crow far, far away, echoing from some unseen wood-side.")

January 12, 1854 ("I see my snowshoe tracks quite distinct, though made January 2d. Though they pressed the snow down four or five inches, they consolidated it, and it now endures and is two or three inches above the general level there, and more white.")
January 13, 1855 ("Picked up a pitch pine cone which had evidently been cut off by a squirrel.")
January 14, 1854 ("The meadows are broad sheets of dark-blue water, contrasting with the white patches of snow still left")
January 15, 1856 ("Seeing the tracks where a leaf had blown along and then tacked and finally doubled and returned on its trail, I think it must be the tracks of some creature new to me.”)
January 16, 1855 ("Carried to Harris the worms -- brown, light-striped-and fuzzy black caterpillars (he calls the first also caterpillars); also two black beetles; all which I have found within a week or two on ice and snow; thickest in a thaw")
January 17, 1860 ("I see the old tracks of some foxes and rabbits about the edge of these ponds (over the ice) within a few feet of the shore")

January 19, 1852 ("The snow blowing far off in the sun . . .looks like the mist that rises from rivers in the morning.") 

January 20, 1857 ("Heard, in the Dennis swamp by the railroad this afternoon, the peculiar goldfinch-like mew — also like some canaries — of, I think, the lesser redpoll (?). Saw several. Heard the same a week or more ago.")
January 20, 1859 ("The green of the ice and water begins to be visible about half an hour before sunset. Is it produced by the reflected blue of the sky mingling with the yellow or pink of the setting sun?")
January 22, 1856 (“At Walden, near my old residence, I find that since I was here on the 11th, apparently within a day or two, some gray or red squirrel or squirrels have been feeding on the pitch pine cones extensively.”)
January 22, 1859 ("Four kinds of caterpillars, and also the glow-worm-like creature so common, grasshoppers, crickets, and many bugs, not to mention the mosquito like insects which the warm weather has called forth (flying feebly just over the ice and snow a foot or two), spiders, and snow-fleas")
January 22, 1856 ("I find that many of those young pines are now full of unopened cones, which apparently will be two years old next summer, and these the squirrel now eats“)
January 23, 1858 ("The wonderfully mild and pleasant weathercontinues. The ground has been bare since the 11th . . . The sun, and cockcrowing, bare ground, etc., etc., remind me of March.")
January 23, 1860 ("When a thaw comes, old tracks are enlarged in every direction, so that an ordinary man's track will look like the track of a snow-shoe ")
January 24, 1858 (" I see two of those black and red-brown fuzzy caterpillars")

January 24, 1860 ("See a large flock of lesser redpolls, eating the seeds of the birch (and perhaps alder) in Dennis Swamp by railroad.")
January 24, 1860 ("[Redpolls] are distinct enough from the goldfinch, their note more shelly and general as they fly, and they are whiter, without the black wings, beside that some have the crimson head or head and breast.")

January 25, 1857 (" I see the track of a fox or dog across the meadow, made some time ago. Each track is now a pure white snowball rising three inches above the surrounding surface,")

January 25, 1856 (“A closed pitch pine cone gathered January 22d opened last night in my chamber.”)

January 26, 1853 ('There is now a fine steam-like snow blowing over the ice."0

January 26, 1853 (“ I look back . . . not into the night, but to a dawn for which no man ever rose early enough.”)
January 31, 1859 ("The pink light reflected from the low, flat snowy surfaces amid the ice on the meadows, just before sunset, is a constant phenomenon these clear winter days. . . . I also see this pink in the dust made by the skaters.")
January 31, 1859 ("Perhaps the green seen at the same time in ice and water is produced by the general yellow or amber light of this hour, mingled with the blue of the reflected sky?")
February 27, 1857 ("I see many crows on the hillside, with their sentinel on a tree.")

March 5, 1854 ("See a small blackish caterpillar on the snow. Where do they come from?")
March 8, 1855 ("I see of late more than before of the fuzzy caterpillars, both black and reddish-brown.”)
March 6, 1860 ("The linarias have been the most numerous birds the past winter.")

1850 ('You have only to stand on your head a moment to be enchanted with the beauty of the landscape.')

January 8, 2023

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 7  <<<<<<<< January 8 >>>>>>>> January 9

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, January 8

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.

The crow, flying high, 

touches the tympanum 

of the sky for us.

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."

 ~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx ©  2009-2023

A-chestnutting with four ladies.

January 10. 

Went a-chestnutting this afternoon to Smith's wood-lot near the Turnpike. 

Carried four ladies. I raked. We got six and a half quarts, the ground being bare and the leaves not frozen. 

The fourth remarkably mild day. 

I found thirty-five chestnuts in a little pile under the end of a stick under the leaves, near — within a foot of — what I should call a gallery of a meadow mouse. These galleries were quite common as I raked. 

There was no nest nor apparent cavity about this store. Aunt M. found another with sixteen in it.

Many chestnuts are still in the burs on the ground. 

Aunt found a twig which had apparently fallen prematurely, with eight small burs, all within the compass of its five or six inches, and all but one full of nuts. 

The galleries above named were evidently permanent and not made by one trip.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 10, 1853


Went a-chestnutting this afternoon carried four ladies.See August 12, 1853 ("To Conantum by boat, berrying, with three ladies.): August 4, 1856 ("Carried party a-berrying to Conantum in boat."); September 25, 1858 ("Go a-graping up Assabet with some young ladies.").

Aunt found a twig with eight small burs, and all but one full of nuts. See October 18, 1856  ("Within this thick prickly bur the nuts are about as safe until they are quite mature, as a porcupine behind its spines."); October 24, 1857 ("To Smith's chestnut grove. . . . I get a couple of quarts of chestnuts by patiently brushing the thick beds of leaves aside with my hand in successive concentric circles till I reach the trunk; . . .It is best to reduce it to a system. Of course you will shake the tree first, if there are any on it. The nuts lie commonly two or three together, as they fell. . . .As I go stooping and brushing the leaves aside by the hour, I am not thinking of chestnuts merely, but I find myself humming a thought of more significance."); December 27, 1852 ("Found chestnuts quite plenty to-day."); December 31, 1852("I was this afternoon gathering chestnuts at Saw Mill Brook. I have within a few weeks spent some hours thus, scraping away the leaves with my hands and feet over some square rods, and have at least learned how chestnuts are planted and new forests raised."); January 25, 1853 ("I still pick chestnuts.")

January 10. 

See A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, January 10

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

A clump of young canoe birches on the hillside shore of the pond.

January 9.

 Another fine warm day, — 48° at 2 p. m. 

P. M. — To Walden. 

I call that ice marbled when shallow puddles of melted snow and rain, with perhaps some slosh in them, resting on old ice, are frozen, showing a slightly internal marbling, or alternation of light and dark spots or streaks. 

I see, on a slender oak (not white oak) overhanging the pond, two knots which, though near, I at first mistook for vireo nests. One was in a fork, too, and both were just the right size and color, if not form. Thus, too, the nests may be concealed to some eyes.

I am interested by a clump of young canoe birches on the hillside shore of the pond. There is an interesting variety in the colors of their bark, passing from bronze at the earth, through ruddy and copper colors to white higher up, with shreds of different color from that beneath peeling off. Going close to them,  find that at first, or till ten feet high, they are a dark bronze brown, a wholly different-looking shrub from what they afterward become, with some ruddy tinges, and, of course, regular white specks; but when they get to be about two inches in diameter, the outmost cuticle bursts up and down the tree on the south side, and peels off each way, under the influence, probably, of the sun and rain and wind, and perhaps aided some times by birds. It is as if the tree unbuttoned a thin waistcoat and suffered it to blow aside, revealing its bosom or inner garment, which is a more ruddy brown, or sometimes greenish or coppery; and thus one cuticle peels off after another till it is a ruddy white, as if you saw to a red ground through a white wash; and at length it is snow-white, about five or six feet from the ground, for it is first white there, while the top, where it is smaller and younger, is still dark-brown. It may be, then, half a dozen years old before it assumes the white toga which is its distinctive dress. 

After the January thaw our thoughts cease to refer to autumn and we look forward to spring. 

I hear that R. M , a rich old farmer who lives in a large house, with a male housekeeper and no other family, gets up at three or four o'clock these winter mornings and milks seventeen cows regularly. 

When asked why he works so hard he answers that the poor are obliged to work hard. Only think, what a creature of fate he is, this old Jotun, milking his seventeen cows though the thermometer goes down to -25°, and not knowing why he does it, — draining sixty-eight cows' teats in the dark of the coldest morning! Think how helpless a rich man who can only do as he has done, and as his neighbors do, one or all of them! What an account he will have to give of himself! He spent some time in a world, alternately cold and warm, and every winter morning, with lantern in hand, when the frost goblins were playing their tricks, he resolutely accomplished his task and milked his seventeen cows, while the man housekeeper prepared his breakfast! If this were original with him, he would be a hero to be celebrated in history. 

Think how tenaciously every man does his deed, of some kind or other, though it be idleness! He is rich, dependent on nobody, and nobody is dependent on him; has as good health as the average, at least, can do as he pleases, as we say. Yet he gravely rises every morning by candle-light, dons his cowhide boots and his frock, takes his lantern and wends to the barn and milks his seventeen cows, milking with one hand while he warms the other against the cow or his person. This is but the beginning of his day, and his Augean stable work. So serious is the life he lives.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 9, 1860

I call that ice marbled when shallow puddles of melted snow and rain are frozen, showing a slightly internal marbling. See January 31, 1859 ("Now we have quite another kind of ice. It has rained hard, converting into a very thin liquid the snow which had fallen on the old ice, and this, having frozen, has made a perfectly smooth but white snow ice. It is white like polished marble (I call it marble ice).")


I am interested by a clump of young canoe birches on the hillside shore of the pond. See December 28, 1852 ("A clump of birches raying out from one centre make a more agreeable object than a single tree."); January 11, 1855 ("This air, thick with snowflakes, making a background, enables me to detect a very picturesque clump of trees on an islet . . .,—a red oak in midst, with birches on each side. ")

An interesting variety in the colors of the bark of young canoe birches.See November 30, 1851 ("Thick birch groves stand here and there, dark brown now with white lines more or less distinct.");  January 24, 1858 ("The sprouts of the canoe birch are not reddish like the white, but a yellowish brown. The small white begin to cast off their red cuticle the third or fourth year and reveal a whitish one. ");  December 8, 1859 ("The birches, seen half a mile off toward the sun, are the purest dazzling white of any tree.").

HDT distinguishes the canoe birch from the white (betula alba).  Wikipedia lumps them as  Betula papyrifera (paper birch, also known as white birch and canoe birch) -- a short-lived species of birch, whose thin white bark, often peels in  layers from the trunk. In older trees, the bark is white, commonly brightly so, flaking in fine horizontal strips to reveal a pinkish or salmon-colored inner bark. It often has small black marks and scars. In individuals younger than five years, the bark appears a brown red colored with white lenticels, making the tree much harder to distinguish from other birches.~ wikipedia

It is as if the tree unbuttoned a thin waistcoat and suffered it to blow aside, revealing its bosom or inner garment. See January 4, 1853 ("Sometimes I was in doubt about a birch whose vest was buttoned smooth and dark, till I came nearer and saw the yellow gleaming through, or where a button was off."); February 18, 1854 ("The curls of the yellow birch bark form more or less parallel straight lines up and down on all sides of the tree, like parted hair blown aside by the wind, or as when a vest bursts and blows open.")


After the January thaw our thoughts cease to refer to autumn and we look forward to spring. See
January 8, 1860 (“After December all weather that is not wintry is springlike.”)

He spent some time and 

every winter morning 

with lantern in hand.

He takes his lantern 

and wends to the barn and milks 

his seventeen cows.

After December all weather that is not wintry is springlike.

January 8. 

Began to rain last evening, and rained some in the night. To-day it is very warm and pleasant. 

2 p. m. — Walk to Walden. Thermometer 48 at 2 p.m. 

We are suddenly surrounded by a warm air from some other part of the globe. What a change! Yesterday morning we walked on dry and squeaking snow, but before night, without any rain, merely by the influence of that warm air which had migrated to us, softening and melting the snow, we began to slump in it.

Now, since the rain of last night, the softest portions of the snow are dissolved in the street, revealing and leaving the filth which has accumulated there upon the firmer foundation, and we walk with open coats, charmed with the trickling of ephemeral rills. 

After December all weather that is not wintry is springlike. 

How changed are our feelings and thoughts by this more genial sky! When I get to the railroad I listen from time to time to hear some sound out of the distance which will express this mood of Nature. The cock and the hen, that pheasant which we have domesticated, are perhaps the most sensitive to atmospheric changes of any domestic animals. You cannot listen a moment such a day as this but you will hear, from far or near, the clarion of the cock celebrating this new season, yielding to the influence of the south wind, or the drawling note of the hen dreaming of eggs that are to be. 

These are the sounds that fill the air, and no hum of insects. They are affected like voyagers on approaching the land. 

We discover a new world every time that we see the earth again after it has been covered for a season with snow. 

I see the jay and hear his scream oftener for the thaw. 

Walden, which was covered with snow, is now covered with shallow puddles and slosh of a pale glaucous slate-color. The sloshy edges of the puddles are the frames of so many wave-shaped mirrors in which the leather-colored oak leaves, and the dark-green pines and their stems, on the hillside, are reflected. 

We see no fresh tracks. The old tracks of the rabbit, now after the thaw, are shaped exactly like a horse shoe, an unbroken curve. Those of the fox which has run along the side of the pond are now so many snowballs, raised as much above the level of the water-darkened snow as at first they sank beneath it. The snow, having been compressed by their weight, resists the melting longer. 

Indeed, I see far across the pond, half a mile distant, what looks like a perfectly straight row of white stones, — some fence or other work of art, — stretching twenty rods along the bare shore. There are a man's tracks, perhaps my own, along the pond-side there, looking not only larger than reality, but more elevated owing to the looming, and are referred to the dark background against which they are seen. When I know that they are on the ice, they look like white stepping-stones. 

I hear the goldfinch notes (they may be linarias), and see a few on the top of a small black birch by the pond-shore, of course eating the seed. Thus they distinguish its fruit from afar. When I heard their note, I looked to find them on a birch, and lo, it was a black birch! [Were they not linarias? Vide Jan. 24, 27, 29.] 

We have a fine moonlight evening after, and as by day I have noticed that the sunlight reflected from this moist snow had more glitter and dazzle to it than when the snow was dry, so now I am struck by the brighter sheen from the snow in the moonlight. All the impurities in the road are lost sight of, and the melting snow shines like frostwork. 

When returning from Walden at sunset, the only cloud we saw was a small purplish one, exactly conforming to the outline of Wachusett, — which it concealed, — as if on that mountain only the universal moisture was at that moment condensed.

The commonest difference between a public speaker who has not enjoyed the advantage of the highest  education in the popular sense, at school and college, and one who has, is that the former will pronounce a few words, and use a few more, in a manner in which the scholars have agreed not to, and the latter will occasionally quote a few Latin and even Greek words with more confidence, and, if the subject is the derivation of words, will maintain a wise silence.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 8, 1860

You cannot listen a moment such a day as this but you will hear, from far or near, the clarion of the cock celebrating this new season. See January 8, 1855 ("It is now a clear warm and sunny day. There is a healthy earthy sound of cock-crowing."); 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 23, 1858 ("The wonderfully mild and pleasant weather_continues. The ground has been bare since the 11th. . . . The sun, and cockcrowing, bare ground, etc., etc., remind me of March.")

We discover a new world every time that we see the earth again after it has been covered for a season with snow. I see the jay and hear his scream oftener for the thaw. See January 7, 1851 ("January thaw. Take away the snow and it would not be winter but like many days in the fall. The birds acknowledge the difference in the air; the jays are more noisy, and the chickadees are oftener heard.")

There are a man's tracks, perhaps my own, along the pond-side there, like white stepping-stones. See January 25, 1857 (" I see the track of a fox or dog across the meadow, made some time ago. Each track is now a pure white snowball rising three inches above the surrounding surface,");January 12, 1854 ("I see my snowshoe tracks quite distinct, though made January 2d. Though they pressed the snow down four or five inches, they consolidated it, and it now endures and is two or three inches above the general level there, and more white.")

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, January 8

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