The fauna and flora of Ministerial Swamp.

November 24. 

Setting stakes in the swamp (Ministerial). Saw seven black ducks fly out of the peat-hole.

J.J. Audubon (The flight of this Duck, which, in as far as I know, is peculiar to America, is powerful, rapid, and as sustained as that of the Mallard. While travelling by day they may be distinguished from that species by the whiteness of their lower wing-coverts, which form a strong contrast to the deep tints of the rest of their plumage )

Saw there also a tortoise still stirring, the painted tortoise, I believe.

Found on the south side of the swamp the Lygodium palmatum, which Bigelow calls the only climbing fern in our latitude, an evergreen, called (with others) snake tongue, as I find in Loudon.

The Irishman who helped me says, when I ask why his countrymen do not learn trades, — do something but the plainest and hardest work, — they are too old to learn trades when they come here.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 24, 1851

Setting stakes in the swamp (Ministerial). See November 14, 1851 ("Surveying the Ministerial Lot in the southwestern part of the town."); November 18,1851 ("Surveying these days the Ministerial Lot . . .I hear the hooting of an owl . . . Here hawks also circle by day, and chickadees are heard, and rabbits and partridges abound.");  December 21, 1851 (“As I stand by the edge of the swamp (Ministerial), a heavy-winged hawk flies home to it at sundown, just over my head, in silence.”); December 13, 1857 ("I go this afternoon thinking I may find the stakes set for auction lots on the Ministerial Lot in December, '51") See also  July 7, 1854 ("See a pretty large hawk. . . circling over the Ministerial Swamp.") 

Saw seven black ducks fly out of the peat-hole. See September 24, 1855 ("See coming from the south in loose array some twenty apparently black ducks, . . .At first they were in form like a flock of blackbirds, then for a moment assumed the outline of a fluctuating harrow. ); September 29, 1851 ("Scared up three black ducks, which rose with a great noise of their wings, striking the water. "); September 30, 1853 ("Saw a large flock of black ducks flying northwest in the form of a harrow."); November 3, 1852 ("At Andromeda Pond, started nine black (?) ducks just at sunset, as usual they circling far round to look at me."); November 11, 1851 ("In the withered grass at Nut Meadow Brook, two black ducks, . . .rise black between me and the sun, but, when they have circled round to the east, show some silvery sheen on the under side of their wings. "); March 12, 1859 ("See two ducks flying over Ministerial Swamp.") See also  A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the American Black Duck)

Saw a tortoise still stirring, the painted tortoise, I believe. See November 14, 1855 ("A painted tortoise swimming under water and a wood tortoise out on the bank."); November 27, 1856 ("Take a turn down the river. A painted tortoise sinking to the bottom, and apparently tree sparrows along the shore"); December 2, 1857 ("Measuring Little Goose Pond, I observed two painted tortoises moving about under the thin transparent ice"); December 3, 1852 (" In a ditch near by, under ice half an inch thick, I saw a painted tortoise moving about.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Painted Turtle (Emys picta)

Found on the south side of the swamp the Lygodium palmatum See November 30, 1851 ("The Lygodium palmatum is quite abundant on that side of the swamp, twining round the goldenrods, etc., etc"); October 2, 1859 (“The climbing fern is perfectly fresh, — and apparently therefore an evergreen, — the more easily found amid the withered cinnamon and flowering ferns.”); May 1, 1859 ("The climbing fern is persistent, i.e. retains its greenness still, though now partly brown and withered.") See also November 24, 1852 ("At this time last year the andromeda in the Ministerial Swamp was red . Now it has not turned from brown."): November 20, 1857 ("I enter the Ministerial Swamp at the road below Tarbell’s. The water andromeda leaves are brown now, except where protected by trees. In some places where many of the bright-crimson shoots of high blueberry are seen together, they have a very pretty effect");  April 29, 1857 ("Sweet-fern at entrance of Ministerial Swamp.");  May 19, 1860 (“At the Ministerial Swamp I see a white lady's-slipper almost out, fully grown, with red ones.”); August 28, 1860 ("The Lycopodium inundatum common by Harrington's mud-hole, Ministerial Swamp.")  

My eye rested with pleasure on the white pines.

November 30

A cold afternoon

windy with some snow not yet

melted on the ground.

My eye wanders as

I sit on an oak stump by

an old cellar-hole.

Where is my home now?

Faint as an old cellar hole,

 is where we have lived.

Methinks that in my 

mood I am asking Nature 

to give me a sign.

Transient gladness.

I do not know what it is –

something that I see:

A recognition

from white pines now reflecting

a silvery light.

And by the old site

I sit on the stump of an

oak which once grew here.

November 30, 2016

Sunday. 

A rather cold and windy afternoon, with some snow not yet melted on the ground. 

Under the south side of the hill between Brown's and Tarbell's, in a warm nook, disturbed three large gray squirrels and some partridges, who had all sought out this bare and warm place. While the squirrels hid themselves in the tree-tops, I sat on an oak stump by an old cellar-hole and mused. 

This squirrel is always an unexpectedly large animal to see frisking about. 

My eye wanders across the valley to the pine woods which fringe the opposite side, and in their aspect my eye finds something which addresses itself to my nature. 

Methinks that in my mood I was asking Nature to give me a sign. 

I do not know exactly what it was that attracted my eye. I experienced a transient gladness, at any rate, at something which I saw. 

I am sure that my eye rested with pleasure on the white pines, now reflecting a silvery light, the infinite stories of their boughs, tier above tier, a sort of basaltic structure, a crumbling precipice of pine horizontally stratified. Each pine is like a great green feather stuck in the ground. A myriad white pine boughs extend themselves horizontally, one above and behind another, each bearing its burden of silvery sunlight, with darker seams between them, as if it were a great crumbling piny precipice thus stratified. 

On this my eyes pastured, while the squirrels were up the trees behind me. That, at any rate, it was that I got by my afternoon walk, a certain recognition from the pine, some congratulation. 

Where is my home? It is indistinct as an old cellar-hole, now a faint indentation merely in a farmer's field, which he has plowed into and rounded off its edges years ago, and I sit by the old site on the stump of an oak which once grew there. 

Such is the nature where we have lived. 

Thick birch groves stand here and there, dark brown (?) now with white lines more or less distinct. 

The Lygodium palmatum is quite abundant on that side of the swamp, twining round the goldenrods, etc., etc.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 30, 1851

My eye rested with pleasure on the white pines, now reflecting a silvery light. See November 11, 1851 ("There is a cold, silvery light on the white pines as I go through J.P. Brown's field near Jenny Dugan’s.”); December 21. 1851(“Sunlight on pine-needles is the phenomenon of a winter day.”); February 4, 1852 ("Now the white pine are a misty blue; anon a lively, silvery light plays on them, and they seem to erect themselves unusually. . . The sun loves to nestle in the boughs of the pine and pass rays through them."); February 5, 1852 ("The boughs, feathery boughs, of the white pines, tier above tier, reflect a silvery light against the darkness of the grove, as if both the silvery-lighted and greenish bough and the shadowy intervals of the shade behind belong to one tree.”); December 8, 1855 ("Yet it is cheering to walk there while the sun is reflected from far through the aisles with a silvery light from the needles of the pine.”); December 3, 1856 (“Tthe pine forest's edge seen against the winter horizon. . . .The silvery needles of the pine straining the light.”).

The Lygodium palmatum twining round the goldenrods. [CLIMBING FERN, or Hartford Fern (Lygodium palmatum) . A species of fern found, rarely, from Massachusetts to Kentucky and southward, remarkable for climbing or twining around weeds and shrubs ~ Wikisource.] See October 2, 1859 (“The climbing fern is perfectly fresh, — and apparently therefore an evergreen, — the more easily found amid the withered cinnamon and flowering ferns.”); May 1, 1859 ("The climbing fern is persistent, i. e. retains its greenness still, though now partly brown and withered.")

November 30. A Book of the Seasons,   by Henry Thoreau, November 30

An old cellar hole.

I sit on the stump of an

oak which once grew here.

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, My eye rested with pleasure on the white pines.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, 

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

out-of-doors, in its own locality.”

~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx © 2009-2025

https://tinyurl.com/HDT511130