May 20
The 18th and 19th a rather gentle and warm May storm, more rain, methinks, than we have had before this spring at one time.
Began with thunder-showers on the night of the 18th, the flashing van of the storm, followed by the long, dripping main body, with, at very long intervals, an occasional firing or skirmishing in the rear or on the flanks.
6 A. M. To Island by river.
Probably a red-wing blackbird's nest, of grass, hung between two button-bushes; whitish eggs with irregular black marks.
Sarsaparilla (Aralia nudicaulis), probably two days.
White oak, swamp white, and chestnut oak probably will open by the 22d.
The white ashes are in full flower now, and how long ? 8 A. M.-To Flint's Pond.
Cornus Canadensis just out.
Probably the C. florida should be set down to-day, since it just begins to shed pollen and its involucre is more open.
It is a fair but cool and windy day, a strong northwest wind, and the grass, to which the rain has given such a start, conspicuously waves, showing its lighter under side, and the buttercups toss in the wind.
The pitch and white pines have grown from one to five inches.
On Pine Hill.
In this clear morning light and a strong wind from the northwest, the mountains in the horizon, seen against some low, thin clouds in the background, look darker and more like earth than usual; you distinguish forest and pasture on them. This in the clear, cool atmosphere in the morning after a rain-storm, with the wind northwest. They will grow more ethereal, melting into the sky, as the day advances.
The beech is already one of the most densely clothed trees, or rather makes a great show of verdure from the size of its fully expanded light-green leaves, though some are later. The fresh shoots on low branches are five or six inches long.
It is an interesting tree to me, with its neat, close, tight-looking bark, like the dress which athletes wear, its bare instep, and roots beginning to branch like bird's feet, showing how it is planted and holds by the ground. Not merely stuck in the ground like a stick.
It gives the beholder the same pleasure that it does to see the timbers of a house above and around.
Do they blossom here? I found nuts, but apparently not sound, at Haverhill the other day,-last year's.
There are some slender, perfectly horizontal limbs which go zigzagging, as it were creeping through the air, only two or three feet above the ground, over the side-hill, as if they corresponded to concealed rills in the ground beneath.
Plenty of arums now in bloom. Probably my earliest one was in bloom, for I did not look within it.
What is that pretty, transparent moss in the brooks, which holds the rain or dewdrops so beautifully on the undersides of the leafets, through which they sparkle crystallinely?
Fresh checkerberry shoots now.
The cedars are full of yellowish cedar apples and minute berries just formed, the effete staminiferous blossom still on. When did they begin to bloom?
I find none of the rare hedyotis yet on Bare Hill.
The peach bloom is now gone and the apple bloom come.
Heard the seringo note, like a rattling watch-spring, from a flock passing swiftly overhead.
The wind makes such a din in the woods that the notes of birds are lost, and added to this is the sound of the waves of Flint's Pond breaking on the shore, the fresh surf. The pond is spotted with whitecaps, five or six feet long by one foot, like a thin flock of sheep running toward the southeast shore. The smallest lakes can be lashed into a sort of fury by the wind, and are quite ocean-like then. These caps are a striving to dilute the water with air.
The barberry will probably blossom to-day.
Here, by the side of the pond, a fire has recently run through the young woods on the hillside. It is surprising how clean it has swept the ground; only the very lowest and dampest rotten leaves remaining, but uvularias and smilacinas have pushed up here and there conspicuously on the black ground, a foot high.
At first you do not observe the full effect of the fire, walking amid the bare dead or dying trees, which wear a perfect winter aspect, which, as trees generally are not yet fully leaved out and you are still used to this, you do not notice, till you look up and see the still green tops everywhere above the height of fifteen feet.
Yet the trees do not bear many marks of fire commonly; they are but little blackened except where the fire has run a few feet up a birch, or paused at a dry stump, or a young evergreen has been killed and reddened by it and is now dropping a shower of red leaves.
Hemlock will blossom to-morrow.
The geranium is just out,
May 20, 2018
and the lady’s-slipper.
Some with old seed vessels are still seen.
Hear again, what I have heard for a week or more sometimes, that rasping, springy note, a very hoarse chirp, ooh, twee twee twee, from a bluish bird as big as a bluebird, with some bright yellow about head, white beneath and lateral tail-feathers, and black cheeks (?).
This and that sort of brown-creeper-like bird of May 12 — and the chickadee-like bird (which may be the chickadee), and the ah te ter twee of deep pine woods (which also may be the chickadee), I have not identified.
Arbor-vitæ has been out some time and the butter nut some days.
Mountain-ash on the 18th.
Larch apparently ten days.
Nemopanthes several days.
The swamp blueberry abundantly out.
Saw a tanager in Sleepy Hollow. It most takes the eye of any bird. You here have the red-wing reversed,-the deepest scarlet of the red-wing spread over the whole body, not on the wing-coverts merely, while the wings are black. It flies through the green foliage as if it would ignite the leaves.
Of deciduous trees and shrubs, the latest to leaf out, as I find by observation to-day, must be the panicled andromeda, rhodora, and button-bush.
In some places, however, the first has perfectly formed leaves, the rhodora at most not half unfolded, the button-bush for the most part just bursting buds.
But I have not seen the prinos and perhaps one or two other shrubs.
I have no doubt that the button-bush may be called the latest of all.
Is that female ash by river at Lee's Hill a new kind? In bloom fully May 18th.
Even this remote forest, which stands so far away and innocent, has this terrible foe Fire to fear. Lightning may ignite a dead tree or the dry leaves, and in a few minutes a green forest be blackened and killed. This liability to accident from which no part of nature is exempt.
Plucked to-day a bunch of Viola pedata, consisting of four divisions or offshoots around a central or fifth root, all united and about one inch in diameter at the ground and four inches at top. [contained 49 Flowers, 22 Buds] And perhaps more buds would still make their appearance, and undoubtedly half a dozen more would have blown the next day. Forming a complex, close little testudo of violet scales above their leaves.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, May 20, 1853
Probably a red-wing blackbird's nest, of grass, hung between two button-bushes; whitish eggs with irregular black marks. See May 25, 1855 ("Red-wing’s nest with four eggs. . .curiously and neatly marked with brown-black spots and lines on the large end.”); June 1, 1857 ("A red-wing's nest, four eggs, . . the hieroglyphics on these eggs . . ..who determines the style of the marking?") See See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Red-wing in Spring
It flies through the green foliage as if it would ignite the leaves. See May 20, 1858 ("See tanagers, male and female, in the top of a pine, one red, other yellow, from below. We have got to these high colors among birds.") See also A Book of Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Scarlet Tanager
The lady’s-slipper just out. See May 20, 1852 ("A lady’s-slipper well budded and now white."); see also May 18, 1851 ("Lady's-slipper almost fully blossomed”).; May 19, 1860 (“At the Ministerial Swamp I see a white lady's-slipper almost out, fully grown, with red ones.”); May 30, 1858 ("Hear of lady's-slipper seen the 23d; how long?")
