Botanizing the grasses and sedges

August 25. 

It has been cool and especially windy from the northwest since the 19th, inclusive, but is stiller now.

The note of a warbling vireo sounds very rare. 

P. M. — To Lupine Hill and beyond. 

I see a mouse on the dry hillside this side of Clamshell. 

It is evidently the short-tailed meadow mouse, or Arvicola hirsuta. Generally above, it is very dark brown, almost blackish, being browner forward. It is also dark beneath. Tail but little more than one inch long. Its legs must be very short, for I can hardly glimpse them. Its nose is not sharp. It endeavors to escape down the hill to the meadow, and at first glides along in a sort of path (?), methinks. It glides close to the ground under the stubble and tries to conceal itself. 

I gather from Nut Meadow Brook, not far below the road, a potamogeton (perhaps P. Clayton heterophylus of Gray), which Russell said was the one by road at Jenny Dugan’s). It is still out. Has handsome broad, grassy immersed leaves and somewhat elliptic floating ones. 

I distinguish these plants this afternoon: 

• Cyperus filiculmis (mariscoides, or tuberous cyperus of Bigelow) in arid, sandy pastures, with globular green heads and slender, commonly slanting culms, five to twelve inches long. It is perhaps getting stale. 

• The prevalent grass in John Hosmer’s meadow I take to be cut-grass? [no] Long since done, and the leaves now commonly purplish, reflecting that color in the sun from a distance. 

• The Paspalum setaceum (ciliatifolium), my saw-grass, which I have seen for some time, commonly cut off by the mowers, apparently in prime or past. 

• Eragrostis pectinacea (Poa hirsuta), hair spear-grass, perhaps not quite so bright as heretofore. Money-Diggers’ Hollow has the most of it. Say a week in prime. 

• Fimbrystilis capillaris (Scirpus capillaris), that little scirpus turning yellowish in sandy soil, as our garden and Lupine Hill sand. Some time in prime. 

• Cyperus strigosus under Clamshell Hill, that yellowish fuzzy headed plant, five to twelve inches high, now apparently in prime. Also in Mrs. Hoar’s garden. 

• Also Cyperus phymatodes, very much like last, in Mrs. Hoar’s garden, which has little tubers at a distance from the base; apparently in prime. 

• Cyperus dentatus (?), with flat spikelets, under Solidago rigida Bank, apparently in prime; also Pout’s Nest, with round fascicles of leaves amid spikes. 

• Juncus scirpoides (?)[Is it not paradoxes? Vide Aug. 30] (polycephalus, many-headed of Bigelow), at Alder Ditch and in Great Meadows, etc., perhaps some time. 

• Andropogon furcatus, forked beard grass, Solidago rigida Bank, a slender grass three to seven feet high on dry soil, apparently in prime with digitate purple spikes, all over hillside behind Caesar’s. 

• Setaria glauca, glaucous panic grass, bottle grass, sometimes called fox-tail, tawny yellow, going to seed, Mrs. Hoar’s garden. 

• Setaria viridis, green bottle grass, in garden, some going to seed, but later than the last. These two I have called millet grass. 

• Aristida dichotomy  poverty grass, slender, curving, purplish, in tufts on sterile soil, looking White fuzzy as it goes to seed; apparently in prime.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 25, 1858

The note of a warbling vireo sounds very rare. See August 9, 1856 (“The notes of the wood pewee and warbling vireo are more prominent of late, and of the goldfinch twittering over.”)

It is plain for miles without a tree . . . That solitude was sweet to me as a flower.

June 21. 

Sunday. 

June 21, 2020

About noon it cleared up, and after dinner I set out for Provincetown, straight across the country to the Bay where the new road strikes it, directly through the pine plantation about one mile from the lighthouse. The pines have apparently not done so well here as in some other places on the Cape. 

I observed a tuft of crow-berry, together with poverty-grass, about one mile west of the light. This part of Truro affords singularly interesting and cheering walks for me, with regular hollows or dimples shutting out the sea as completely as if in the midst of the continent, though when you stand on the plain you commonly see the sails of vessels standing up or down the coast on each side of you, though you may not see the water. At first you may take them for the roofs of barns or houses. 

It is plain for miles without a tree, where the new telegraph-wires are a godsend to the birds, affording them something to perch upon. That solitude was sweet to me as a flower. I sat down on the boundless level and enjoyed the solitude, drank it in, the medicine for which I had pined, worth more than the bear-berry so common on the Cape. 

As I was approaching the Bay through a sandy hollow a mile east of High Head, I found two or three arrow-points and a rude axe or hammer, a flattish stone from the beach with a deep groove chipped around it. 

The beach on the Bay Side was completely strewn with seaweed (the grassy kind), which does not grow on the Atlantic side, as if the Bay were a meadow compared with the Atlantic. The beach was harder than the Back Side, the hardest part being on the weed at high-water line. The skulls and backbones of black-fish, their vertebrae and spinal processes, and disk-shaped bones, five inches in diameter, from the spine were strewn all along. These looked like rough crackers. 

Also the ribs of whale (probably humpbacked), — they get humpback and finback and right whales, I heard, — six feet long, lay under the bank, hardly to be distinguished from their gray rails. Some of those whale ribs, ten inches wide, were from time to time set up in the sand, like mile stones (or bones); they seemed to answer that purpose along the new road. 

They had taken a whale in Provincetown Harbor on the previous 17th, and stripped off the blubber at one of the wharves. I saw many dogfish whose livers had been extracted. 

At East Harbor River, as I sat on the Truro end of the bridge, I saw a great flock of mackerel gulls, one hundred at least, on a sandy point, whitening the shore there like so many white stones on the shore and in the water, uttering all together their vibrating shrill note. They had black heads, light bluish-slate wings, and light rump and tail and beneath. From time to time all or most would rise and circle about with a clamor, then settle again on the same spot close together. 

Soon after crossing the bridge, I turned off and ascended Mt. Ararat. It exhibited a remarkable landscape: on the one side the desert, of smooth and spotless palest fawn-colored sand, slightly undulating, and beyond, the Atlantic; on the other, the west, side, a few valleys and hills, densely clothed with a short, almost moss-like (to look down at) growth of huckleberry, blueberry, bear-berry, josh-pear (which is so abundant in Provincetown), bayberry, rose, checkerberry, and other bushes, and beyond, the Bay. All these bushes formed an even and dense covering to the sand-hills, much as bear-berry alone might. It was a very strange scenery. You would think you might be in Labrador, or some other place you have imagined. The shrubbery at the very summit was swarming with mosquitoes, which troubled me when I sat down, but they did not rise above the level of the bushes. 

At the Pilgrim House, though it was not crowded, they put me into a small attic chamber which had two double beds in it, and only one window, high in a corner, twenty and a half inches by twenty-five and a half, in the alcove when it was swung open, and it required a chair to look out conveniently. Fortunately it was not  a cold night and the window could be kept open, though at the risk of being visited by the cats, which appear to swarm on the roofs of Provincetown like the mosquitoes on the summits of its hills. 

I have spent four memorable nights there in as many different years, and have added considerable thereby to my knowledge of the natural history of the cat and the bedbug. Sleep was out of the question. A night in one of the attics of Provincetown! to say nothing of what is to be learned in entomology. It would be worth the while to send a professor there, one who was also skilled in entomology. Such is your Pilgerruhe or Pilgrims'-Rest. Every now and then one of these animals on its travels leaped from a neighboring roof on to mine, with such a noise as if a six-pounder had fallen within two feet of my head, — the discharge of a catapult, — a twelve-pounder discharged by a catapult, — and then followed such a scrambling as banished sleep for a long season, while I watched lest they came in at the open window. A kind of foretaste, methought, of the infernal regions. I didn't wonder they gave quit claim deeds of their land here. My experience is that you fare best at private houses. The barroom may be defined a place to spit. 

"Soon as the evening shades prevail,

The cats take up the wondrous tale."

At still midnight, when, half awake, half asleep, you seem to be weltering in your own blood on a battle field, you hear the stealthy tread of padded feet belonging to some animal of the cat tribe, perambulating the roof within a few inches of your head. 

I had already this evening called on Mr. Atwood, the Representative of the town and one of the commissioners appointed by the legislature to superintend the experiments in the artificial breeding of fishes. He said that he knew (I think) eighty-two kinds of fishes there. 

When Mr. Pool, the Doorkeeper of the House of Representatives, — if that is his name and title, — who makes out a list of the Representatives and their professions, asked him his business, he answered, "Fisherman." At which Pool was disturbed and said that no representative had ever called himself a fisherman before. It would not do to print it so. And so Atwood is put down as "Master Mariner"! ! So much for American democracy. I reminded him that Fisherman had been a title of honor with a large party ever since the Christian Era at least. When next we have occasion to speak of the apostles I suppose we should call them "Master Mariners"! 

Atwood said that his brother here took the bone shark recently which I read was thirty feet long. 

Fog again at night.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 21, 1857

A walk on the beach.

June 19. 

Piping Plover

Friday. Fog still, but I walk about a mile north onward on the beach. 

The sea is still running considerably. It is surprising how rapidly the water soaks into the sand, and is even dried up between each undulation. 

The sand has many holes in it, about an eighth of an inch over, which seem to have been made by the beach-flea. These have a firm and as if artificial rim or curb, and it is remarkable that the waves flow two or three feet over them with force without obliterating them. They help soak up the water. 

As I walk along close to the edge of the water, the sea oscillating like a pendulum before me and each billow flowing with a flat white foaming edge and a rounded outline up the sand, it reminds me of the white toes of blue-stockinged feet thrust forward from under the garments in an endless dance. 

It is a contra-dance to the shore. Some waves flow unexpectedly high and fill my shoes with water before I am aware of it. It is very exciting for a while to walk where half the floor before you is thus incessantly fluctuating. 

There is frequently, if not for the most part, a bar just off the shore on which the waves first break and spend more or less of their violence, and I see that the way to land in a boat at such a time would be to row along outside this bar and its breakers, till you came to an opening in it, then enter and row up or down within the bar to a comparatively safe place to land. 

I turn up the first hollow. A piping plover peeps around me there, and feigns lameness, — though I at first think that she is dusting herself on the sand, — to attract me away from her nest evidently. 

Return inland. The poverty-grass is fully out, in bright-yellow mounds or hillocks, more like painted clods than flowers, or, on the bare sandy hills and plains of the Cape, they look like tufts of yellow lichens on a roof. They indicate such soil as the cladonia lichen with us. If the soil were better they would not be found there. 

These hillocks are about as big as a large ant-hill — some have spread to eight or ten feet in diameter, but are flat and broken more or less — and commonly dead in the middle or perhaps one side, but I see many perfect dense hemispheres of yellow flowers.  As the sand gathers around them, they rise above it, and they seem to bloom and flourish better when thus nearly buried in sand. A hemisphere eighteen inches in diameter would rest flat on the surface for six inches in width on the outside and be rather loosely rooted in the middle, for you could easily lift it all up. 

The Hudsonia ericoides is the most common, and the tomentosa appears  to be less in hillocks, i. e. more broken and dead. 

The poverty-grass emits a common sweetish scent as you walk over the fields. It blossoms on the edges first. You meet with it in Plymouth as you approach the peculiar soil of the Cape.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 19, 1857

A piping plover peeps around me there, and feigns lameness . . . See  July 11, 1857  ("The piping plover, as it runs half invisible on the sand before you, utters a shrill peep on an elevated key (different birds on different keys) . . ."); July 11, 1855 ("See young piping plover running in a troop on the beach . . .."); July 7, 1855 ("The piping plover running and standing on the beach.")