Surveying again for Ed. Hoar the wood land adjoining his farm.
A yet
warmer day. A very thick haze, concealing mountains and all distant objects
like a smoke, with a strong but warm southwest wind. Your outside coat is soon
left on the ground in the woods, where it first becomes quite intolerable.
The
small red butterfly in the wood-paths and sprout-lands, and I hear at midafternoon
a very faint but positive ringing sound rising above the susurrus of the pines,
— of the breeze, — which I think is the note of a distant and perhaps solitary
toad; not loud and ringing, as it will be.
Toward night I hear it more
distinctly, and am more confident about it. I hear this faint first reptilian
sound added to the sound of the winds thus each year a little in advance of the
unquestionable note of the toad. Of constant sounds in the warmer parts of warm
days there now begins to be added to the rustling or crashing, waterfall-like sound
of the wind this faintest imaginable prelude of the toad.
I often draw my
companion's attention to it, and he fails to hear it at all, it is so slight a
departure from the previous monotony of March. This morning you walked in the
warm sprout-land, the strong but warm southwest wind blowing, and you heard no
sound but the dry and mechanical susurrus of the wood; now there is mingled
with or added to it, to be detected only by the sharpest ears, this first and
faintest imaginable voice.
I heard this under Mt. Misery. Probably they come
forth earlier under the warm slopes of that hill.
The pewee sings in earnest,
the first I have heard; and at even I hear the first real robin's song.
I hear
that there has been a great fire in the woods this afternoon near the factory.
Some say a thousand acres have been burned over. This is the dangerous time, —between
the drying of the earth, or say when dust begins to fly, and the general
leafing of the trees, when it is shaded again. These fires are a perfectly
regular phenomenon of this season.
Many refer to them this thick haze, but,
though in the evening I smell the smoke (no doubt) of the Concord fire, I think
that the haze generally is owing to the warm southwest wind having its vapor
condensed by our cooler air.
An engine sent from town and a crowd of boys; and
I hear that one man had to swim across a pond to escape being burnt.
One tells
me he found the saxifrage out at Lee's Cliff this afternoon, and another, Ellen
Emerson, saw a yellow or little brown snake, evidently either the Coluber
ordinatus or else amænus, probably the first.
Sit without fire.
H.
D. Thoreau, Journal, March 31, 1860
Your outside coat is soon left on the ground in the woods, where it first becomes quite intolerable. See
March 31, 1855 ("I am uncomfortably warm, gradually unbutton both my coats, and wish that I had left the outside one at home.") See also
March 15, 1852 ("This afternoon I throw off my outside coat. A mild spring day.. . .My life partakes of infinity.");
April 5, 1854 ("Whatever year it may be, I am surveying, perhaps, in the woods; I have taken off my outside coat, perhaps for the first time, and hung it on a tree; . . .; when I hear a single, short, well- known stertorous croak from some pool half filled with dry leaves.")
I hear this faint first reptilian sound added to the sound of the winds thus each year a little in advance of the unquestionable note of the toad. See
April 5, 1860 (" I hear, or think that I hear, a very faint distant ring of toads, which, though I walk and walk all the afternoon, I never come nearer to. . . .It merely gives a slightly more ringing or sonorous sound to the general rustling of inanimate nature. ");
April 13, 1853 ("First hear toads (and take off coat), a loud, ringing sound filling the air, which yet few notice."); April 13, 1858 ("Hear the first toad in the rather cool rain, 10 A. M.");
April 15, 1856 (" I hear a clear, shrill, prolonged ringing note from a toad, the first toad of the year");
May 1, 1857 ("There is a cool and breezy south wind, and the ring of the first toad leaks into the general stream of sound, unnoticed by most.") See also
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau,
The Ring of Toads.
The pewee sings in earnest, the first I have heard. See
March 16, 1854 ("The first phoebe near the water is heard. ");
March 29, 1858 ("Hear a phoebe early in the morning over the street."); March 30, 1851 ("Spring is already upon us. . . . The pewee is heard, and the lark. ");
April 1, 1857. (" Up Assabet . . .Hear a phoebe");
April 1, 1859("At the Pokelogan up the Assabet, I see my first phoebe, the mild bird. It flirts its tail and sings
pre vit, pre vit, pre vit, pre vit incessantly, as it sits over the water, and then at last, rising on the last syllable, says
pre-VEE, as if insisting on that with peculiar emphasis.") See also
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Eastern Phoebe
At even I hear the first real robin's song. See
March 31, 1852 ("The robins sing at the very earliest dawn. I wake with their note ringing in my ear."); See also
March 12, 1854 ("I hear my first robin peep distinctly at a distance. No singing yet. ");
April 1, 1857. ("Already I hear a robin or two singing their evening song.");
April 1, 1852 ("I hear a robin singing in the woods south of Hosmer's, just before sunset. It is a sound associated with New England village life. It brings to my thoughts summer evenings when the children are playing in the yards before the doors and their parents conversing at the open windows. It foretells all this now, before those summer hours are come.") and
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau,
Robins in Spring
A yellow or little brown snake, evidently either the Coluber ordinatus or else amænus, probably the first. See
October 18, 1858 (“Noticed a little snake, eight or nine inches long, in the rut in the road in the Lincoln woods. It was brown above with a paler-brown dorsal stripe, which was bounded on each side by a row of dark-brown or blackish dots one eighth inch apart, the opposite rows alternating; beneath, light cream-color or yellowish white. Evidently Storer’s
Coluber ordinatus.”);
October 29, 1857 (“I see evidently what Storer calls the little brown snake (
Coluber ordinatus). . . . Above it is pale-brown, with a still lighter brown stripe running down the middle of the back”);
October 11, 1856 (“It is apparently
Coluber amaenus, the red snake. Brown above, light-red beneath, about eight inches long . . . It is a conspicuous light red beneath, then a bluish-gray line along the sides, and above this brown with a line of lighter or yellowish brown down the middle of the back.”);
September 9, 1857 ("It was a dark ash-color above, with darker longitudinal lines, light brick-red beneath. There were three triangular buff spots just behind the head, one above and one each side. It is apparently
Coluber amaenus”);
April 29, 1858 (“A little brown snake with blackish marks along each side of back and a pink belly. Was it not the
Coluber amaenus?”)
Some say a thousand acres have been burned over. See
April 2, 1860 ("Walked to the Mayflower Path and to see the great burning of the 31st. I smelled the burnt ground a quarter of a mile off. It was a very severe burn, the ground as black as a chimney-back. The fire is said to have begun by an Irishman burning brush near Wild' s house in the south part of Acton, and ran north and northeast some two miles before the southwest wind, crossing Fort Pond Brook. I walked more than a mile along it and could not see to either end, and crossed it in two places. A thousand acres must have been burned.")
These fires are a perfectly regular phenomenon of this season. See March 29, 1858 ("I saw, on the hillside far across the meadow by Holbrook's clearing, what I at first took for a red flag or handkerchief carried along on a pole, just above the woods. It was a fire in the woods, and I saw the top of the flashing flames above the tree-tops. The woods are in a state of tinder, and the smoker and sportsman and the burner must be careful now.");
April 4, 1856 ("Already I hear of a small fire in the woods in Emerson’s lot, set by the engine, the leaves that are bare are so dry.");
April 9, 1856 ("Now look out for fires in the woods, for the leaves are never so dry and ready to burn as now. The snow is no sooner gone, —nay, it may still cover the north and west sides of hills, — when a day or two’s sun and wind will prepare the leaves to catch at the least spark.");
April 21, 1859 ("Put out a fire in the woods, the Brister lot.");
April 5, 1860 ("We heard of fires in the woods in various towns, and more or less distant, on the same days that they occurred here, — the last of March and first of April. The newspapers reported many. The same cause everywhere produced the same effect.") See also February 8, 1858 ("Two or three-acres were burned over, set probably by the engine. Such a burning as commonly occurs in the spring.")
One tells me he found the saxifrage out at Lee's Cliff this afternoon. See
April 3, 1853("To my great surprise the saxifrage is in bloom. It was, as it were, by mere accident that I found it.. . . under a projecting rock in a little nook on the south side of a stump, I spied one little plant which had opened three or four blossoms high up the Cliff.
"); April 27, 1852 ("On Conantum Cliffs I find to-day for the first time the early saxifrage (
Saxifraga vernalis) in blossom, growing high and dry in the narrow seams, where there is no soil for it but a little green moss. It is one of the first flowers, not only in the spring of the year, but in the spring of the world.") See also
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau,
Saxifrage in Spring (Saxifraga vernalis)
Sit without fire. See
April 30, 1859 (" The warmest afternoon yet. Sat in sun without fire this forenoon.");
May 2, 1858 ("Sit without fire to-day and yesterday.");
May 3, 1857 ("To-day we sit without fire.")
