A Book of the Seasons, Signs of the Spring: ripples made by fishes

 

No mortal is alert enough 

to be present at the first dawn of the spring. 

Henry Thoreau, March 17, 1857

No wonder we feel the spring influences. 

There is a motion in the very ground under our feet. 

Each rill is peopled with new life rushing up it. 

March 20, 1858

Sandy-bottomed brook

flowing cold from ice and snow —

fins poised over sand!

March 19, 1854

March 19, 2015

February 1.  Nut Meadow Brook open for some distance in the meadow. I am affected by the sight of some green polygonum leaves there. Some kind of minnow darts off. February 1, 1856 

February 23.   I have seen signs of the spring.  February 23, 1857

February 25. Am surprised to see some little minnows only an inch long in an open place in Well Meadow Brook. February 25, 1856

March 7. I see many tadpoles of medium or full size in deep warm ditches in Hubbard’s meadow. They may probably be seen as soon as the ditches are open, thus earlier than frogs. At his bridge over the brook it must have been a trout I saw glance,—rather dark, as big as my finger. March 7, 1855

March 8.  I walk these days along the brooks, looking for tortoises and trout, etc.  March 8, 1855

March 9. I detect the trout minnows not an inch long by their quick motions or quirks, soon concealing themselves. March 9, 1854

March 11. Snow and ice together make a curtain twenty-eight inches thick now drawn over the pond. Such is the prospect of the fishes!   March 11, 1856

March 15.  The trout darts away in the puny brook there so swiftly in a zigzag course that commonly I only see the ripple that he makes, in proportion, in this brook only a foot wide, like that made by a steamer in a canal. Or if I catch a glimpse of him before he buries himself in the mud, it is only a dark film without distinct outline. By his zigzag course he bewilders the eye, and avoids capture perhaps. March 15, 1857

March 16. Saw a flock of sheldrakes a hundred rods off, on the Great Meadows, mostly males with a few females, all intent on fishing . . . It is remarkable that they find their finny prey on the middle of the meadow now, and even on the very inmost side, as I afterward saw, though the water is quite low. Of course, as soon as they are seen on the meadows there are fishes there to be caught. I never see them fish thus in the channel. Perhaps the fishes lie up there for warmth already. March 16, 1860 

March 18.  Nut Meadow Brook is open for a dozen rods from its mouth, and for a rod into the river . . . I see the ripples made by some fishes, which were in the small opening at its mouth, making haste to hide themselves in the ice-covered river. This square rod and one or two others like it in the town are the only places where I could see this phenomenon now. Thus early they appear, ready to be the prey of the fish hawk. Within the brook I see quite a school of little minnows, an inch long, amid or over the bare dead stems of polygonums, and one or two little water-bugs (apple seeds). The last also in the broad ditch on the Corner road, in Wheeler’s meadow.  Notwithstanding the backwardness of the season, all the town still under deep snow and ice, here they are, in the first open and smooth water, governed by the altitude of the sun. March 18, 1856

March 19.  See in Mill Brook behind Shannon's three or four shiners (the first), poised over the sand with a distinct longitudinal light-colored line midway along their sides and a darker line below it. This is a noteworthy and characteristic lineament, or cipher, or hieroglyphic, or type, of spring.  You look into some clear, sandy-bottomed brook, where it spreads into a deeper bay, yet flowing cold from ice and snow not far off, and see, indistinctly poised over the sand on invisible fins, the outlines of a shiner, scarcely to be distinguished from the sands behind it as if it were transparent, as if the material of which it was builded had all been picked up from them. March 19, 1854

March 19.  No sooner is some opening made in the river, a square rod in area, where some brook or rill empties in, than the fishes apparently begin to seek it for light and warmth, and thus early, perchance, may become the prey of the fish hawk. They are seen to ripple the water, darting out as you approach. March 19, 1856

March 19.  I observed yesterday a dead shiner by the riverside, and to-day the first sucker.  March 19, 1857

March 19.  I see in the ditch by the Turnpike bridge a painted tortoise, and, I think, a small shiner or two, also several suckers which swiftly dart out of sight, rippling the water. We rejoice to see the waters inhabited again, for a fish has become almost incredible.  March 19, 1860

March 20. The wind blows eastward over the opaque ice in vain till it slides on to the living water surface where it raises a myriad brilliant sparkles on the bare face of the pond, an expression of glee, of youth, of spring, as if it spoke the joy of the fishes within it and of the sands on its shore. March 20, 1853

March 20. [The dead sucker phenomenon] is confined to the very earliest spring or winter. March 20, 1857 

March 20. In the sluiceway of Pole Brook, by the road just beyond, I found . . . a dozen (or more) willow sticks, as big one's finger or larger, being set small end down in a circle, in a thin round board which made the bottom, and then smaller osiers interwoven at right angles with them, close and firm. Another funnel-shaped basket was secured within this, extending about half-way down it. . . with an opening hardly two inches wide at the bottom, where only a dozen sharped sticks approached each other. There was a square door in the board bottom, by which the fishes could be taken out. This was set in that sluice way, with the mouth or broad end down-stream, all sunk beneath the surface, the fishes being now evidently running up the brooks from the river and ponds, the ice being mostly gone out of the meadows and brooks. We raised this and found eight or ten small pickerel in it, the biggest a foot long.  March 20, 1858

March 20. The fishes are going up the brooks as they open. They are dispersing themselves through the fields and woods, imparting new life into them. They are taking their places under the shelving banks and in the dark swamps. The water running down meets the fishes running up. They hear the latest news. Spring-aroused fishes are running up our veins too. Little fishes are seeking the sources of the brooks, seeking to disseminate their principles. Talk about a revival of religion! and business men's prayer-meetings! with which all the country goes mad now! What if it were as true and wholesome a revival as the little fishes feel which come out of the sluggish waters and run up the brooks toward their sources? All Nature revives at this season. With her it is really a new life, but with these churchgoers it is only a revival of religion or hypocrisy. They go down stream to still muddier waters. It cheers me more to behold the swarms of gnats which have revived in the spring sun. The fish lurks by the mouth of its native brook, watching its opportunity to dart up the stream by the cakes of ic . . . No wonder we feel the spring influences. There is a motion in the very ground under our feet. Each rill is peopled with new life rushing up it.. March 20, 1858

March 22. The phenomena of an average March . . . As for fishes, etc., trout glance in the brooks , brook minnows are seen; see furrows on sandy bottoms, and small shell snails copulate; dead suckers, etc. , are seen floating on meadows; pickerel and perch are running up brooks, and suckers (24th) and pickerel begin to dart in shallows.  March 22, 1860

March 27. I saw on the 22d a sucker which apparently had been dead a week or two at least. Therefore they must begin to die late in the winter. March 27,1858

March 28.  I can remember now some thirty years — after a fashion — of life in Concord, and every spring there are many dead suckers floating belly upward on the meadows. This phenomenon of dead suckers is as constant as the phenomenon of living ones; nay, as a phenomenon it is far more apparent . . . When I realize that the mortality of suckers in the spring is as old a phenomenon, perchance, as the race of suckers itself, I contemplate it with serenity and joy even, as one of the signs of spring. Thus they have fallen on fate. And so, many a fisherman is not seen on the shore who the last spring did not fail here.   March 28, 1857 

March 29.  The trout glances like a film from side to side and under the bank. March 29, 1853

March 30.   It is a little warmer than of late, though still the shallows are skimmed over. The pickerel begin to dart from the shallowest parts not frozen.  March 30, 1855

*****

So I came in and

shut the door and passed my first

spring night in the woods.

Walden, Spring

See also

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Pickerel
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Osprey (Fish Hawk)
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Sheldrake (Goosander, Merganser)

and Signs of the Spring:

• A Change in the Air
• A Sunny Nook in Spring
• Alder and Willow Catkins Expanding
• Braided Ripples of Melting Snow Shine in the Ruts
• Bright Blue Water
• Buzzing Flies
• Ducks Afar, Sailing on the Meadow
• Frogs, and Turtles Stirring
• Greening Grasses and Sedges
• Insects and Worms Come Forth and are Active
• Listening for the Bluebird
• March is famous for its Winds
• Mosses Bright Green
• Perla-like Insects Appear
• Red Maple Sap Flows
• Ripples made by Fishes
• Skunks Active
• The Anxious Peep of the Early Robin
• The Crowing of Cocks, the Cawing of crows
• The Days are Sensibly Longer
• The Gobbling of Turkeys
• The Grackle Arrives
• The Hawks of March
• The New Warmth of the Sun
• The Note of the Dark-eyed Junco Going Northward
• The Red-Wing Arrives
• The Skunk Cabbage Blooms
• The Softened Air of these Warm February Days
• The Song Sparrow Sings
• The Spring Note of the Chickadee
• The Spring Note of the Nuthatch
• The Striped Squirrel Comes Out
• The Water Bug (Gyrinus)
• Walking without Gloves
• Woodpeckers Tapping

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

 Ripples made by Fishes

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 ©  2009-2024

https://tinyurl.com/HDTfishes

Reflecting the November sun without its heats.

November 8. 

A pleasant day. 

P. M. — To Nut Meadow and Fair Haven Hill. 

I hear a small z-ing cricket. 

Coombs says that quite a little flock of pigeons bred here last summer. He found one nest in a small white pine near his pigeon-stand (where he baited them in the summer), so low he could put his hand in it(!?). 

I saw, while talking with him, a trout playing about in the open roadside watering-place, on the Jimmy Miles road (i. e. in Nut Meadow Brook), which was apparently fifteen inches long; not lurking under the bank but openly swimming up and down in midstream.

How richly and exuberantly downy are many golden- rod and aster heads now, their seed just on the point of falling or being blown away, before they are in the least weather-beaten  They are now puffed up to their utmost, clean and light.

The tufts of purplish withered andropogon in Witherell Glade are still as fair as ever, soft and trembling and bending from the wind; of a very light mouse-color seen from the side of the sun, and as delicate as the most fragile ornaments of a lady's bonnet; but looking toward the sun they are a brilliant white, each polished hair (of the pappus?) reflecting the November sun without its heats, not in the least yellowish or brown like the goldenrods and asters.

H. D. Thoreau,  Journal, November 8, 1859

Coombs says that quite a little flock of pigeons bred here last summer. See September 14, 1859 (“They are catching pigeons nowadays. Coombs has a stand west of Nut Meadow, ”)

I saw a trout playing in Nut Meadow Brook which was apparently fifteen inches long. See November 14, 1857 (“I hear that Gardiner Heywood caught a trout in Walden Pond the other day and that it weighed five pounds.”)

How richly and exuberantly downy are many golden- rod and aster heads now. See November 5, 1855 (“The downy, fuzzy globular tops of the Aster puniceus . . .  are slightly tinged with yellow, compared with the hoary gray of the goldenrod. ”)

Looking toward the sun they are a brilliant white, reflecting the November sun. See November 10, 1858 (“This a November phenomenon, — the silvery light reflected from a myriad of downy surfaces. A true November seat is amid the pretty white-plumed Andropogon scoparius, the withered culms of the purple wood grass which covers so many dry knolls. . . .Looking toward the sun, as I sit in the midst of it rising as high as my head, its countless silvery plumes are a very cheerful sight. At a distance they look like frost on the plant.”)

What various kinds of ice there are!

January 31. 

P. M. —— Up river across Cyanean Meadow. 

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), and the trees and hill are reflected in it, as not in the other. It is far less varied than the other, but still is very peculiar and interesting. You notice the polished surface much more, as if it were the marble floor of some stupendous hall. Yet such is its composition it is not quite so hard and metallic, I think. The skater probably makes more of a scratch. The other was hard and crystalline.

As I look south just before sunset, over this fresh and shining ice, I notice that its surface is divided, as it were, into a great many contiguous tables in different planes, somewhat like so many different facets of a polyhedron as large as the earth itself. These tables or planes are bounded by cracks, though without any appreciable opening, and the different levels are betrayed by the reflections of the light or sky being interrupted at the cracks. 

The ice formed last night is a day old, and these cracks, as I find, run generally from northeast to southwest across the entire meadow, some twenty-five or thirty rods, nearly at right angles with the river, and are from five to fifteen feet apart, while there are comparatively few cracks crossing them in the other direction. You notice this phenomenon looking over the ice some rods before you; otherwise might not observe the cracks when upon them. 

It is as if the very globe itself were a crystal with a certain number of facets. 

When I look westward now to the flat snow-crusted shore, it reflects a strong violet color. 

Also 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. Whole fields and sides of hills are often the same, but it is more distinct on these flat islands of snow scattered here and there over the meadow ice. I also see this pink in the dust made by the skaters.

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? ? 

Surely the ice is a great and absorbing phenomenon. Consider how much of the surface of the town it occupies, how much attention it monopolizes! We do not commonly distinguish more than one kind of water in the river, but what various kinds of ice there are! 

Young Heywood told me that the trout which he caught in Walden was twenty-seven inches long and weighed five pounds, but was thin, not in good condition. (He saw another.) It was in the little cove between the deep one and the railroad.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 31, 1859

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. See  December 20, 1854 ("in some places, where the sun falls on it, the snow has a pinkish tinge");  December 21, 1854 ("The last rays of the sun falling on the Baker Farm reflect a clear pink color. "); January 1, 1855 ("We see the pink light on the snow within a rod of us"); January 10, 1859 ("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 19, 1859 ("I see a rosy tinge like dust on the snow when I look directly toward the setting sun, but very little on the hills. Methinks this pink on snow (as well as blue shadows) requires a clear, cold evening."); January 23, 1859 ("I notice on the ice where it slopes up eastward a little, a distinct rosy light (or pink) reflected from it generally, half an hour before sunset. This is a colder evening than of late, and there is so much the more of it.")

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. See Janusry 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?"); 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. ")

But what various kinds of ice there are! See January 26, 1859 ("What various kinds of ice there are!

The first freezing day-- the crunching sound of frost-crystals in the heaving mud under my feet

November 14. 

P. M. – Ride to limestone quarries on old Carlisle road with E. Hoar. 

This morning it was considerably colder than for a long time, and by noon very much colder than heretofore, with a pretty strong northerly wind. The principal flight of geese was November 8th, so that the bulk of them preceded this cold turn five days. 

You need greatcoat and buffalo and gloves now, if you ride. I find my hands stiffened and involuntarily finding their way to my pockets. No wonder that the weather is a standing subject of conversation, since we are so sensitive. 

If we had not gone through several winters, we might well be alarmed at the approach of cold weather. With this keener blast from the north, my hands suddenly fail to fulfill their office, as it were begin to die. We must put on armor against the new foe. I am almost world-ridden suddenly. I can hardly tie and untie my shoe-strings. 

What a story to tell an inhabitant of the tropics, – perchance that you went to walk, after many months of warmth, when suddenly the air became so cold and hostile to your nature, that it benumbed you so that you lost the use of some of your limbs, could not untie your shoe-strings or unbutton your clothes! 

This cold weather makes us step more briskly.

I hear that the Indians say we are to have a hard winter, because of the abundance of acorns, also because of the unusual thickening of corn-husks in the summer! 

The stone at those quarries strikes northeasterly and southwesterly, or apparently with the rocks of Curly-pate, a third of a mile off. The strata appear to be nearly vertical. In the most southwesterly quarry, I noticed in the side of an upright sliver of rock, where the limestone had formerly been blasted off, the bottom of the nearly perpendicular hole which had been drilled for that purpose, two or three inches deep and about two and a half feet from the ground.

 In this I found two fresh chestnuts, a dozen or more amphicarpaea seeds, as many apparently either prinos (?) or rose (?) seeds (single seeds and fresh), and several fresh barberry seeds mixed with a little earth and rubbish. 

What placed them there? Squirrel, mouse, jay, or crow? At first I thought that a quadruped could hardly have reached this hole, but probably it could easily, and it was a very cunning place for such a deposit.  I brought them all home in order to ascertain what the seeds were and how they came there. 

Examining the chestnuts carefully in the evening and wondering if so small a bird as a chickadee could transport one, I observed near the larger end of one some very fine scratches, which it seemed to me might have been made by the teeth of a very small animal when carrying it, but certainly not by the bill of a bird, since they had pricked sharply into the shell, rucking it up one way. I then looked to see where the teeth of the other jaw had scratched it, but could discover no marks and was therefore still somewhat in doubt. 

Coming up-stairs an hour afterward, I examined those scratches with a microscope, and saw plainly that they had been made by some fine and sharp cutting instrument like a fine chisel, a little concave, and had plowed under the surface of the shell a little, toward the big end of the nut, raising it up; and, looking farther, I now discovered, on the larger end of the nut, at least two corresponding marks made by the lower incisors, plowing toward the first and about a quarter of an inch distant. These were a little less obvious to the unarmed eye, but no less plain through the glass. 

I now had no doubt that they were made by the incisors of a mouse, and, comparing them with the incisors of a deer mouse (Mus leucopus) whose skull I have, I found that one or two of the marks were just the width of its two incisors combined (a twentieth of an inch), and the others, though finer, might have been made by them. On one side, at least, it had taken fresh hold once or twice. I have but little doubt that these seeds were placed there by a Mus leucopus, our most common wood mouse. 

The other nut, which had no marks on it, I suppose was carried by the star end, which was gone from both. There was no chestnut tree within twenty rods. These seeds thus placed in this recess will account for chestnut trees, barberry bushes, etc., etc., growing in chinks and clefts where we do not see how the seeds could have fallen. There was earth enough even in this little hole to keep some very small plant alive. 

I hear that Gardiner Heywood caught a trout in Walden Pond the other day and that it weighed five pounds. [And a little over. Speared it about a week ago, and saw another not quite so large. Henry and John Bigelow put a couple into the pond some ten years ago. Were these the ones?]

It seems that the Abel Davis who caught the pickerel in Temple Brook, which would make such a meal for his “Lavinia” and himself, was addicted to talking to himself, thinking aloud. He was once talked of for captain of the company, and about that time, they say, was overheard saying to himself, “Captain Abel Davis! What a fine-looking man!”  

Can those straight ridges running north by west and south by east over the most level part of Curly-pate have anything to do with diluvial furrows? 

Returning along the edge of Calla Swamp, under the fern-clad hill, I feel the crunching sound  of frost-crystals in the heaving mud under my feet, and see and feel the sphagnum already stiffened into a crust, and what probably in the forenoon was water trickling from a fern-clad rock is now half a dozen icicles, six or eight inches long. 

Such is the first freezing day. Such phenomena are first observed under the north side of a hill in a cold swamp like this. Such are the first advances of winter. Ice-crystals shoot in the mud, the sphagnum becomes a stiffened mass, and dropping water in these cold places, a rigid icicle. 

E. Hoar tells me that his partner, having a new adobe house, or perhaps roof to it, built in Santa Barbara, on the California coast, corrected the bad levelling of his carpenters by taking such a position as to make the ridge-pole coincide with the horizon line where the Pacific appeared to meet the sky. 

The thermometer is 27° at 6 P. M. The mud in the street is stiffened under my feet this evening. 

Where there is a wall near a pitch pine wood, I see the scales of the cones which the squirrels have carried to the wall and stripped, strewn all along the wall on the ground.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 14, 1857

I have but little doubt that these seeds were placed there by a Mus leucopus, our most common wood mouse. See November 19, 1857 (" What pretty fruit for the mice, these bright prinos berries! They run up the twigs in the night and gather this shining fruit, take out the small seeds, and eat their kernels at the entrance to their burrows. The ground is strewn with them there.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Wild Mouse

The crunching sound of frost-crystals under my feet, such is the first freezing day. See November 14, 1858 ("It is all at once perfect winter. I walk on frozen ground two thirds covered with a sugaring of dry snow.")

This cold weather makes us step more briskly. See November 12, 1858 ("All people move the brisker for the cold, yet are braced and a little elated by it. They love to say, “Cold day, sir.” Though the days are shorter, you get more work out of a hired man than before, for he must work to keep warm. ")

Trout fishing in Maine.

August 6. 

Thursday. A. M. — To the high hill and ponds in Bucksport, some ten or more miles out.

AUGUST 6, 2017

 A withdrawn, wooded, and somewhat mountainous country. There was a little trout-pond just over the highest hill, very muddy, surrounded by a broad belt of yellow lily pads. 

Over this we pushed with great difficulty on a rickety raft of small logs, using poles thirty feet long, which stuck in the mud. The pond was about twenty-five feet deep in the middle, and our poles would stick up there and hold the raft.

There was no apparent inlet, but a small outlet. The water was not clear nor particularly cold, and you would have said it was the very place for pouts, yet T. said that the only fish there caught were brook trout, at any time of day. You fish with a line only, sinking twenty feet from the raft. 

The water was full of insects, which looked very much like the little brown chips or bits of wood which make coarse sawdust, with legs, running over the submerged part of the raft, etc. 

I suppose this pond owed its trout to its elevation and being fed by springs. It seems they do not require swift or clear water, sandy bottom, etc. Are caught like pouts without any art. 

We had many bites and caught one.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 6, 1857

I suppose this pond owed its trout to its elevation and being fed by springs. Compare August 24, 1860 ("How much this varied temperature must have to do with the distribution of the fishes”)

August 6. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, August 6

 

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 © 2009-2021 

I cross one of the bays of Walden, and might the middle.

March 15. 

P. M. — To Hubbard’s Close and Walden. 

I see in the ditches in Hubbard’s Close the fine green tips of spires of grass just rising above the surface of the water in one place, as if unwilling to trust itself to the frosty air. Favored by the warmth of the water and sheltered by the banks of the ditch, it has advanced thus far. 

But generally I see only the flaccid and floating frost-bitten tops of grass which apparently started that warm spell in February. The surface of the ditches is spotted with these pale and withered frost-bitten bladelets. 

It was the first green blush, as it were, — nay, it is purple or lake often, and a true blush, —of spring, of that Indian spring we had in February. An early dawn and premature blush of spring, at which I was not present. 

To be present at the instant when the springing grass at the bottoms of ditches lifts its spear above the surface and bathes in the spring air! Many a first faint crop mantling the pools thus early is mown down by the frost before the village suspects that vegetation has reawakened. 

The trout darts away in the puny brook there so swiftly in a zigzag course that commonly I only see the ripple that he makes, in proportion, in this brook only a foot wide, like that made by a steamer in a canal. Or if I catch a glimpse of him before he buries himself in the mud, it is only a dark film without distinct outline. By his zigzag course he bewilders the eye, and avoids capture perhaps. 

As usual at this date and earlier, there are a few square rods of green grass tufts at Brister’s springs, like a green fire under the pines and alders, and in one place an apparent growth of golden saxifrage. 

At Heywood’s Peak, I start partridges from the perfectly bare hillside. Such the spots they frequent at this season. 

I cross one of the bays of Walden, and might the middle. 

By Thrush Alley, where they have been cutting more wood this winter, I see one of those beetles made of an oak excrescence, such as I have heard of, left by the chopper. 

The whole is a little over four feet long. The head nine or ten inches and the handle about three and a half feet, but all one piece. It was apparently of a young tree, or perhaps a limb, about four inches in diameter with a regular excrescence about it still, eight or nine inches in diameter. This head had been smoothed or trimmed and made more regular by the axe, cut off rather square at the end, and the lower part cut down to a handle of convenient size. And thus the chopper had made in a few moments in the woods a really efficient implement, with his axe only, out of some of the very wood he wished to split. 

A natural beetle. There was no danger that the handle would come off or the head crack. It needed no ringing. And thus he saved the head of his axe.

We are singularly pleased and contented when a mere excrescence is thus converted into a convenient implement. Who was it, what satyr, that invented this rustic beetle? It was shaped:     

An indispensable piece of woodcraft.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 15, 1857

An early dawn and premature blush of spring, at which I was not present. See March 17, 1857 ("No mortal is alert enough to be present at the first dawn of the spring, but he will presently discover some evidence that vegetation had awaked some days at least before. . . .I thus detect the first approach of spring by finding here and there its scouts and vanguard which have been slain by the rear-guard of retreating winter.")

At Heywood’s Peak, I start partridges from the perfectly bare hillside. Such the spots they frequent at this season. See March 23, 1856 (" Almost the whole of the steep hillside on the north of Walden is now bare and dry and warm, though fenced in with ice and snow. It has attracted partridges, four of which whir away on my approach.")

I cross one of the bays of Walden, and might the middle. See March 14, 1860 (" I am surprised to find Walden open. No sooner has the ice of Walden melted than the wind begins to play in dark ripples over the surface of the virgin water. Ice dissolved is the next moment as perfect water as if melted a million years."); April 18, 1856 ("Walden is open entirely to-day for the first time, owing to the rain of yesterday and evening. I have observed its breaking up of different years commencing in ’45, and the average date has been April 4th.")

I open my mouth to the wind.

December 29

The snow is softened yet more, and it thaws somewhat. The cockerels crow, and we are reminded of spring. 

P. M. — To Warren Miles's mill. 

We must go out and re-ally ourselves to Nature every day. We must make root, send out some little fibre at least, even every winter day. I am sensible that I am imbibing health when I open my mouth to the wind. 

Staying in the house breeds a sort of insanity always. Every house is in this sense a hospital. A night and a forenoon is as much confinement to those wards as I can stand. I am aware that I recover some sanity which I had lost almost the instant that I come abroad. 

Do not the F. hyemalis, lingering yet, and the numerous tree sparrows foretell an open winter? 

The fields behind Dennis's have but little snow on them; the weeds rising above it imbrown them. It is collected in deep banks on the southeast slopes of the hills, — the wind having been northwest, — and there no weeds rise above it. 

By Nut Meadow Brook, just beyond Brown's fence crossing, I see a hornets' nest about seven inches in diameter on a thorn bush, only eighteen inches from the ground. Do they ever return to the same nests?

White oaks standing in open ground will commonly have more leaves now than black or red oaks of the same size, also standing exposed. 

Miles is sawing pail-stuff. Thus the full streams and ponds supply the farmer with winter work. 

I see two trout four or five inches long in his brook a few rods below the mill. The water is quite low, he having shut it off. Rich copper-brown fish darting up and down the fast-shoaling stream. 

When I return by Clamshell Hill, the sun has set, and the cloudy sky is reflected in a short and narrow open reach at the bend there. The water and reflected sky are a dull, dark green, but not the real sky.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 29, 1856

We must go out and re-ally ourselves to Nature every day. . . . I open my mouth to the wind. See July 23, 1851 ("The wind has fairly blown me outdoors; the elements were so lively and active, and I so sympathized with them, that I could not sit while the wind went by."); December 20, 1851 ("Go out before sunrise or stay out till sunset "); January 20, 1852 ("To see the sun rise or go down every day would preserve us sane forever.”);; November 4, 1852 ("I keep out-of-doors for the sake of the mineral, vegetable, and animal in me.") June 5, 1854 ("I have come to this hill to see the sun go down, to recover sanity and put myself again in relation with Nature.”); July 14, 1854 ("Health is a sound relation to nature.”); November 13, 1857 ("See the sun rise or set if possible each day.") September 13, 1859 ("You must be outdoors long, early and late.")

 

It thaws somewhat. The cockerels crow, and we are reminded of spring. See December 29, 1851 ("It is warm as an April morning. There is a sound as of bluebirds in the air, and the cocks crow as in the spring.")

I see two trout four or five inches long in his brook a few rods below the mill. The water is quite low, he having shut it off. See May 7, 1856 ("Miles began last night to let the water run off. . . . The brook below is full of fishes, -—suckers, pouts, eels, trouts, -— endeavoring to get up, but his dam prevents.”)

The water and reflected sky are a dull, dark green, but not the real sky. See  December 30, 1855 (“Recrossing the river behind Dodd’s, now at 4 P. M., the sun quite low, the open reach just below is quite green”); January 18, 1860 ("The sky in the reflection at the open reach at Hubbard's Bath is more green than in reality.”).

Go out every day –

 even every winter day,

Ally with Nature

The miller now raises his gate and lets his pond run off.

May 7. 

Wednesday. Fresh easterly wind. 

2 P. M. — To bear-berry on Major Heywood road. 

In Deacon Hosmer’s barn meadows, hear the don’t don’t of a bullfrog. 

In the first hollow in the bank this side of Clamshell, where sand has been dug for the meadow, are a hundred or more bank swallows at 2 P. M. (I suspect I have seen them for some time) engaged in prospecting and digging their holes and circling about. It is a snug place for them,—though the upright portion of the bank is only four or five feet high, — a semi-circular recess facing the southeast. Some are within scratching out the sand, -- I see it cast out of the holes behind them, -- others hanging on to the entrance of the holes, others on the flat sandy space beneath in front, and others circling about, a dozen rods over the meadow. 

Theirs is a low, dry, grating twitter, or rather rattle, less metallic or musical than the vite vite and twittering notes of barn and white-bellied swallows. 

They are white-bellied, dark winged and tailed, with a crescent of white nearly around the lower part of the neck, and mouse-colored heads and backs. The upper and greater part of this bank is a coarse sliding gravel, and they build only in the perpendicular and sandy part (I sit and watch them within three or four rods) and close to the upper part of it. 

While I am looking, they all suddenly with one consent take to wing, and circle over the hillside and meadow, as if they chose to work at making their holes a little while at a time only. I find the holes on an average about a foot deep only as yet, some but a few inches. 

In the meanwhile I hear, through this fresh, raw east wind, the te-a-lea of myrtle-birds from the woods across the-river. I hear the evergreen-forest note close by; and hear and see many myrtle-birds, at the same time that I hear what I have called the black and white creeper’s note. Have I ever confounded them? 

Over the edge of Miles’s mill-pond, now running off, a bumblebee goes humming over the dry brush. I think I saw one on the 5th also. 

Miles began last night to let the water run off. The pond falls about three inches in twenty-four hours. The brook below is full of fishes, -—suckers, pouts, eels, trouts, -— endeavoring to get up, but his dam prevents. 

This morning his young man killed a number of pouts and eels and suckers with a shovel. Here he comes now, at 4 P. M., with a spear, and raises the gate and waits a few moments for the water, which was two or three feet deep just below the mill, to run off; and then I see a good-sized trout, four or five pouts, and several suckers, and one eel still making their way upward, though the water hardly covers their backs. They do not turn and go down the stream with the water which is thus suddenly and rapidly let off. 

Meanwhile this young man picks out half a dozen pouts, eels, and suckers with his spear. Twenty rods down the brook I saw many more suckers trying to make their way up. They found it difficult now to get over the bars where the water was very shallow, and were some times confined to the hollows between. I saw two or three in company trying to squeeze through a narrow passage under some alder boughs, which was blocked up by two spotted tortoises; and one large eel squirming directly over an indifferent wood turtle, concluding seemed unwilling to turn and go down the brook, and for the most part would come so near in the shallow water that they could easily be struck with the spear. 

The water thus suddenly let off, there were many spotted and wood tortoises seen crawling about on the bottom. 

One little snapping (making the fifth of its species here), three and a half inches long, going down a few rods below the dam. This, like the larger ones, going down the brook. Where to? and why? He can not be old enough to breed yet, and it is too early to be laying at the desert. 

This young snapping turtle was very strong-scented. Its tail appeared particularly long, as long as its shell, and very tapering, and very distinctly and sharply keeled. The first half-dozen of its dorsal serrations were very prominent and sharp, and its bill was very sharp also. It had four sharp points on each side of its shell behind, and I noticed that it swam better than other kinds of tortoises. Its head was as large as that of an ordinary wood tortoise. There were tracks of other turtles on the sandy bank.

The young man said that the eels came along as many as three in an hour in the night, and this morning there were a great many of them about the wheel. Last fall (this dam being made late in the fall), they found in the hollow under the wheel which they bailed out sixteen trout which weighed eight pounds.

It is surprising how many fishes will run up and breed in such a little brook as this. The fishes generally would conceal themselves in the mud under a projecting bank, or in some deep hole in the sand in mid-channel which communicated with the mud beneath. One of those larger snapping turtles seized the one I had by the head and they braced and struggled awhile. 

The miller now raises his gate and lets his pond run off. Do they not generally earlier? 

For a week the road has been full of cattle going up country.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, May 7, 1856

This dam being made late in the fall. . . . See  April 28, 1856 ("I began to survey the meadow there early, before Miles’s new mill had been running long this Monday morning and flooded it, but a great stream of water was already rushing down the brook, and it almost rose over our boots in the meadow before we had done.”); April 25, 1856 ("Warren Miles had caught three more snapping turtles since yesterday, at his mill, . . . These turtles have been disturbed or revealed by his operations.”); April 24 1856 (Warren Miles at his new mill tells me eels can’t get above his mill now, in the spring.”); February 28, 1856 ("Miles is repairing the damage done at his new mill by the dam giving way.”)

I hear the evergreen-forest note close by; and hear and see many myrtle-birds, at the same time that I hear what I have called the black and white creeper’s note. Have I ever confounded them? See May 6, 1855 ("The er er twe, ter ter twe, evergreen-forest note."); May 11, 1854 ("Hear the evergreen-forest note"); May 15, 1858 ("Hear the evergreen-forest note");  June 1, 1854 ("Hear my evergreen-forest note, sounding rather raspingly as usual, where there are large oaks and pines mingled. It is very difficult to discover now that the leaves are grown, as it frequents the tops of the trees. But I get a glimpse of its black throat and, I think, yellow head "); July 10 1854 ("Evergreen-forest note, I think, still.") and May 30, 1855 ("In the thick of the wood between railroad and Turnpike, hear the evergreen forest note, and see probably the bird,-- black throat, greenish-yellow or yellowish-green head and back, light-slate (?) wings with two white bars. Is it not the black-throated green warbler?”).

For a week the road has been full of cattle going up country. See May 6, 1855 ("Road full of cattle going up country.”);  May 8, 1854 ("I hear the voices of farmers driving their cows past to their up-country pastures now."); May 10, 1852 ("This Monday the streets are full of cattle being driven up-country, — cows and calves and colts.")

I suspect that about all the conspicuous white ducks I see are goosanders

April 7

In my walk in the afternoon of to-day, I see from Conantum, say fifty rods distant, two sheldrakes, male and probably female, sailing on A. Wheeler’s cranberry meadow. I see only the white of the male at first, but my glass reveals the female. The male is easily seen a great distance on the water, being a large white mark. But they will let you come only within some sixty rods ordinarily.

April 7, 2019

I observe that they are uneasy at sight of me and begin to sail away in different directions.

I plainly see the vermilion bill of the male and his orange legs when he flies (but he appears all white above), and the reddish brown or sorrel of the neck of the female, and, when she lifts herself in the water, as it were preparatory to flight, her white breast and belly. She has a grayish look on the sides. 

Soon they approach each other again and seem to be conferring, and then they rise and go off, at first low, down-stream, soon up-stream a hundred feet over the pond, the female leading, the male following close behind, the black at the end of his curved wings very conspicuous. 

I suspect that about all the conspicuous white ducks I see are goosanders. 

I skinned my duck yesterday and stuffed it to-day. It is wonderful that a man, having undertaken such an enterprise, ever persevered in it to the end, and equally wonderful that he succeeded. To skin a bird, drawing backward, wrong side out, over the legs and wings down to the base of the mandibles! Who would expect to see a smooth feather again? This skin was very tender on the breast. I should have done better had I stuffed it at once or turned it back before the skin became stiff. Look out not to cut the ear and eye lid. But what a pot-bellied thing is a stuffed bird compared even with the fresh dead one I found! It looks no longer like an otter, like a swift diver, but a mere waddling duck. How perfectly the vent of a bird is covered! There is no mark externally. 

At six this morn to Clamshell. The skunk-cabbage open yesterday, — the earliest flower this season. I suspect that the spathes do not push up in the spring. This is but three inches high. I see them as high and higher in the fall, and they seem only to acquire color now and gape open. I see but one out, and that sheds pollen abundantly. 

See thirty or forty goldfinches in a dashing flock, in all respects (notes and all) like lesser redpolls, on the trees by Wood’s Causeway and on the railroad bank. There is a general twittering and an occasional mew. Then they alight on the ground to feed, along with F. hyemalis and fox-colored sparrows. 

They are merely olivaceous above, dark about the base of the bill, but bright lemon-yellow in a semicircle on the breast; black wings and tails, with white bar on wings and white vanes to tail. I never saw them here so early before; or probably one or two olivaceous birds I have seen and heard of other years were this. 

Clear, but a cold air. 

P. M. — To Hubbard’s Close and Lee’s Cliff. A mouse-nest of grass, in Stow’s meadow east of railroad, on the surface. Just like those seen in the rye-field some weeks ago, but this in lower ground has a distinct gallery running from it, and I think is the nest of the meadow mouse. 

The pool at Hubbard’s Close, which was full of ice, unbroken gray ice, the 27th of March, is now warm-looking water, with the slime-covered callitriche standing a foot high in it; and already a narrow grass, the lake grass, has sprung up and lies bent nine or ten inches flat on the water. This is very early as well as sudden. 

In ten days there has been this change. How much had that grass grown under the ice? I see many small skaters  in it. 

See a trout as long as my finger, in the ditch dug from Brister’s Spring, which, having no hole or overhanging bank where it could hide, plunged into the mud like a frog and was concealed. 

The female flowers of the hazel are just beginning to peep out. 

At Lee’s Cliff I find the radical leaves of the early saxifrage, columbine, and the tower mustard, etc., much eaten apparently by partridges and perhaps rabbits. They must have their greens in the spring, and earlier than we. 

Below the rocks, the most obviously forward radical leaves are the columbine, tower mustard (lanceolate and petioled and remotely toothed), and catnep, and mullein. Early crowfoot, the butter cup (bulbosa), is a peculiarly sappy, dark pickle-green, decided spring, and none of your sapless evergreens. The little thyme-leaved arenaria, I believe it is, which is evergreen, and some other minute leaves, also, already green the ground. 

The saxifrage on the rocks will apparently open in two days; it shows some white. 

The grass is now conspicuously green about open springs, in dense tufts. The frozen sod, partly thawed in low grounds, sinks under me as I walk.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 7, 1855

I plainly see the vermilion bill of the male and his orange legs when he flies . . .I skinned my duck yesterday and stuffed it to-day. See April 6, 1855 ("It is a perfectly fresh and very beautiful bird, and as I raise it, I get sight of its long, slender vermilion bill (color of red sealing wax) and its clean, bright-orange legs and feet, and then of its perfectly smooth and spotlessly pure white breast and belly, tinged with a faint salmon (or tinged with a delicate buff inclining to salmon)”) See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Sheldrake (Merganser, Goosander)

See thirty or forty goldfinches in a dashing flock, in all respects (notes and all) like lesser redpolls, on the trees by Wood’s Causeway and on the railroad bank. There is a general twittering and an occasional mew. See   March 24, 1859 ("I see a flock of goldfinches, first of spring, flitting along the cause way-bank. They have not yet the bright plumage they will have, but in some lights might be mistaken for sparrows. There is considerable difference in color between one and another, but the flaps of their coats are black, and their heads and shoulders more or less yellow . . .  Wilson says, "In the month of April they begin to change their winter dress, and, before the middle of May, appear in brilliant yellow.”"); April 15, 1859 ("Hear a goldfinch, after a loud mewing on an apple tree, sing in a rich and varied way, as if imitating some other bird."); April 19, 1858 (Along the wall under the Middle Conantum Cliff, I saw many goldfinches, male and female, the males singing in a very sprightly and varied manner, sitting still on bare trees. Also uttered their watery twitter and their peculiar mewing.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Goldfinch

The female flowers of the hazel are just beginning to peep out. See note to April 7, 1854 ("The hazel stigmas are well out and the catkins loose, but no pollen shed yet.") See also   March 27, 1853 ("The hazel is fully out. . . .It is in some respects the most interesting flower yet, though so minute that only an observer of nature, or one who looked for them, would notice it. It is the highest and richest colored yet, - ten or a dozen little rays at the end of the buds which are at the ends and along the sides of the bare stems. Some of the flowers are a light, some a dark crimson. The high color of this minute, unobserved flower, at this cold, leafless, and almost flowerless season! It is a beautiful greeting of the spring, ") See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau: the Hazel

A mouse-nest of grass, in Stow’s meadow . . . the nest of the meadow mouse. See  March 15, 1855 ("Mr. Rice tells me that . . . he heard a squeaking and found that he was digging near the nest of what he called a " field mouse," – by his description probably the meadow mouse. It was made of grass, etc., and, while he stood over it, the mother, not regarding him, came and carried off the young, one by one, in her mouth, being gone some time in each case before she returned, and finally she took the nest itself.  "); March 22, 1855 ("A (probably meadow) mouse nest in the low meadow by stone bridge, where it must have been covered with water a month ago; probably made in fall. Low in the grass, a little dome four inches in diameter, with no sign of entrance . . .Made of fine meadow-grass.");  August 25, 1858 ("I see . . . 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.") See also  See Thompson (Meadow mouse nests are sometimes constructed in their burrows, and are also found at the season of hay harvest, in great numbers, among the vegetation upon the surface of the ground. They are built of coarse straw, lined with fine soft leaves, somewhat in the manner of a bird's nest, with this difference, that they are covered at the top, and the passage into them is from beneath.") and A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Wild Mouse. Thoreau's e meadow mouse or "short-tailed meadow mouse," Arvicola hirsuta, is now known as Microtus pennsylvanicus, meadow Vole.

At Lee’s Cliff I find the radical leaves of the early saxifrage, columbine, and the tower mustard, etc., See  April 1, 1855 ("At the first Conantum Cliff I am surprised to see how much the columbine leaves have grown in a sheltered cleft; also the cinquefoil, dandelion, yarrow, sorrel, saxifrage, etc., etc. They seem to improve the least warmer ray to advance themselves, and they hold all they get.")

April 7. See A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, April 7

Sheldrakes sail away

in different directions

uneasy of me.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, 

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, all the conspicuous white ducks 

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

out-of-doors, in its own locality.”

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

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