This is the foreglow of the year.

March 18, 2019

March 18.

The season is so far advanced that the sun, every now and then promising to shine out through this rather warm rain, lighting up transiently with a whiter light the dark day and my dark chamber, affects me as I have not been affected for a long time. I must go forth.

How eagerly the birds of passage penetrate the northern ice, watching for a crack by which to enter! Forthwith the swift ducks will be seen winging their way along the rivers and up the coast. They watch the weather more sedulously than the teamster. All nature is thus forward to move with the revolution of the seasons.

It is decidedly clearing up. At Conantum Cliff the columbines have started and the saxifrage even, the former as conspicuously as any plant, particularly any on dry ground. Both these grow there in high and dry chinks in the face of tire cliff, where no soil appears, and the sunnier the exposure the more advanced. Even if a fallen fragment of the rock is so placed as to reflect the heat upon it, it has the start of its neighbors. These plants waste not a day, not a moment, suitable to their development.

The ice in Fair Haven is more than half melted, and now the woods beyond the pond, reflected in its serene water where there has been opaque ice so long, affect me as they perhaps will not again this year.

The bluebird and song sparrow sing immediately on their arrival and hence deserve to enjoy some preeminence. They give expression to the joy which the season inspires. But the robin and blackbird only peep and chuck at first commonly, and the lark is silent and flitting. 

The bluebird at once fills the air with his sweet warbling, and the song sparrow from the top of a rail pours forth his most joyous strain. Both express their delight at the weather which permits them to return to their favorite haunts. They are the more welcome to man for it.

The sun is now declining, with a warm and bright light on all things, a light which answers to the late afterglow of the year, when, in the fall, wrapping his cloak closer about him, the traveller goes home at night to prepare for winter. This the foreglow of the year, when the walker goes home at eve to dream of summer.

To-day first I smelled the earth.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 18,1853

The ice in Fair Haven is more than half melted. See March 19, 1855 ("I am surprised to find that the river has not yet worn through Fair Haven Pond.”); March 22, 1855 ("I cross Fair Haven Pond, including the river, on the ice, and probably can for three or four days yet.”); March 26, 1857 ("Fair Haven .is open; may have been open several days; there is only a little ice on the southeast shore.”); March 26, 1860 ("Fair Haven Pond may be open by the 20th of March, as this year, or not till April 13 as in '56, or twenty-three days later.”); March 22, 1854 ("Fair Haven still covered and frozen anew in part.”) See also April 1, 1852 ("Each part of the river seen further north shines like silver in the sun, and the little pond in the woods west of this hill is half open water. Cheering , that water with its reflections, compared with this opaque dumb pond.")

This the foreglow of the year, . . .See August, 19, 1853 ("The day is an epitome of the year.”); August 24, 1852 ("The year is but a succession of days, and I see that I could assign some office to each day which, summed up, would be the history of the year."); July 26, 1853 (“This the afternoon of the year.”); August 31, 1852 ("The evening of the year is colored like the sunset.”)

To-day first I smelled the earth. See  note to March 4, 1854  ("I begin to sniff the air and smell the ground.”)

March cold.

March 15. 

To-day the weather is severely and remarkably cold. It is not easy to keep warm in my chamber. I have not taken a more blustering walk this past winter than this afternoon. Notwithstanding this day is so cold that I keep my ears covered, the sidewalks melt in the sun, such is its altitude. The coldness of the air blown from the icy northwest prevails over the heat of the sun.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 15, 1853


I have not taken a more blustering walk this past winter than this afternoon. See March 28, 1854 ("Coldest day for a month or more, — severe as almost any in the winter."); March 28, 1855 ("I run about these cold and blustering days, on the whole perhaps the worst to bear in the year, . . . looking almost in vain for some animal or vegetable life stirring. As for the singing of birds, — the few that have come to us, — it is too cold for them to sing and for me to hear. "); March 12, 1856 ("We had a colder day in the winter of ’54 and ’55 than in the last, yet the ice did not get to be so thick. . . . If the present cold should continue uninterrupted a thousand years would not the pond become solid?"); March 13, 1857 ("This month has been windy and cold, a succession of snows one or two inches deep, soon going off, the spring birds all driven off. ")

Notwithstanding this day is so cold that I keep my ears covered, the sidewalks melt in the sun, such is its altitude. See March 18, 1856 ("“Two little water-bugs . . .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.")

You must get your living by loving.

March 13. 

I go to the Cliffs to hear if any new spring birds have arrived, for not only they are more sure to sing in the morning, but it is stiller and you can hear them better then. I hear only crows and blue jays and chickadees lisping. Excepting a few blue birds and larks, no spring birds have come, apparently. The woods are still. 

But what was that familiar spring sound from the pine wood across the river, a sharp vetter vetter vetter vetter, like some woodpecker, or possibly nuthatch ? Yet I thought it the voice of the bird and not a tapping. It reminds me of the pine warbler (?), if that is it. 

I see some of my little gnats of yesterday in the morn ing sun, somewhat mosquito-like. 

P. M. — No sap flows yet from my hole in the white maple by the bridge. Found on the Great Fields a fragment of Indian soapstone ware, which, judging from its curve and thinness, for a vestige of the rim remains, was a dish of the form and size of a saucer, only three times as thick. 

Listening for early birds, I hear a faint tinkling sound in the leafless woods, as if a piece of glass rattled against a stone.

All enterprises must be self-supporting, must pay for themselves. The great art of life is how to turn the surplus life of the soul into life for the body, — that so the life be not a failure. For instance, a poet must sustain his body with his poetry. . . .

You must get your living by loving. 

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 13, 1853.

But what was that familiar spring sound from the pine wood across the river, like some woodpecker, or possibly nuthatch? See March 5, 1859 ("Going down-town this forenoon, I heard a white-bellied nuthatch on an elm within twenty feet, uttering peculiar notes and more like a song than I remember to have heard from it.. . .It was something like to-what what what what what, rapidly repeated, and not the usual gnah gnah; and this instant it occurs to me that this may be that earliest spring note which I hear, and have referred to a woodpecker! (This is before I have chanced to see a bluebird, blackbird, or robin in Concord this year.) It is the spring note of the nuthatch")

Listening for early birds, I hear a faint tinkling sound in the leafless woods, as if a piece of glass rattled against a stone. See November 17, 1853 ("The notes of one or two small birds, this cold morning, in the now comparatively leafless woods, sound like a nail dropped on an anvil, or a glass pendant tinkling against its neighbor “);  See also December 5, 1853 (“”See and hear a downy woodpecker on an apple tree. Have not many winter birds, like this and the chickadee, a sharp note like tinkling glass or icicles? ); December 17, 1856 ("That feeble cheep of the tree sparrow, like the tinkling of an icicle."); February 18, 1855 ("I listen ever for something springlike in the notes of birds, some peculiar tinkling notes.”); March 18, 1858 (“Almost every bush has its song sparrow this morning, and their tinkling strains are heard on all sides.”)

Turn the surplus life of the soul into life for the body. See May 10, 1853 ("If I am overflowing with life, rich in experience for which I lack expression, then nature will be my language full of poetry...")

The great art of life.

Get your living by loving,

by surplus of soul.

March 13, 1853

A first spring day.

March 10.

This is the first really spring day. The sun is brightly reflected from all surfaces, and the north side of the street begins to be a little more passable to foot-travelers. You do not think it necessary to button up your coat. Something analogous to the thawing of the ice seems to have taken place in the air. At the end of winter there is a season in which are are daily expecting spring, and finally a day when it arrives.

I see many middling-sized black spiders on the edge of the snow, very active. 

By John Hosmer's ditch by the riverside I see the skunk-cabbage springing freshly, the points of the spathes just peeping out of the ground, in some other places three inches high even. The radical leaves of innumerable plants (as here a dock in and near the water) are evidently affected by the spring influences. Many plants are to some extent evergreen, like the buttercup now beginning to start. 

Methinks the first obvious evidence of spring is the pushing out of the swamp willow catkins, then the relaxing of the earlier alder catkins, then the pushing up of skunk-cabbage spathes (and pads at the bottom of water). This is the order I am inclined to, though perhaps any of these may take precedence of all the rest in any particular case.

What is that dark pickle-green alga (?) at the bottom of this ditch, looking somewhat like a decaying cress, with fruit like a lichen? 

At Nut Meadow Brook crossing we rest awhile on the rail, gazing into the eddying stream. The ripple-marks on the sandy bottom, where silver spangles shine in the river with black wrecks of caddis-cases lodged under each shelving sand, the shadows of the invisible dimples reflecting prismatic colors on the bottom, the minnows already stemming the current with restless, wiggling tails, ever and anon darting aside, probably to secure some invisible mote in the water, whose shadows we do not at first detect on the sandy bottom, — when detected so much more obvious as well as larger and more interesting than the substance, — in which each fin is distinctly seen, though scarcely to be detected in the substance; these are all very beautiful and exhilarating sights, a sort of diet drink to heal our winter discontent. Have the minnows played thus all winter? 

The equisetum at the bottom has freshly grown several inches. Then should I not have given the precedence on the last page to this and some other water-plants ? I suspect that I should, and the flags appear to be starting.

I am surprised to find on the rail a young tortoise, an inch and one sixteenth long in the shell, which has crawled out to sun, or perchance is on its way to the water, which I think must be the Emys guttata, for there is a large and distinct yellow spot on each dorsal and lateral plate, and the third dorsal plate is hexa gonal and not quadrangular, as the E. picta is described to be, though in my specimen I can't make it out to be so. Yet the edges of the plates are prominent, as is described in the E. insculpta, which, but for the spots and two yellow spots on each side of the hind head and one fainter on the top of the head, I should take it to be. It is about seven eighths of an inch wide. Very inactive. When was it hatched and where? 

What is the theory of these sudden pitches, or steep shelving places, in the sandy bottom of the brook ? It is very interesting to walk along such a brook as this in the midst of the meadow, which you can better do now before the frost is quite out of the sod, and gaze into the deep holes in its irregular bottom and the dark gulfs under the banks. Where it rushes rapidly over the edge of a steep slope in the bottom, the shadow of the disturbed surface is like sand hurried forward in the water. The bottom, being of shifting sand, is exceedingly irregular and interesting. 

What was that sound that came on the softened air? It was the warble of the first bluebird from that scraggy apple orchard yonder. When this is heard, then has spring arrived. 

It must be that the willow twigs, both the yellow and green, are brighter-colored than before. I cannot be deceived. They shine as if the sap were already flowing under the bark; a certain lively and glossy hue they have. 

The early poplars are pushing forward their catkins, though they make not so much display as the willows. 

Still in some parts of the woods it is good sledding. 

At Second Division Brook, the fragrance of the senecio, which is decidedly evergreen, which I have bruised, is very permanent and brings round the year again. It is a memorable sweet meadowy fragrance. 

I find a yellow- spotted tortoise (Emys guttata) in the brook. 

A very few leaves of cowslips, and those wholly under water, show themselves yet. 

The leaves of the water saxifrage, for the most part frost-bitten, are common enough. 

Near the caltha was also green hog-spawn, and Channing says he saw pollywogs. Perhaps it is a particularly warm place. 

The alder's catkins — the earliest of them — are very plainly expanding, or, rather, the scales are loose and separated, and the whole catkin relaxed. 

Minott says that old Sam Nutting, the hunter, — Fox Nutting, Old Fox, he was called, — who died more than forty years ago (he lived in Jacob Baker's house, Lincoln; came from Weston) and was some seventy years old then, told him that he had killed not only bear about Fair Haven among the walnuts, but moose!

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 10, 1853

This is the first really spring day. . . .You do not think it necessary to button up your coat. See March 15, 1852 ("This afternoon I throw off my outside coat. A mild spring day.  The air is full of bluebirds.  . . . My life partakes of infinity.")

Something analogous to the thawing of the ice seems to have taken place in the air. See February 18, 1857 (“The very grain of the air seems to have undergone a change and is ready to split into the form of the bluebird's warble.”); March 9, 1852 ("[T]he air excites me. When the frost comes out of the ground, there is a corresponding thawing of the man.”); March 21, 1853 (“[W]inter breaks up within us; the frost is coming out of me, and I am heaved like the road; accumulated masses of ice and snow dissolve, and thoughts like a freshet pour down unwonted channels.”)

The air seems to thaw.

Daily we expected spring –

today it arrives.

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, A first spring day

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

What is the earliest sign of spring?

March 7.

What is the earliest sign of spring? The motion of worms and insects? The flow of sap in trees and the swelling of buds? Do not the insects awake with the flow of the sap? Bluebirds, etc., probably do not come till insects come out. Or are there earlier signs in the water? - the tortoises, frogs, etc.

The only birds I see to-day are the lesser redpolls. I have not seen a fox-colored sparrow or a Fringilla hyemalis [snowbird].

Find the yellow bud of a Nuphar advena in the ditch on the Turnpike on E. Hosmer's land, bud nearly half an inch in diameter on a very thick stem, three fourths of an inch thick at base and ten inches long, four or five inches above the mud. This may have swollen somewhat during the warmest weather in the winter, after pushing up in the fall. And I see that it may, in such a case, in favorable locations, blossom at very early but irregular periods in the spring.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 7, 1853

What is the earliest sign of spring? See February 23, 1857("I have seen signs of the spring. I have seen a frog swiftly sinking in a pool, or where he dimpled the surface as he leapt in. I have seen the brilliant spotted tortoises stirring at the bottom of ditches. I have seen the clear sap trickling from the red maple.”)

Spring fog.

March 6.

Sunday. Last Sunday I plucked some alder twigs, some aspen, and some swamp willow, and put them in water in a warm room, Immediately the alder catkins were relaxed and began to lengthen and open, and by the second day to drop their pollen; like handsome pendants they hung round the pitcher, and at the same time the smaller female flower expanded and brightened. In about four days the aspens began to show their red anthers and feathery scales, being an inch in length and still extending. March 2d, I added the andromeda; March 3d, the rhodora.

This morning, the ground being still covered with snow, there was quite a fog over the river and meadows, which I think owing to a warm atmosphere over the cold snow.

The hemlock cones have shed their seeds, but there are some closed yet on the ground. 

Part of the pitch pine cones are yet closed.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 6, 1853

See : A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, I Have Seen Signs of the Spring

• Catkins expanding

 

Part of the pitch pine cones are yet closed. See April 19, 1856 (“As dryness will open the pitch pine cone, so moisture closes it up again. “); March 3, 1855 ("I find a cone which was probably dropped by a squirrel in the fall, [and] buried by the snow till now, for it has apparently just opened, and I shake its seeds out.”); March 1, 1856 ("I see a pitch pine seed with its wing, far out on Walden.”); February 27, 1853 (“ Each scale, which is very elaborately and perfectly constructed, is armed with a short spine, pointing downward, as if to protect its seed from squirrels and birds. That hard closed cone, which defied all violent attempts to open it has thus yielded to the gentle persuasion of warmth and dryness. The expanding of the pine cones, that, too, is a season.”); February 22, 1855 (“Pitch pine cones must be taken from the tree at the right season, else they will not open or “blossom” in a chamber.” ); February 1, 1856 ("I see a pitch pine seed, blown thirty rods from J. Hosmer’s little grove.”); January 25, 1856 (“A closed pitch pine cone gathered January 22d opened last night in my chamber.”); January 22, 1856 ("I find that many of those young pines are now full of unopened cones, which apparently will be two years old next summer, and these the squirrel now eats. “); January 8, 1856 ("All of the pitch pine cones that I see, but one, are open.”); November 20, 1855 ("the whole cone opens its scales with a smart crackling."); November 14, 1855 (“ . . . It is a general and sudden bursting or expanding of all the scales with a sharp crackling sound and motion of the whole cone, as by a force pent up within it. I suppose the strain only needed to be relieved in one point for the whole to go off..”); October 24, 1854 (" he chickadees are picking the seeds out of pitch pine cones.”) and Seasons of the Pitch Pine

The Lesser Redpoll

March 5.

F. Brown showed me to-day some lesser redpolls which he shot yesterday. They turn out to be my falsely-called chestnut-frontleted bird of the winter. They have a sharp bill, black legs and claws, and a bright-crimson crown or frontlet, in the male reaching to the base of the bill, with, in his case, a delicate rose or carmine on the breast and rump. Though this is described by Nuttall as an occasional visitor in the winter, it has been the prevailing bird here this winter.

 Yesterday I got my grape cuttings. The day before went to the Corner Spring to look at the tufts of green grass. Got some of the very common leptogium (??). Is it one of the Collemaceæ? 

Was pleased with the sight of the yellow osiers of the golden willow, and the red of the cornel, now colors are so rare. 

Saw the green fine-threaded conferva in a ditch, commonly called frog-spittle. Brought it home in my pocket, and it expanded again in a tumbler. It appeared quite a fresh growth, with what looked like filmy air-bubbles, as big as large shot, in its midst.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 5, 1853

The lesser redpoll has been the prevailing bird here this winter. See . March 6, 1860 ("The linarias have been the most numerous birds the past winter"); December 11, 1855  (“There is no question about the existence of these delicate creatures, their adaptedness to their circumstances.”)  See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Lesser Redpoll

Saw the green fine-threaded conferva in a ditch. See January 29, 1858 ("In the ditches on Holbrook's meadow near Copan, I see a Rana palustris swimming, and much conferva greening all the water. Even this green is exhilarating, like a spring in winter. I am affected by the sight even of a mass of conferva in a ditch")