A small hawk flies swiftly past on the side of the hill, swift and low.

April 7.

April 7, 2019

The Cheney elm looks as if it would shed pollen to-morrow,[no], and the Salix purpurea will perhaps within a week. 

Standing under the north side of the hill, I hear the rather innocent phe phe, phe phe, phe phe, phe' of a fish hawk (for it is not a scream, but a rather soft and innocent note), and, looking up, see one come sailing from over the hill. The body looks quite short in proportion to the spread of the wings, which are quite dark or blackish above. He evidently has something in his talons. 

We soon after disturb him again, and, at length, after circling around over the hill and adjacent fields, he alights in plain sight on one of the half-dead white oaks on the top of the hill, where probably he sat before. As I look through my glass, he is perched on a large dead limb and is evidently standing on a fish (I had noticed something in his talons as he flew), for he stands high and uneasily, finding it hard to keep his balance in the wind. 

He is disturbed by our neighborhood and does not proceed at once to eat his meal. I see the tail of the fish hanging over the end of the limb. Now and then he pecks at it. I see the white on the crown of the hawk. It is a very large black bird as seen against the sky. Soon he sails away again, carrying his fish, as before, horizontally beneath his circles about over the adjacent pasture like a hawk hunting, though he can only be looking for a suitable place to eat his fish or waiting for us to be gone. 

Looking under the limb on which he was perched, we find a piece of the skin of a sucker (?) or some other scaly fish which a hawk had dropped there long since. No doubt many a fish hawk has taken his meal on that sightly perch. 

It seems, then, that the fish hawk which you see soaring and sailing so leisurely about over the land — for this one soared quite high into the sky at one time — may have a fish in his talons all the while and only be waiting till you are gone for an opportunity to eat it on his accustomed perch. 

I told Pratt my theory of the formation of a swamp on a hillside, but he thought that the growth of the alders, etc., there would not make the ground any more moist there, but less so, and stated that the soil (as he had noticed) was drier under rank grass in a mowing-field than at the same depth under a surface of bare and hot sand, because the grass took up the moisture from the soil. 

I saw a hole (probably of a woodchuck) partly dug on the east side of the hill, and three or four large stones lay on the fresh sand-heap thrown out, which the wood- chuck had pushed up from below. One was about six inches long by four or more wide and might weigh four pounds, and, looking into the hole, whose bottom I could not see, I saw another nearly as large about three feet down, on its way up. I have seen their holes dug in much worse places than this. This hole sloped downward at a considerable angle, so that the stones had to be pushed up a steep slope. 

A small hawk flies swiftly past on the side of the hill, swift and low, apparently the same as that of April 3d, a deep rusty brown. 

The woodchuck probably digs in a stony place that he may be the more secure. 

I hear there the hovering note of a snipe at 4.30 p.m., — unusually early in the day. 

Find a Sternothcerus odoratus so far from water on Simon Brown's knoll, where water has not been since about March 20th, that I think he was then washed and left there and has since lain in the ground. There are two or three small leeches on him, which may have adhered to him all winter. 

The white man's relics in the fields are like the Indian's, — pipes, pottery, and (instead of arrowheads) bullets.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 7, 1859

The Cheney elm looks as if it would shed pollen to-morrow.  See April 15, 1852 (“The broad flat brown buds on Mr. Cheney's elm, containing twenty or thirty yellowish-green threads, surmounted with little brownish-mulberry cups, which contain the stamens and the two styles, -- these are just expanding or blossoming now.”); April 16, 1856 (“Cheney’s elm shows stamens on the warm side pretty numerously.”); April 17, 1855 (“The flowers of the common elm at Lee’s are now loose and dangling, apparently well out a day or two in advance of Cheney’s, but I see no pollen. ”)


I hear the rather innocent phe phe, phe phe, phe phe, phe' of a fish hawk , and, looking up, see one come sailing from over the hill. See April 6, 1859 ("A fish hawk sails down the river, from time to time almost stationary one hundred feet above the water, notwithstanding the very strong wind.”); April 14, 1852 ("The streams break up; the ice goes to the sea. Then sails the fish hawk overhead, looking for his prey.”) April 25, 1858 (“ I hear the phe phe, phe phe, phe phe, phe phe, phe, the sharp whistling note, of a fish hawk. . . . There is about half a second between each note, and he utters them either while perched or while flying. He shows a great proportion of wing and some white on back. The wings are much curved. He sails along some eighty feet above the water’s edge, looking for fish, and alights again quite near. I see him an hour afterward about the same spot.”)See also A Book of Seasons, by Henry Thoreau The Osprey (Fish Hawk)

A small hawk flies swiftly past on the side of the hill, swift and low, apparently the same as that of April 3d, a deep rusty brown. See April 3, 1859 ("Near to the pond I see a small hawk, larger than a pigeon hawk, fly past, — a deep brown with a light spot on the side. I think it probable it was a sharp-shinned hawk.”) See also See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the sharp-shinned hawk.

I hear there the hovering note of a snipe at 4.30 p.m., — unusually early in the day. See April 7, 1858 ("Snipes rise two or three times as I go over the meadow"); see also April 6, 1854 ("Hear the snipe over the meadows this evening."); April 9, 1853 ("Hear the snipe a short time at early starlight"); April 9, 1855 ("Some twenty minutes after sundown I hear the first booming of a snipe.") and A Book of Seasons, by Henry Thoreau: the Snipe

A fish hawk sails down the river.

April 6. 

April 6,2012

April 6, 2019

Another remarkably windy day; cold northwest wind and a little snow spitting from time to time, yet so little that even the traveller might not perceive it. 

For nineteen days, from the 19th of March to the 6th of April, both inclusive, we have had remarkably windy weather. For ten days of the nineteen the wind has been remarkably strong and violent, so that each of those days the wind was the subject of general remark. The first one of these ten days was the warmest, the wind being southwest, but the others, especially of late, were very cold, the wind being northwest, and for the most part icy cold. There have also been five days that would be called windy and only four which were moderate. The last seven, including to-day, have all been windy, five of them remarkably so; wind from northwest.

The sparrows love to flit along any thick hedge, like that of Mrs. Gourgas's. Tree sparrows, F. hyemalis, and fox-colored sparrows in company. 

A fish hawk sails down the river, from time to time almost stationary one hundred feet above the water, notwithstanding the very strong wind. 

I see where moles have rooted in a meadow and cast up those little piles of the black earth.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 6, 1859

For nineteen days, from the 19th of March to the 6th of April, both inclusive, we have had remarkably windy weather. See March 21, 1859 ("From the evening of March 18th to this, the evening of the 21st, we have had uninterrupted strong wind, — till the evening of the 19th very strong south west wind, then and since northwest, — three days of strong wind.”);  April 4, 1852 (" I feel the northwest air cooled by the snow on my cheek.”); April 15, 1854 ("Snow and snowing; four inches deep.”); April 12, 1855 ("the mountains are again thickly clad with snow, and, the wind being northwest, this coldness is accounted for.”); April 15, 1860 ("Strong northwest wind and cold.. . .We are continually expecting warmer weather than we have”)

Tree sparrows, F. hyemalis, and fox-colored sparrows in company. See March 23, 1853 (“The birds which are merely migrating or tarrying here for a season are especially gregarious now, — the redpoll, Fringilla hyemalis, fox-colored sparrow, etc.”); April 8, 1855 ("Also song sparrows and tree sparrows and F. hyemalis are heard in the yard. The fox-colored sparrow is also there”); April 17, 1855 ("A sudden warm day, like yesterday and this, takes off some birds and adds others. It is a crisis in their career. The fox-colored sparrows seem to be gone, and I suspect that most of the tree sparrows and F. hyemalis, at least, went yesterday.”). See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Tree Sparrow;  A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Fox-colored Sparrow;  A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Dark-eyed Junco.

A fish hawk sails down the river. See April 7, 1859 ("The fish hawk which you see soaring and sailing so leisurely about over the land . . . may have a fish in his talons all the while and only be waiting till you are gone for an opportunity to eat it on his accustomed perch");  April 14, 1852 ("The streams break up ; the ice goes to the sea. Then sails the fish hawk overhead, looking for his prey.”); April 25, 1858 (“He sails along some eighty feet above the water’s edge, looking for fish, and alights again quite near. ”)  See also A Book of Seasons, by Henry Thoreau The Osprey (Fish Hawk)

A pretty sure sign of cold and windy weather.

April 5. 

"Did you see those two sun-dogs on Saturday?"

In running a line through a wood-lot in the southwest part of Lincoln to-day, I started from an old pine stump, now mostly crumbled away, though a part of the wood was still hard above ground, which was described in his deed of 1813 (forty-six years ago) as a pine stump. It was on the side of a hill above Deacon Farrar's meadow.

 As I stood on a hill just cut off, I saw, half a dozen rods below, the bright-yellow catkins of a tall willow just opened on the edge of the swamp, against the dark-brown twigs and the withered leaves. This early blossom looks bright and rare amid the withered leaves and the generally brown and dry surface, like the early butterflies. 

This is the most conspicuous of the March flowers (i. e. if it chances to be so early as March). It suggests unthought-of warmth and sunniness. It takes but little color and tender growth to make miles of dry brown woodland and swamp look habitable and home like, as if a man could dwell there. 

Mr. Haines, who travelled over the lots with us this very cold and blustering day, was over eighty. 

"What raw, blustering weather!" said I to my employer to-day. 

"Yes," answered he. "Did you see those two sun-dogs on Saturday?" 

They are a pretty sure sign of cold and windy weather.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 5, 1859


Bright-yellow catkins of a tall willow just opened on the edge of the swamp, against the dark-brown twigs and the withered leaves. See April 12, 1852 ("See the first blossoms (bright-yellow stamens or pistils) on the willow catkins to-day. . . . It is fit that this almost earliest spring flower should be yellow, the color of the sun."); April 15, 1852 (" the largest early-catkined willow in large bushes in sand by water now blossoming -- the fertile catkins with paler blossoms, the sterile covered with pollen, a pleasant lively bright yellow -- is the brightest flower I have seen thus far. ")' April 18, 1852 ("The most interesting fact, perhaps, at present is these few tender yellow blossoms, these half-expanded sterile aments of the willow, seen through the rain and cold, — signs of the advancing year, pledges of the sun's return.").

This early blossom looks bright and rare amid the withered leaves and the generally brown and dry surface, like the early butterflies. See March 31. 1858 ("The earliest butterflies seem to be born of the dry leaves on the forest floor.")

I see the cold and sheeny snow still glazing the mountains.

April 4. 

Clear, cold, and very windy; wind north west. 

For a fortnight past, or since the frost began to come out, I have noticed the funnel-shaped holes of the skunk in a great many places and their little mincing tracks in the sand. Many a grub and beetle meets its fate in their stomachs. 

Methinks the peculiar and interesting Brown Season of the spring lasts from the time the snow generally begins to go off — as this year the fore part of March — till the frost is generally (or entirely ?) out. Perhaps it will be through the first week of April this year. Ordinary years it must be somewhat later. 

The surface of the earth is never so completely saturated with wet as during this period, for the frost a few inches beneath holds all the ice and snow that are melted and the rain, and an unusual amount of rain falls. All plants, therefore, that love moisture and coolness, like mosses and lichens, are in their glory, but also [?] I think that the very withered grass and weeds, being wet, are blooming at this season. 
The conspicuous reddish brown of the fallen brakes is very rich, contrasting with the paler brown of oak leaves.

 Such an appetite have we for new life that we begin by nibbling the very crust of the earth. We betray our vegetable and animal nature and sympathies by our delight in water. We rejoice in the full rills, the melting snow, the copious spring rains and the freshets, as if we were frozen earth to be thawed, or lichens and mosses, expanding and reviving under this influence. The osier bark now, as usual, looks very yellow when wet, and the wild poplar very green. 

P. M. — To Cliffs. 

Those striped snakes of the 30th were found (several in all) on west side the railroad causeway, on the sand, which is very warm. It would seem, then, that they come out in such places soon after the frost is out. The railroad men who were cutting willows there to set on the sides of the Deep Cut, to prevent the gullying there, came across them. 

The epigaea looks as if it would open in two or three days at least, — showing much color and this form: The flower-buds are protected by the withered leaves, oak leaves, which partly cover them, so that you must look pretty sharp to detect the first flower. These plants blossom by main strength, as it were, or the virtue that is in them, — not growing by water, as most early flowers, — in dry copses. 

I see several earthworms to-day under the shoe of the pump, on the platform. They may have come up through the cracks from the well where the warm air has kept them stirring. 

On the barren railroad causeway, of pure sand, grow chiefly sallows, a few poplars, and sweet-fern and blackberry vines. 

When I look with my glass, I see the cold and sheeny snow still glazing the mountains. This it is which makes the wind so piercing cold. 

There are dark and windy clouds on that side, of that peculiar brushy or wispy character — or rather like sheafs — which denotes wind. They only spit a little snow at last, thin and scarcely perceived, like falling gossamer.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 4, 1859

 I have noticed the funnel-shaped holes of the skunk in a great many places and their little mincing tracks in the sand. See March 28, 1855 ("The skunk’s nose has made small round holes such as a stick or cane would make."); April 2, 1856 ("There are many holes in the surface of the bare, springy ground amid the rills, made by the skunks or mice, and now their edges are bristling with feather like frostwork, as if they were the breathing-holes or nostrils of the earth."). See also  note to February 25, 1860 ("They appear to come out commonly in the warmer weather in the latter part of February.")

Brown Season of the spring lasts from the time the snow generally begins to go off — as this year the fore part of March. Compare March 26, 1860 ("The brown season extends from about the 6th of March ordinarily into April. . . . Tried by various tests, this season fluctuates more or less.")

Those striped snakes of the 30th were found (several in all) on west side the railroad causeway, on the sand, which is very warm. See April 3, 1859 ("C. says he saw a striped snake on the 30th") See also April 2, 1858 ("At the spring on the west side of Fair Haven Hill, I startle a striped snake.. . . No doubt on almost every such warm bank now you will find a snake lying out"); April 9, 1856 ("Saw a striped snake, which probably I had scared into the water from the warm railroad bank”); April 16, 1855 (A striped snake rustles down a dry open hillside where the withered grass is long. "); April 20, 1854 ("A striped snake on a warm, sunny bank.")  See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Striped Snake

The cold and sheeny snow still glazing the mountains. This it is which makes the wind so piercing cold. See April 4, 1852 (" I see the snow lying thick on the south side of the Peterboro Hills, and though the ground is bare from the seashore to their base, I presume it is covered with snow from their base to the Icy Sea. I feel the northwest air cooled by the snow on my cheek."); April 4, 1855 ("far beyond all, in the north western horizon, my eye rests on a range of snow-covered mountains, glistening in the sun.”). See also April 12, 1855 ("the mountains are again thickly clad with snow, and, the wind being northwest, this coldness is accounted for.”); April 30, 1860 ("It snowed there a little, but not here. This is connected with the cold weather of yesterday; the chilling wind came from a snow-clad country.")

"What do you get for lecturing now?"

April 3. 

An easterly wind and rain. 

P. M. — To White Pond. 

C. says he saw a striped snake on the 30th. 

We go by Clamshell. The water on the meadows is now visibly lowered considerably, and the tops of bushes begin to appear. The high water has stood over and washed down the base of that avalanche of sand from my new ravine, leaving an upright edge a foot high, and as it subsided gradually, it has left various parallel shore lines, with stones arranged more or less in rows along them, thus forming a regular beach of four or five rods' length. 

The baeomyces is in its perfection this rainy day.

 I have for some weeks been insisting on the beauty and richness of the moist and saturated crust of the earth. It has seemed to me more attractive and living than ever, — a very sensitive cuticle, teeming with life, especially in the rainy days. I have looked on it as the skin of a pard. And on a more close examination I am borne out by discovering, in this now so bright baeomyces and in other earthy lichens and in cladonias, and also in the very interesting and pretty red and yellow stemmed mosses, a manifest sympathy with, and an expression of, the general life of the crust. This early and hardy cryptogamous vegetation is, as it were, a flowering of the crust of the earth. Lichens and these mosses, which depend on moisture, are now most rampant. If you examine it, this brown earth-crust is not dead. 

We need a popular name for the baeomyces. C. suggests " pink mould." Perhaps " pink shot " or "eggs " would do. 

A great many oak leaves have been blown off in the late windy weather. When I disturb a leaf in the woods I find it quite dry within this rainy day. I saw the other day a long winrow of oak leaves, a foot high, washed up on the meadow-edge a quarter of a mile off, opposite Ball's Hill, whence they partly came. 

It does not rain hard to-day, but mizzles, with considerable wind, and your clothes are finely bedewed with it even under an umbrella. The rain-drops hanging regularly under each twig of the birches, so full of light, are a very pretty sight as you look forth through the mizzle from under your umbrella. In a hard rain they do not lodge and collect thus. 

I hear that Peter Hutchinson hooked a monstrous pickerel at the Holt last winter. It was so large that he could not get his head through the hole, and so they cut another hole close by, and then a narrow channel from that to the first to pass the line through, but then, when they came to pull on the line, the pickerel gave a violent jerk and escaped. Peter thinks that he must have weighed ten pounds. 

Men's minds run so much on work and money that the mass instantly associate all literary labor with a pecuniary reward. 

They are mainly curious to know how much money the lecturer or author gets for his work. They think that the naturalist takes so much pains to collect plants or animals because he is paid for it. An Irishman who saw me in the fields making a minute in my note-book took it for granted that I was casting up my wages and actually inquired what they came to, as if he had never dreamed of any other use for writing. I might have quoted to him that the wages of sin is death, as the most pertinent answer. 

"What do you get for lecturing now?" I am occasionally asked. 

It is the more amusing since I only lecture about once a year out of my native town, often not at all; so that I might as well, if my objects were merely pecuniary, give up the business. 

Once, when I was walking on Staten Island, looking about me as usual, a man who saw me would not believe me when I told him that I was indeed from New England but was not looking at that region with a pecuniary view, — a view to speculation; and he offered me a handsome bonus if I would sell his farm for him. 

I see by the White Pond path many fox-colored sparrows apparently lurking close under the lee side of a wall out of the way of the storm. Their tails near the base are the brightest things of that color — a rich cinnamon -brown — that I know. Their note to-day is the chip much like a tree sparrow's. We get quite near them. 

Near to the pond I see a small hawk, larger than a pigeon hawk, fly past, — a deep brown with a light spot on the side. I think it probable it was a sharp- shinned hawk. 

The pond is quite high (like Walden, which, as I noticed the 30th ult., had risen about two feet since January, and perhaps within a shorter period), and the white sand beach is covered. 

The water being quite shallow on it, it is very handsomely and freshly ripple-marked for a rod or more in width, the ripples only two or three inches apart and very regular and parallel, but occasionally there is a sort of cell a foot long (a split closed at each end) in one. 

In some parts, indeed, it reminded me of a cellular tissue, but the last foot next the shore had no ripple-marks; apparently they were constantly levelled there. These were most conspicuous where a dark sediment, the dead wood or crumbled leaves, perchance, from the forest, lay in the furrows and contrasted with the white sand. The cells were much more numerous and smaller in proportion than I represent them. 

I find in drawing these ripple-marks that I have drawn precisely such lines as are used to represent a shore on maps, and perchance the sight of these parallel ripple-marks may have suggested that method of drawing a shore-line. I do not believe it, but if we were to draw such a lake-shore accurately it would be very similar.

H. D Thoreau, Journal, April 3, 1859


I see by the White Pond path many fox-colored sparrows apparently lurking close under the lee side of a wall out of the way of the storm.Their note to-day is the chip much like a tree sparrow's. See March 23, 1858 ("A large flock of fox-colored sparrows flits by along an alder-row, uttering a faint chip like that of the tree sparrow."); March 23, 1853 ("The birds which are merely migrating or tarrying here for a season are especially gregarious now”); April 17, 1855 ("A sudden warm day, like yesterday and this, takes off some birds and adds others. It is a crisis in their career. The fox-colored sparrows seem to be gone, and I suspect that most of the tree sparrows and F. hyemalis, at least, went yesterday.") See also  A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Fox-colored Sparrow.

I see a small hawk, larger than a pigeon hawk, fly past, — a deep brown with a light spot on the side. I think it probable it was a sharp- shinned hawk. See March 28, 1854 (“See a small slate-colored hawk, with wings transversely mottled beneath, — probably the sharp-shinned hawk.”);April 26, 1854 (“Saw probably a pigeon hawk skim straight and low over field and wood, and another the next day apparently dark slate-color.”); April 16, 1855 ( "What I call a pigeon hawk, probably sharp-shinned.”); May 8, 1854 (“Saw a small hawk flying low, about size of a robin — tail with black bars”); May 4, 1855 (“ See a small hawk go over high in the air, with a long tail and distinct from wings. . . .Was it not the sharp-shinned, or Falco fuscus? I think that what I have called the sparrow hawk falsely, and latterly pigeon hawk, is also the sharp-shinned (vide April 26th and May 8th, 1854, and April 16th, 1855), for the pigeon hawk’s tail is white-barred.”). See also  amd note to July 21, 1858 ("It was the Falco fuscus, the American brown or slate-colored hawk.")  See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Sharp-shinned Hawk

April 3. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, April 3

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 © 2009-2022

No one dreamed of snipe an hour ago.

April 2. 

P. M. — To Lee's Cliff (walking). 

April 2, 2019

Alders [Incana on causeways, i. e. the earliest ones] generally appear to be past prime. 

I see a little snow ice in one place to-day. It is still windy and cool, but not so much so as yesterday. 

I can always sail either up or down the river with the rudest craft, for the wind always blows more or less with the river valley. But where a blunt wooded cape or hill projects nearly in the direction to which the wind is blowing, I find that it blows in opposite directions off that shore, while there may be quite a lull off the centre. This makes a baffling reach. Generally a high wood close upon the west side of our river, the prevailing winds being northwest, makes such a reach. 

There are many fuzzy gnats now in the air, windy as it is. Especially I see them under the lee of the middle Conantum cliff, in dense swarms, all headed one way, but rising and falling suddenly all together as if tossed by the wind. They appear to love best a position just below the edge of the cliff, and to rise constantly high enough to feel the wind from over the edge, and then sink suddenly down again. They are not, perhaps, so thick as they will be, but they are suddenly much thicker than they were, and perhaps their presence affects the arrival of the phoebe, which, I suspect, feeds on them. 

From near this cliff, I watch a male sheldrake in the river with my glass. It is very busily pluming it self while it sails about, and from time to time it raises itself upright almost entirely out of water, showing its rosaceous breast. It is some sixty rods off, yet I can see the red bill distinctly when it is turned against its white body. Soon after I see two more, and one, which I think is not a female, is more gray and far less distinctly black and white than the other. I think it is a young male and that it might be called by some a gray duck. However, if you show yourself within sixty rods, they will fly or swim off, so shy are they. Yet in the fall I sometimes get close upon a young bird, which dashes swiftly across or along the river and dives. 

In the wood on top of Lee's Cliff, where the other day I noticed that the chimaphila leaves had been extensively eaten and nibbled off and left on the ground, I find under one small pitch pine tree a heap of the cones which have been stripped of their scales, evidently by the red squirrels, the last winter and fall, they having sat upon some dead limbs above. They were all stripped regularly from the base upward, excepting the five to seven uppermost and barren scales, making a pretty figure like this: —   


I counted two hundred and thirty-nine cones under this tree alone, and most of them lay within two feet square upon a mass of the scales one to two inches deep and three or four feet in diameter. There were also many cones under the surrounding pines. Those I counted would have made some three quarts or more. These had all been cut off by the squirrels and conveyed to this tree and there stripped and eaten. They appeared to have devoured all the fruit of that pitch pine grove, and probably it was they that nibbled the wintergreen. 

No fruit grows in vain. 

The red squirrel harvests the fruit of the pitch pine. His body is about the color of the cone. I should like to get his recipe for taking out pitch, for he must often get his chaps defiled, methinks. These were all fresh cones, the fruit of last year, perhaps. There was a hole in the ground where they lodged by that tree.

I see fly across the pond a rather large hawk, and when at length it turns up am surprised to see a large blackish spot on the under side of each wing, reminding me of the nighthawk. Its wings appeared long and narrow, but it did not show the upper or under side till far off, — sailing [?] so level. What was it? 

The bass recently cut down at Miles Swamp, which averages nearly two and a half feet in diameter at the ground, has forty-seven rings, and has therefore grown fast. 

The black ash is about eighteen inches in diameter and has forty-eight rings. 

The white ash is about fifteen inches in diameter and has seventy-eight rings. 

I see the small botrychium still quite fresh in the open pasture, only a reddish or leathery brown, — some, too, yellow. It is therefore quite evergreen and more than the spleenworts. 

As I go down the street just after sunset, I hear many snipe to-night. This sound is annually heard by the villagers, but always at this hour, i. e. in the twilight, — a hovering sound high in the air, — and they do not know what to refer it to. It is very easily imitated by the breath. A sort of shuddering with the breath. It reminds me of calmer nights. Hardly one in a hundred hears it, and perhaps not nearly so many know what creature makes it. Perhaps no one dreamed of snipe an hour ago, but the air seemed empty of such as they; but as soon as the dusk begins, so that a bird's flight is concealed, you hear this peculiar spirit-suggesting sound, now far, now near, heard through and above the evening din of the village. I did not hear one when I returned up the street half an hour later.

H. D.Thoreau, Journal, April 2, 1859

The red squirrel harvests the fruit of the pitch pine. See January 22, 1856 ("At Walden, near my old residence, I find that . . ., some gray or red squirrel or squirrels have been feeding on the pitch pine cones extensively. "); March 8, 1859 ("Have I ever seen a squirrel eat the pine buds?") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Red Squirrel.

Alders [Incana on causeways, i. e. the earliest ones] generally appear to be past prime.. Compare  April 2, 1856 ("The alder scales do not even appear relaxed yet.");See April 8, 1855 ("I find also at length a single catkin of the Alnus incana, with a few stamens near the peduncle discolored and shedding a little dust when shaken; so this must have begun yesterday . ..  Though I have looked widely, I have not found the alder out before. "); April 8, 1859 ("The Alnus serrulata is evidently in its prime considerably later than the incana, for those of the former which I notice to-day have scarcely begun, while the latter chance to be done. The fertile flowers are an interesting bright crimson in the sun. “); April 9, 1852 ("Observe the Alnus incana, which is distinguished from the common by the whole branchlet hanging down, so that the sterile aments not only are but appear terminal, and by the brilliant polished reddish green of the bark, and by the leaves."); April 9, 1856 ("The Alnus incana, especially by the railroad opposite the oaks, sheds pollen.”). See also A Book of Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Alders


The bass recently cut down at Miles Swamp, which averages nearly two and a half feet in diameter at the ground, has forty-seven rings, and has therefore grown fast. See A Book of Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Basswood

Hardly one in a hundred hears it, and perhaps not nearly so many know what creature makes it. See April 9, 1858 ("Persons walking up or down our village street in still evenings at this season hear this singular winnowing sound in the sky over the meadows and know not what it is. This “booming” of the snipe is our regular village serenade. I heard it this evening for the first time, as I sat in the house, through the window. Yet common and annual and remarkable as it is, not one in a hundred of the villagers hears it, and hardly so many know what it is."); April 1, 1853 ("Now, at early starlight, I hear the Snipe’s hovering note as he circles over Nawshawtuct Meadow. "). April 7, 1859 ("I hear there the hovering note of a snipe at 4.30 p.m., — unusually early in the day."); April 25, 1859 ("The snipe have hovered commonly this spring an hour or two before sunset and also in the morning. I can see them flying very high over the Mill-Dam, and they appear to make that sound when descending, — one quite by himself.")  See also A Book of Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Snipe

Let me see how soon the woods will have acquired a new color

April 1. 

Gilpin says well that the object of a light mist is a "nearer distance." Among winter plants, regarded as component parts of the forest, he thinks the fern the most picturesque. He says: "We are often at a loss to distinguish in pictures, the rising from the setting sun; though their characters are very different, both in the lights and shadows. The ruddy lights indeed of the evening are more easily distinguished: but it is not perhaps always sufficiently observed, that the shadows of the evening are much less opaque, than those of the morning." 

This morning, the ground was completely covered with snow, and the water on the meadows looked dark and stormy and contrasted well with the white landscape. Now, at noon, the ground is once more as bare as before. 

He is in the lowest scale of laborers who is merely an able-bodied man and can compete with others only in physical strength. Woodchoppers in this neighborhood get but fifty cents a cord, but, though many can chop two cords in a day in pleasant weather and under favorable circumstances, yet most do not average more than seventy-five cents a day, take the months together. But one among them of only equal physical strength and skill as a chopper, having more wit, buys a cross-cut saw for four dollars, hires a man to help him at a dollar a day, and saws down trees all winter at ten cents apiece and thirty or forty a day, and clears two or more dollars a day by it. 

Yet as long as the world may last few will be found to buy the cross-cut saw, and probably the wages of the sawyer will never be reduced to a level with those of the chopper. 

2 p. m. — To Flint's Pond cedar woods via railroad, returning by C. Smith's orchard. 

Saw the first bee of the season on the railroad causeway, also a small red butterfly and, later, a large dark one with buff-edged wings. 

Gilpin's "Forest Scenery" is a pleasing book, so moderate, temperate, graceful, roomy, like a gladed wood; not condensed; with a certain religion in its manners and respect for all the good of the past, rare in more recent books; and it is grateful to read after them. Somewhat spare indeed in the thoughts as in the sentences. Some of the cool wind of the copses converted into grammatical and graceful sentences, with out heat. Not one of those humors come to a head which some modern books are, but some of the natural surface of a healthy mind. 

Walden is all white ice, but little melted about the shores. The very sight of it, when I get so far on the causeway, though I hear the spring note of the chickadee from over the ice, carries my thoughts back at once some weeks toward winter, and a chill comes over them. 

There is an early willow on sand-bank of the railroad, against the pond, by the fence, grayish below and yellowish above. 

The railroad men have dug around the sleepers that the sun may thaw the ground and let them down. It is not yet out. 

Cut across near Baker's barn. 

The swollen buds of some trees now give a new tint to their tops seen at a distance, — to the maples at least. Baker's peach orchard looks at this distance purplish below and red above, the color of the last year's twigs. The geranium (?) is the most common green leaf to be seen everywhere on the surface now the snow is gone. 

They have been shooting great numbers of muskrats the last day or two. 

Is that the red osier (cornel or viburnum) near the grape-vine on the Bare Hill road? 

How sure the farmer is to find out what bush affords the best withes, little of a botanist as he is ! 

The mountains seen from Bare Hill are very fine now in the horizon, so evanescent, being broadly spotted white and blue like the skins of some animals, the white predominating. 

The Peterboro Hills to the north are almost all white.

The snow has melted more on the more southern mountains. With their white mantles, not withstanding the alternating dark patches, they melt into the sky. Yet perhaps the white portions may be distinguished by the peculiar light of the sun shining on them. They are like a narrow strip of broadly spotted leopard-skin, the saddle-cloth of the sun spread along the horizon. 

I am surprised to find Flint's Pond frozen still, which should have been open a week ago. 

The Great Sudbury Meadows covered with water are revealed. Blue they look over the woods. 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. How unexpectedly dumb and poor and cold does Nature look, when, where we had expected to find a glassy lake reflecting the skies and trees in the spring, we find only dull, white ice! 

Such am I, no doubt, to many friends. 

But, now that I have reached the cedar hill, I see that there is about an acre of open water, perhaps, over Bush Island in the middle of the pond, and there are some water-fowl there on the edge of the ice, — mere black spots, though I detect their character by discovering a relative motion, — and some are swimming about in the water. 

The pond is, perhaps, the handsomer, after all, for this distant patch only of blue water, in the midst of the field of white ice. Each enhances the other. It is an azure spot, an elysian feature, in your cold companion, making the imagined concealed depths seem deeper and rarer. This pond is worth coming to, if only be cause it is larger than Walden. 

I can so easily fancy it indefinitely large. It represents to me that Icy Sea of which I have been reading in Sir J. Richardson's book. 

The prevailing color of the woods at present, excepting the evergreens, is russet, a little more red or grayish, as the case may be, than the earth, for those are the colors of the withered leaves and the branches; the earth has the lighter hue of withered grass. Let me see how soon the woods will have acquired a new color. 

Went over the hill toward the eastern end of the pond. What is the significance of odors, of the odoriferous woods ? Sweet and yellow birch, sassafras, fever-bush, etc., are an interesting clan to me. When we bruise them in our walk, we are suddenly exhilarated by their odor. This sweet scent soon evaporates, and you must break the twig afresh. If you cut it, it is not as if you break it. Some, like the sassafras, have brought a great price as articles of commerce. No wonder that men thought they might have some effect toward renovating their lives. Gosnold, the discoverer of Cape Cod, carried home a cargo of sassafras. What could be more grateful to the discoverer of a new country than a new fragrant wood? 

Gilpin's is a book in which first there is nothing to offend, and secondly something to attract and please.

The branches of the young black birch grow very upright, as it were appressed to the main stem. Their buds appear a little expanded now. 

Saw the fox-colored sparrows and slate-colored snowbirds on Smith's Hill, the latter singing in the sun, — a pleasant jingle. 

The mountains, which an hour ago were white, are now all blue, the mistiness has increased so much in the horizon, and crept even into the vales of the distant woods. The mist is in wreaths or stripes because we see the mist of successive vales. There could not easily be a greater contrast than between this morning's and this evening's landscapes. 

The sun now an hour high. Now I see the river-reach, far in the north. The more distant river is ever the most ethereal. 

Sat awhile before sunset on the rocks in Saw Mill Brook. A brook need not be large to afford us pleasure by its sands and meanderings and falls and their various accompaniments. It is not so much size that we want as picturesque beauty and harmony. If the sound of its fall fills my ear it is enough. I require that the rocks over which it falls be agreeably disposed, and prefer that they be covered with lichens. The height and volume of the fall is of very little importance compared with the appearance and disposition of the rocks over which it falls, the agreeable diversity of still water, rapids, and falls, and of the surrounding scenery. I require that the banks and neighboring hillsides be not cut off, but excite a sense of at least graceful wild-ness. 

One or two small evergreens, especially hemlocks, standing gracefully on the brink of the rill, contrasting by their green with the surrounding deciduous trees when they have lost their leaves, and thus enlivening the scene and betraying their attachment to the water. It would be no more pleasing to me if the stream were a mile wide and the hemlocks five feet in diameter. I believe that there is a harmony between the hemlock and the water which it overhangs not explainable.

In the first place, its green is especially grateful to the eye the greater part of the year in any locality, and in the winter, by its verdure overhanging and shading the water, it concentrates in itself the beauty of all fluviatile trees. It loves to stand with its foot close to the water, its roots running over the rocks of the shore, and two or more on opposite sides of a brook make the most beautiful frame to a waterscape, especially not too glaring. 

It makes the more complete frame be cause its branches, particularly in young specimens such as I am thinking of, spring from so near the ground, and it makes so dense a mass of verdure. 

There are many larger hemlocks covering the steep side-hill forming the bank of the Assabet, where they are successively undermined by the water, and they lean at every angle over the water. Some are almost horizontally directed, and almost every year one falls in and is washed away. The place is known as the " Leaning Hemlocks." 

But to return to Saw Mill Run. I love that the green fronds of the fern, pressed by the snow, lie on its rocks. It is a great advantage to take in so many parts at one view. We love to see the water stand, or seem to stand, at many different levels within a short distance, while we sit in its midst, some above, some below us, and many successive falls in different directions, meandering in the course of the fall, rather than one "chute," — rather spreading and shoaling than contracting and deepening at the fall. In a small brook like this, there are many adjuncts to increase the variety which are wanting in a river, or, if present, cannot be attended to; even dead leaves and twigs vary the ripplings and increase the foam.

And the very lichens on the rocks of the run are an important ornament, which in the great waterfall are wont to be overlooked. I enjoy this little fall on Saw Mill Run more than many a large one on a river that I have seen. The hornbeams and witch-hazel and canoe birches all come in for their share of attention. We get such a complete idea of the small rill with its overhanging shrubs as only a bird's-eye view from some eminence could give us of the larger stream. Perhaps it does not fall more than five feet within a rod and a half. I should not hear Niagara a short distance off. The never-ending refreshing sound! 

It suggests more thoughts than Montmorenci. A stream and fall which the woods imbosom. They are not in this proportion to a larger fall. They lie in a more glaring and less picturesque light. Even the bubbles are a study. It can be completely examined in its details. The consciousness of there being water about you at different levels is agreeable. The sun can break through and fall on it and vary the whole scene infinitely. 

Saw the freshly (?) broken shells of a tortoise's eggs — or were they a snake's ? — in Hosmer's field. 

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. 

As I come over the Turnpike, the song sparrow's jingle comes up from every part of the meadow, as native as the tinkling rills or the blossoms of the spirea, the meadow-sweet, soon to spring. Its cheep is like the sound of opening buds. The sparrow is continually singing on the alders along the brook-side, while the sun is continually setting. 

We have had a good solid winter, which has put the previous summer far behind us; intense cold, deep and lasting snows, and clear, tense winter sky. It is a good experience to have gone through with.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 1, 1852

 See the first bee of the season on the railroad cause way, also a small red butterfly and, later, a large dark one with buff-edged wings. See April 2, 1856 (" I see and hear flies and bees about. A large buff-edged butterfly flutters by along the edge of the Cliff, — Vanessa antiopa. Though so little of the earth is bared, this frail creature has been warmed to life again. "). Also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,  the Buff-edged butterfly

The Peterboro Hills to the north are almost all white. See April 4, 1852 ("I see the snow lying thick on the south side of the Peterboro Hills, . . .probably the dividing line at present between the bare ground and the snow-clad ground stretching three thousand miles to the Saskatchewan and Mackenzie and the Icy Sea."); April 4, 1855 (" [O]on each side and beyond, the earth is clad with a warm russet, more pleasing perhaps than green; and far beyond all, in the northwestern horizon, my eye rests on a range of snow-covered mountains, glistening in the sun.");February 21, 1855 ("We now notice the snow on the mountains, because on the remote rim of the horizon its whiteness contrasts with the russet and darker hues of our bare fields. I look at the Peterboro mountains with my glass from Fair Haven Hill. I think that there can be no more arctic scene than these mountains in the edge of the horizon completely crusted over with snow, with the sun shining on them, seen through a telescope over bare, russet fields and dark forests, .... A silver edging to this basin of the world"),

The place is known as the " Leaning Hemlocks.” See  March 29, 1853 ("A pleasant short voyage is that to the Leaning Hemlocks on the Assabet, just round the Island under Nawshawtuct Hill. The river here has in the course of ages gullied into the hill, at a curve, making a high and steep bank, on which a few hemlocks grow and overhang the deep, eddying basin. For as long as I can remember, one or more of these has always been slanting over the stream at various angles, being undermined by it, until one after another, from year to year, they fall in and are swept away")  Also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, at the Leaning Hemlocks.

I believe that there is a harmony between the hemlock and the water which it overhangs not explainable. See November 4, 1851 ("[A] few small hemlocks, with their now thin but unmixed and fresh green foliage, stand over and cheer the stream [Saw Mill Brook].These little cheerful hemlocks, - the lisp of chickadees seems to come from them now, - each standing with its foot on the very edge of the stream, reaching sometimes part way over its channel, and here and there one has lightly stepped across..")

We have had a good solid winter, which has put the previous summer far behind us; intense cold, deep and lasting snows, and clear, tense winter sky.See February 12, 1854("the unrelenting steel-cold scream of a jay, unmelted, that never flows into a song, a sort of wintry trumpet, screaming cold; hard, tense, frozen music, like the winter sky itself")