20 February 1854 – 26 February 1854

Channing saw yesterday three little birds olive-green above, with yellowish-white breasts and, he thinks, bars on wings. Were they goldfinches ? P. M. — Skating to Fair Haven Pond.

A. M.—A fine, driving snow-storm. Have seen no good samples of the blue in snow this winter. At noon clears up. - P. M. — To Goose Pond by Tuttle Path. A little snow, lodged on the north side of the woods, gives them a hoary aspect, —a mere sugaring, how- ever. The snow has just ceased falling — about two inches deep, in the woods, upon the old and on bare ground ; but there is scarcely a track of any animal yet to be seen, except here and there the surface of the snow has been raised and broken interruptedly where some mouse came near the surface in its travels, and in one wood I see very numerous tracks, prob- ably of red squirrels, leading to and from three or four holes in the earth close together, somewhat like those in an ant’s nest, — quite a broad beaten path to some stumps with white pine cones on them and single tracks to the base of trees. It has now got to be such weather that after a cold morning it is colder in the house, —or we feel colder, — than outdoors, by noon, and are surprised that it is no colder when we come out. You cannot walk too early in new-fallen snow to get the sense of purity, novelty, and unexplored- ness. The snow has lodged more or less in perpen» dicular lines on the northerly sides of trees, so that I am able to tell the points of compass as well as by the sun. I guide myself accordingly. It always gladdens me to see a willow, though catkinless as well as leaf- less, rising above the new-fallen, untrodden snow, in some dry hollow in the woods, for then I feel nearer to spring. There are some peculiarly dry and late look- ing ones I see there, but it is enough that they are willows. The locust pods are open or opening. Litile beans they hold. What delicate satin-like inside: linings they have !

I measured the thickness of the frozen ground at the deep cut on the new Bedford road, about half-way up the hill. They dig under the frozen surface and then crack it off with iron wedges, with much labor, in pieces from three to six feet square. It was eighteen inches thick and more there — thicker higher up, not so thick lower down the hill. Saw in Sleepy Hollow a small hickory stump, about six inches in diameter and six inches high, so com- pletely, regularly, and beautifully covered by that winkle-like fungus in concentric circles and successive layers that the core was concealed and you would have taken it for some cabbage-like plant. This was the Sa way the wound was healed. The cut surface of the stump was completely and thickly cov- ered. Our neighbor Wetherbee was J. Moore’s com- panion when he took that great weight of pickerel this winter. He says it was fifty-six pounds in Flint’s, in one day, and that four of them weighed eighteen pounds and seven ounces. My alder catkins in the pitcher have shed their pollen for a day or two, and the willow catkins have pushed out half an inch or more and show red and yellowish.

A. M.—The snow drives horizontally from the north or northwesterly, in long waving lines like the outline of a swell or billow. The flakes do not fall perceptibly for the width of a house. P. M. — Saw some of those architectural drifts form- ing. ‘The fine snow came driving along over the field like steam curling from a roof. As the current rises to go over the wall, it produces a lull in the angle made by the wall and ground, and accordingly just enough snow is deposited there to fill the triangular calm, but the greater ~~ part passes over and —— # nga is deposited in the larger calm. A portion of the wind also apparently passes through the chinks of the wall and curves upward against the main drift, appearing to carve it and perforate it in various fashion, hold- ing many snowy particles in suspension in vertical eddies. I am not sure to what extent the drift is carved and perforated, and to what originally depos- ited, in these forms. How will it look behind a tight fence ? Not that ornamental beauty is to be neglected, but, at least, let it first be inward-lookmg and essen- tial, like the lining of a shell, of which the inhabitant is unconscious, and not mere outside garnishing.

P. M.— 'To Walden and Fair Haven. In Wheeler’s Wood by railroad. Nuthatches are faintly answering each other, — tit for tat, — on dif- ferent keys, — a faint creak. Now and then one utters a loud distinct gnah. This bird more than any I know loves to stand with its head downward. Meanwhile chickadees, with their silver tinkling, are flitting high above through the tops of the pines. Measured the ice of Walden in three places, — One about 10 rods from the shore, 16% inches thick 25 rods from the shore, “ a ae Inmiddle........ re, 5° - Call it then 17 inches on an average. On Fair Haven, in the only place tried, it was 21 inches thick. The portion of the ice in Walden above water was about 11 inches, in Fair Haven about 1?. This part then equals +4, + and ;4; respectively. Tried the frost in five different and very distant woods in my walk. Found that though the ground is frozen more than 18 inches — from 18 [inches] to 24 feet — thick on the open hillside on the new Bedford road, notwithstanding some snow on it, I can drive a stake without any trouble in the midst of ordinary level mixed pine and oak woods where the snow Is a foot deep, in very thick pine and oak woods where the snow is only one inch thick or none at all, and the ground does not slope to the north and east, and probably the northwest, and in sprout-lands where it is 20 inches thick in some places, and in springy meadows. In Moore’s Swamp it is frozen about 4 inches deep in open land. I think that in an average year the ice in such a pond as Fair Haven attains a greater thick- ness than the snow on a level. The other day I thought that I smelled a fox very strongly, and went a little further and found that it was a skunk. May not their odors differ in intensity chiefly? Observed in one of the little pond-holes between Walden and Fair Haven where a partridge had travelled around in the snow amid the bordering bushes twenty-five rods, had pecked the green leaves of the lambkill and left fragments on the snow, and had paused at each high blueberry bush, fed on its red buds and shaken down fragments of its bark on the snow. ‘These buds appeared its main object. I finally scared the bird. I see such mice or mole tracks as these: — ae eee Se The frozen earth at the new road cut is hauled off twenty rods by chains hooked round it, and it lies like great blocks of yellow sandstone for building, cracked out exactly square by wedges. The sexton tells me that he had to dig the last grave through two feet of frozen ‘ground. I measured a block to-day two feet five inches thick after being dragged a dozen rods.

Kane, ashore far up Baffin’s Bay, says, ‘‘ How strangely this crust we wander over asserts its identity through all the disguises of climate! ”’ Speaking of the effects of refraction on the water, he says: ‘‘ The single repetition was visible all around us; the secondary or inverted image sometimes above and sometimes below the primary. But it was not uncom- mon to see, also, the uplifted ice-berg, with its accom- panying or false horizon, joined at its summit by its in- verted image, and then above a second horizon, a third berg in its natural position.” He refers to Agassiz at Lake Superior as suggesting “ that it may be simply the * reflection of the landscape inverted upon the surface of the lake, and reproduced with the actual landscape; ” though there there was but one inversion. He says that he saw sledge-tracks of Franklin’s party in the neighborhood of Wellington Sound, made on the snow, six years old, which had been covered by the after- snows of five winters. This reminds me of the sled-tracks I saw this winter. Kane says that, some mornings in that winter in the ice, they heard “a peculiar crisping or crackling sound.” “This sound, as the ‘noise accompanying the aurora,’ has been attributed by Wrangell and others, ourselves among the rest, to changes of atmospheric temperature acting upon the crust of the snow.” Kane thinks it is rather owing “to the unequal contraction and dilata- tion” of unequally presenting surfaces, “not to a sud- den change of atmospheric temperature acting upon the snow.”’ Is not this the same crackling I heard at Fair Haven on the 19th, and are not most of the arctic phenomena to be witnessed in our latitude on a smaller scale? At Fair Haven it seemed a slighter contraction of the ice, — not enough to make it thunder. This morning it began with snowing, turned to a fine freezing rain producing a glaze,— the most of a glaze thus far, — but in the afternoon changed to pure rain. P. M. — To Martial Miles’s in rain. The weeds, trees, etc., are covered with a glaze. The blue-curl cups are overflowing with icy drops. All trees present a new appearance, their twigs being bent down by the ice, — birches, apple trees, etc., but, above all, the pines. Tall, feathery white pines look like cock- erels’ tails in a shower. Both these and white [= pitch] pines, their branches being inclined downward, have sharpened tops like fir and spruce trees. Thus an arc- tic effect is produced. Very young white and pitch pines are most changed, all their branches drooping in a compact pyramid toward the ground except a single plume in the centre. They have a singularly crestfallen look. The rain is fast washing off all the glaze on which I had counted, thinking of the effect of to-morrow’s sun on it. The wind rises and the rain increases. Deep pools of water have formed in the fields, which have an agreeable green or blue tint, — sometimes the one, sometimes the other. Yet the quan- tity of water which is fallen is by no means remark- able but, the ground being frozen, it is not soaked up. There is more water on the surface than before this winter.