5 March 1855 – 11 March 1855

P. M. — To Beck Stow’s. A strong but warm southwesterly (?) wind, which has produced a remarkable haze. As I go along by Sleepy Hollow, this strong, warm wind, rustling the leaves on the hillsides, this blue haze, and the russet earth seen through it, remind me that a new season has come. ‘There was the less thick, more remotely blue, haze of the 11th February, succeeded by a thaw, beginning on the 14th. Will not rain follow this much thicker haze?

'To Second Division Brook. Still stronger wind, shaking the house, and rather cool. This the third day of wind. Our woods are now so reduced that the chopping of this winter has been a cutting to the quick. At least we walkers feel it as such. There is hardly a wood- lot of any consequence left but the chopper’s axe has been heard in it this season. They have even infringed fatally on White Pond, on the south of Fair Haven Pond, shaved off the topknot of the Cliffs, the Colburn farm, Beck Stow’s, etce., etc. Observed a mouse or mole’s nest in the Second Division Meadow, where it had been made under the snow, —a nice warm globular nest some five inches in diameter, amid the sphagnum and cranberry vines, etc., — made of dried grass and lined with a still finer grass. ‘The hole was on one side, and the bottom was near two inches thick. There were many small paths or galleries in the meadow leading to this from the brook some rod or more distant. | The small gyrinus is circling in the brook. I see where much fur of a rabbit, which probably a fox was carrying, has caught on a moss rose twig as he leaped a ditch. It is much worse walking than it has been for ten days, the continual warmth of the sun melting the ice and snow by walls, etc., and reaching the deeper frost, unexpectedly after the surface had been dry. Pastures which look dry prove soft and full of water. There is a peculiar redness in the western sky just after sunset. There are many great dark, slate-col- ored clouds floating there, seen against more distant and thin, wispy, bright-vermilion (?), almost blood- red ones. This in many places appears as the lining of the former. It rained last evening, but not much. This the first rain or storm since February 18th inclusive, 2. e. fifteen days. ‘The weather began to be decidedly springlike, —air full of light, etc.,—the 18th. ‘The 20th was per- fect March. The 21st and 22d were remarkably fair and warm; 23d to 28th inclusive remarkably clear and cold; March Ist and 2d remarkably clear and serene and pleasant. Since then colder, with increasing wind and some clouds, with last night some rain. The sands are too dry and light-colored to ee arrowheads so well now. I see many places where after the late freshet the musquash made their paths under the ice, leading from the water, a rod or mae to a bed of grass above the water-level.

P. M. — To Red-Ice Pond. A raw east wind and rather cloudy. Methinks the buds of the early willows, the willows of the railroad bank, show more of the silvery down than ten days ago. Did I not see crows flying northeasterly yesterday toward night? The redness in the ice appears mostly to have evap- orated, so that, melted, it does not color the water in a bottle. Saw, about a hemlock stump on the hillside north of the largest Andromeda Pond, very abundant drop- pings of some kind of mice, on that common green moss (forming a firm bed about an inch high, like little pines, surmounted by a fine red stem with a green point, in all three quarters of an inch high), which they had fed on to a great extent, evidently when it was covered with snow, shearing it off level. Their droppings could be collected by the hand probably, <> a light brown above, green next the earth. There were appar- ently many of their holes in the earth about the stump. They must have fed very extensively on this moss the past winter.’ It is now difficult getting on and off Walden. At Brister’s Spring there are beautiful dense green beds of moss, which apparently has just risen above the surface of the water, tender and compact. 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. To-day, as also three or four days ago, I saw a clear drop of maple sap on a broken red maple twig, which tasted very sweet. The Pyrola secunda is a perfect evergreen. It has lost none of its color or freshness, with its thin ovate finely serrate leaves, revealed now the snow is gone. It is more or less branched. Picked up a very handsome white pine cone some six and a half inches long by two and three eighths near base and two near apex, perfectly blossomed. It is a very rich and wholesome brown color, of various shades as you turn it in your hand, —a light ashy or gray brown, somewhat like unpainted wood, as you look down on it, or as if the lighter brown were cov- ered with a gray lichen, seeing only those parts of the scales always exposed, — with a few darker streaks or marks (\“) and a drop of pitch at the point of each scale. Within, the scales are a dark brown above (2. e. as it hangs) and a light brown be- neath, very distinctly being marked be- \ y neath by the same darker brown, down the centre and near the apex somewhat anchorwise. We were walking along the sunny hillside on the south of Fair Haven Pond (on the 4th), which the chop- pers had just laid bare, when, in a sheltered and warmer place, we heard a rustling amid the dry leaves on the hillside and saw a striped squirrel eying us from its resting-place on the bare ground. It sat still till we were within a rod, then suddenly dived into its hole, which was at its feet, and disappeared. The first plea- sant days of spring come out like a squirrel and go in again.!

P. M.— To old Carlisle road. Another fair day with easterly wind. This morning I got my boat out of the cellar and turned it up in the yard to let the seams open before I calk it. The blue river, now almost completely open (7. e. excepting a little ice in the recesses of the shore and a good deal over the meadows), admonishes me to be swift. I see where many young trees and bushes have been broken down by the ice after the last freshet, many of Loring’s young maples, for example. The cornel and other bushes along the walls are broken like young trees by snowdrifts, the ice, sinking with them in its embrace, weighing or dragging them down. In many places, where the water rose so high as to reach the ends of the lower branches of white maples and these were afterward frozen in, the ice, sinking with the ebb, breaks off or strips down the branch.! There appears to be a motion to the ice (even on meadows away from the current and at Walden shore) somewhat like that of a glacier, by which it tips over the trees, etc., standing in it with- out breaking up, —the result, one would say, of its swelling under the influence of the sun. . Was surprised to see a cluster of those large leek buds on a rock in Clark’s (?) meadow between the oak and my house that was. Danie] Clark tells me that on his part of the Great Meadows there is a hole just about the breadth and depth of a man, commonly full of water. He does not know what made it. I crossed through the swamp south of Boulder Field toward the old dam. Stopping in a sunny and sheltered place on a hillock in the woods, — for it was raw in the wind, —I heard the hasty, shuffling, as if frightened, note of a robin from a dense birch wood, —a sort of tche tche tche tche tche, — and then prob- ably it dashed through the birches; and so they fetch the year about. Just from the South Shore, perchance, it alighted not in the village street, but in this remote birch wood. This sound reminds me of rainy, misty April days in past years. Once or twice before, this af- ternoon, I thought I heard one and listened, but in vain. I still see the bluish bloom on thimble-berry vines quite fresh. I walk these days along the brooks, looking for tortoises and trout, etc. They are full of a rust-colored water, as if they flowed out of an iron mine. As the ice melts in the swamps I see the horn-shaped buds of the skunk-cabbage, green with a bluish bloom, standing uninjured, ready to feel the influence of the sun, — the most prepared for spring — to look at — of any plant. I see of late more than before of the fuzzy caterpillars, both black and reddish-brown.

A cloudy, rain-threatening day, not windy | and rather warmer than yesterday. Painted the bottom of my boat. P. M. — To Andromeda Ponds. Scare up a rabbit on the hillside by these ponds, which was gnawing a smooth sumach. See also where they have gnawed the red maple, sweet-fern, Populus grandidentata, white and other oaks (taking off con- siderable twigs at four or five cuts), amelanchier, and sallow; but they seem to prefer the smooth sumach to any of these. With this variety of cheap diet they are not likely to starve. I get a few drops of the sweet red maple juice which has run down the main stem where a rabbit had nibbled off close a twig. The rabbit, indeed, lives, but the sumach may be killed. The heart-wood of the poison-dogwood, when I break it down with my hand, has a singular rotten, yellow look and a spirituous or apothecary odor. As, on the 4th, I clambered over those great white pine masts which lay in all directions one upon another on the hillside south of Fair Haven, where the woods have been laid waste, I was struck, in favorable lights, with the jewel-like brlliancy of the sawed ends thickly bedewed with crystal drops of turpentine, thickly as a shield, as if the dryads (?), oreads (?), pine-wood nymphs had seasonably wept there the fall of the tree. The perfect sincerity of these terebinthine drops, each one reflecting the world, colorless as light, or like drops of dew heaven-distilled and trembling to their fall, is incredible when you remember how firm their con- sistency. And is this that pitch which you cannot touch without being defiled ? Looking from the Cliffs, the sun being as before in- visible, I saw far more light in the reflected sky in the neighborhood of the sun than I could see in the heavens from my position, and it occurred to me that the reason was that there was reflected to me from the river the view I should have got if I had stood there on ee aE aaa Pee Ye Sew Klaas, the water in a more ‘\ Eves favorable position. I see that the mud in the road has crystallized as it dried (for it is not nearly cold enough to freeze), like the first crystals that shoot and set on water when freezing. I see the minute seeds of the Andromeda calyculata scattered over the melting ice of the Andromeda Ponds. C. says he saw yesterday the slate-colored hawk with a white bar across tail, — meadow hawk, 17. e. frog hawk. Probably finds moles and mice. Troup An overcast and dark night.

Snowed in the night, a mere whitening. In the morning somewhat overcast still, cold and quite windy. The first clear snow to whiten the ground since February 9th. IT am not aware of growth in any plant yet, unless it be the further peeping out of willow catkins. They have crept out further from under their scales, and, looking closely into them, I detect a little redness along the twigs even now. You are always surprised by the sight of the first spring bird or insect; they seem premature, and there is no such evidence of spring as themselves, so that they literally fetch the year about. It is thus when I hear the first robin or bluebird or, looking along the brooks, see the first water-bugs out circling. But you think, They have come, and Nature cannot recede. Thus, when on the 6th I saw the gyrinus at Second Division Brook, I saw no peculiarity in the water or the air to remind me of them, but to-day they are here and yesterday they were not. I go looking deeper for tortoises, when suddenly my eye rests on these black circling apple- seeds in some smoother bay. The red squirrel should be drawn with a pine cone. Those reddening leaves, as the checkerberry, lambkill, etc., etc., which at the beginning of winter were greenish, are now a deeper red, when the snow goes off. No more snow since last night, but a strong, cold northerly wind all day, with occasional gleams of sunshine. The whitening of snow consequently has not disappeared. Miss Minott says that Dr. Spring told her that when the sap began to come up into the trees, 2. e. about the middle of February (she says), then the diseases of the human body come out. The idea is that man’s body sympathizes with the rest of nature, and his pent-up humors burst forth like the sap from wounded trees. This with the mass may be that languor or other weakness commonly called spring feelings. Minott tells me that Henry Hosmer says he saw geese two or three days ago! Jacob Farmer gave me to-day a part of the foot probably of a pine marten, which he found two or three days ago in a trap he had set in his brook for a mink, — under water, baited with a pickerel. It is clothed above with a glossy dark-brown hair, and contains but two toes (perhaps a third without the talon), armed with fine and very sharp talons, much curved. It had left thus much in the trap and departed. Audubon and Bachman call my deer mouse “ Mus Leucopus, Rafinesque,” American White-Footed Mouse; call it “yellowish brown above” and give these syno- nyms: — “Mus Sylvaticus, Forster, Phil. Trans., vol. lxii., p. 380. Field-Rat, Penn., Hist. Quad., vol. ii., p. 185. Field-Rat, Arctic Zodl., vol. i., p. 131. Musculus Leucopus, Rafinesque, Amer. Month. Review, Oct. 1818, p. 444. Mus Leucopus, Desmar. Mamm., esp. 493. Mus Sylvaticus, Harlan, Fauna, p. 151. Mus Agrarius, Godm., Nat. Hist., vol. ii., p. 88. Mus Leucopus, Richardson, F. B. A., p. 142. Arvicola Nuttalliit, Harlan, variety.

P. M. — To Annursnack. Clear and rather pleasant; the ground again bare; wind northerly. I am surprised to see how rapidly that ice that covered the meadows on the Ist of March has disappeared under the influence of the sun alone. The greater part of what then lay on the meadows a foot thick has melted, —two thirds at least. On Abel Hosmer’s pasture, just southeast of the stone bridge, I see where the sod was lifted up over a great space in the flood of the 17th of February. There is one bare place there, showing only the fine and now white roots of grass, seven rods long by two or three. There are other smaller ones about it. The sod carried off is from four to six inches thick com- monly. Pieces of this crust, from a quarter to a third the size mentioned, are resting within ten or twenty rods. One has sunk against the causeway bridge, being too wide to go through. I see one piece of crust, twelve feet by six, turned completely topsyturvy with its ice beneath it. This has prevented the ice from melting, and on examining it I find that the ice did not settle down on to the grass after the water went down and then freeze to it, for the blades of grass pene- trate one inch into the ice, showing that, the water being shallow, the whole froze, and the grass was frozen in, and thus, when the water rose again, was lifted up. The bared places I have noticed as yet were not in the low ground, but where the water was comparatively shallow, commonly at a distance from the river.! A bluebird day before yesterday in Stow.? Saw a cake of recent ice very handsomely marked as it decayed, with darker marks for the original crys- tals centred with the original white. It would be a rare pattern for a carpet, because it contains a variety of figures agreeable to the eye without regularity. Many of those dirty-white millers or ephemere in the air. As I sit at the base of Annursnack the earth appears almost completely bare, but from the top I see consid- erable white ice here and there. This shows that what is left is only the whitened and rotting ice, which, being confined to the lowest hollows and meadows, is only observed from a height. At this season, — before grass springs to conceal them, —I notice those pretty little roundish shells on the tops of hills; one to-day on Annursnack. I see pitch pine needles looking as if whitewashed, thickly covered on each of the two slopes of the needle with narrow, white, oyster-shell-like latebree or chrysa- lids of an insect.