28 January 1856 – 3 February 1856

Snowed all day, about two inches falling. They say it snowed about the same all yesterday in New York. Cleared up at night.

P. M.— Measured the snow in the same places measured the 16th and 23d, having had, except yesterday, fair weather and no thaw.’ Average of both sides. West of railroad, average 114 + East of railroad, 17 133 — On the 23d it was 11} | 14 124+ «16th « « 121 153 13,6 Trillium Woods to-day 14,8, the 23d 13}+ 16th 17 As I measured oftener west than east of railroad, the snow is probably about fourteen on a level in open fields now, or quite as deep as at any time this winter. Yet it has apparently been settling a little the last six days. In the woods, apparently, it has also been settling, but it is not so deep there as on the 16th, because it settled rapidly soon after that date. It is deeper east of railroad, evidently’ because it lies behind it like a wall, though I measure from six to ten or twelve rods off on that side. Since the 13th there has been at no time less than one foot on a level in open fields. It is interesting to see near the sources, even of small streams or brooks, which now flow through an open country, perhaps shrunken in their volume, the traces of ancient mills, which have devoured the primitive forest, the earthen dams and old sluiceways, and ditches and banks for obtaining a supply of water. These relics of a more primitive period are still frequent in our midst. Such, too, probably, has been the history of the most thickly settled and cleared countries of Europe. The saw-miller is neighbor and successor to the Indian. It is observable that not only the moose and the wolf disappear before the civilized man, but even many species of insects, such as the black fly and the almost microscopic “no-see-em.” How imperfect a notion have we commonly of what was the actual condi- tion of the place where we dwell, three centuries ago! For the most part the farmers have not been able to get into the woods for the last fortnight or more, on account of the snow, and some who had not got up their wood before are now put to their trumps, for though it may not be more than eighteen inches deep on a level in sprout-lands, the crust cuts the legs of the cattle, and the occasional drifts are impassable. Sometimes, with two yoke of oxen and a horse attached to the sled, the farmer attempts to break his way into his lot, one driving while another walks before with a shovel, treading and making a path for the horse, but they must take off the cattle at last and turn the sled with their hands. , Miss Minott has been obliged to have some of her locusts about the house cut down. She remembers when the whole top of the elm north of the road close to Dr. Heywood’s broke off, — when she was a little girl. It must have been there before 1800.

8 a. M. — It has just begun to snow, — those little round dry pellets like shot. George Minott says that he was standing with Bow- ers (?) and Joe Barrett near Dr. Heywood’s barn in the September gale, and saw an elm, twice as big as that which broke off before his house, break off ten feet from the ground, — splinter all up,—and the barn bent and gave so that he thought it was time to be moving. He saw stones “as big as that [air-tight] stove, blown right out of the wall.”’ So, by bending to the blast, he made his way home. All the small build- ings on the Walden road across the brook were blown back toward the brook. Minott lost the roof of his shed. The wind was southerly. As I walked above the old stone bridge on the 27th, I saw where the river had recently been open under the wooded bank on the west side; and recent sawdust and shavings from the pail-factory, and also the ends of saplings and limbs of trees which had been bent down by the ice, were frozen in. In some places some water stood above the ice, and as I stood there, I saw and heard it gurgle up through a crevice and spread over the ice. This was the influence of Loring’s Brook, far above. Stopped snowing before noon, not having amounted to anything. P. M. — Measured to see what difference there was in the depth of the snow in different adjacent fields as nearly as possible alike and similarly situated. Com- menced fifteen or twenty rods east of the railroad and measured across Hubbard’s (?), Stow’s, and Collier’s fields toward a point on the south side of the last, twenty- five rods east of Trillium Woods. These three fields were nearly level, somewhat meadowy, especially the second, and at least twenty-five rods from the nearest disturbing influence, such as the railroad embankment or a wood. North AB BC [CD] Average of ‘ 22 20 Q1 all three, A Wall and riders “ra 97 12 14-2 14 12 13 ’ 13 9 8 The walls, no doubt, gave the first and third fields somewhat more snow. Yet I am inclined to think that in this trial the snow is shallower very nearly as the fields are more moist. It is three inches shallower here than nearer the railroad, where I measured yesterday, showing the effect of that bank very clearly, six to fifteen rods off, but the average is the same obtained yesterday for open fields east and west of railroad, and proves the truth of that measuring. The snow in the first field measured two inches more than that in the second! The andromeda swamp gave 264+? (on the 12th it was 234°). It has probably been more than 24 feet, say on the 16th. The Andromeda calyculata is now quite covered, and I walk on the crust over an almost uninterrupted plain there; only a few blueberries and Andromeda paniculata rise above it. Near the last, I break through. It is so light beneath that the crust breaks there in great cakes under my feet, and imme- diately falls about a foot, making a great hole, so that once pushing my way through — for regularly stepping is out of the question in the weak places — makes a pretty good path. In Wheeler’s squirrel wood, which on the 12th gave 10* inches of snow now gives 15,? which is what I should have judged from the changes in Trillium Wood. They are affected alike. The sprout-land just south of this wood gives as average of fourteen measurements 21,4;,° which I sus- pect is too much, it is so sheltered a place. By the railroad against Walden I heard the lisping of a chickadee, and saw it on a sumach. It repeatedly hopped to a bunch of berries, took one, and, hopping ¢ to a more horizontal twig, placed it under one foot and hammered at it with its bill. The snow was strewn with 149=12. 249-17. 3 +9—-28.4,, the berries under its foot, but I could see no shells of the fruit. Perhaps it clears off the crimson only. Some of the bunches are very large and quite upright there still. Again, I suspect that on meadows the snow is not so deep and has a firmer crust. In an ordinary storm the depth of the snow will be affected by a wood twenty or more rods distant, or as far as the wood is a fence. The snow is so light in the swamps under the crust, amid the andromeda, that a cat could almost run there. There are but few tracks of mice, now the snow is so deep. They run underneath. The drift about Lynch’s house is like this: — What a difference between life in the city and in the country at present, — between walking in Washington Street, threading your way between countless sledges and travellers, over the discolored snow, and crossing Walden Pond, a spotless field of snow surrounded by woods, whose intensely blue shadows and your own are the only objects. What a solemn silence reigns here!

P. M. — Up North Branch. There are a few inches of light snow on top of the little, hard and crusted, that I walked on here last, above the snow ice. The old tracks are blotted out, and new and fresher ones are to be discerned. It is a tabula rasa. ‘These fresh falls of snow are like turning over a new leaf of Nature’s Album. At first you detect no track of beast or bird, and Nature looks more than commonly silent and blank. You doubt if anything has been abroad, though the snow fell three days ago, but ere long the track of a squirrel is seen making to or from the base of a tree, or the hole where he dug for acorns, and the shells he dropped on the snow around that stump. The wind of yesterday has shaken down countless oak leaves, which have been driven hurry-scurry over this smooth and delicate and unspotted surface, and now there is hardly a square foot which does not show some faint trace of them. ‘They still spot the snow thickly in many places, though few can be traced to their lairs. More hemlock cones also have fallen and rolled down the bank. The fall of these withered leaves after each rude blast, so clean and dry that they do not soil the snow, is a phenomenon quite in harmony with the winter. Perhaps the tracks of the mice are the most amusing of any, they take such various forms and, though small, are so distinct. Here is where one has come down the bank and hopped meanderingly across the river. o# 2s <3 6 -< =F Soe et 3: Ps 2 Or-@ —<@a —< S —S =An inch and a quar- ter wide by five, six, or seven apart from centre to centre. But what track is this, just under the bank? hm | a 4 = 2 - > wtf It must be a bird, which at last struck the snow with its wings and took to flight. There were but four hops in all, and then it ended as above, though there was nothing near enough for it to hop upon from the snow. The form of the foot was somewhat like that of a squirrel, though only the outline was distinguished. The foot was about two inches long, and it was about two inches from outside of one foot to outside of the other. Six- teen inches from hop to hop, the rest in proportion. Looking narrowly, I saw where one wing struck the bank ten feet ahead, thus: —— as it passed. A quar- ter of a mile down-stream ~~ it occurred again, thus: and near by still less of a track, — sny but marks as if it had pecked in — ; | the snow. Could it be the track ‘tay of a crow with its toes unusually close together ? Or was it an owl ?? Some creature has been eating elm blossom-buds and dropping them over the snow. The tracks of the mice suggest extensive hopping in the night and going a-gadding. They commence and terminate in the most insignificant little holes by the side of a twig or tuft, and occasionally they give us the type of their tails very distinctly, even sidewise to the course on a bank-side, thus: — Saw also the tracks, probably of a muskrat, for a few feet leading from hole to hole just under the bank.

Our kitten Min, two-thirds grown, was playing with Sophia’s broom this morning, as she was sweeping the parlor, when she suddenly went into a fit, dashed round the room, and, the door being opened, rushed up two flights of stairs and leaped from the attic window to the ice and snow by the side of the door- step, —a descent of a little more than twenty feet, —- passed round the house and was lost. But she made her appearance again about noon, at the window, quite well and sound in every joint, even playful and frisky. Pp. M. — Up river. What gives to the excrements of the fox that @iay- color often, even at this season?’ Left on an emi- nence. I scented a fox’s trail this afternoon (and have done so several times before), where he crossed the river, just three rods distant. Looked sharp, and discovered where it had stopped by a prominence. Yet he could not have passed since last night, or twelve hours before, it being near the village. How widely they range these nights! I hear that Daniel Foster of Princeton had eleven turkeys taken from under his barn in one night last fall, probably by a fox. Two were found a week after, buried under some brush in a neighboring wood. The snow is somewhat banked toward the sides of the river, but shows darker-yellowish or icy in the mid- dle. lichens, blown from the black willows, lie here and there on the snow. Nut Meadow Brook open for some distance in the meadow. I was affected by the sight of some green polygonum leaves there. Some kind of minnow darted off. I see where a crow has walked along its side. In one place it hopped, and its ° feet were side by side, as in the track of yesterday, though a little more spread, the toes. I have but little doubt that yesterday’s track was a crows. ‘Ihe two inner toes are near together; the middle, more or less curved often. I see a gray rabbit amid the young oaks in Hubbard’s riverside grove, curled and shrunk up, squatting on the snow. I advance and begin to sketch it, when it plunges into a little hole in the snow by its side, the entrance to its burrow, three inches wide by a little more in length. ‘The track of its foot is about one inch wide. I see a pitch pine seed, blown thirty rods from J. Hosmer’s little grove. The Sheldon house in Deerfield, pulled down about eight years since, represented in Gleason’s Pictorial for 1851 and in Barber, is in the style of the Hunt house, except that there is but one window on each side of the door. It and the meeting-house alone of those within the fort survived the assault of 1704, and the door through which a hole was cut and a woman shot is still preserved. This has been a memorable January for snow and cold. It has been excellent sleighing ever since the 2 26th of December, — not less than a foot at any time since January 6th on a level in open fields, in swamps much more. Cars have been detained; the wood-lots for the most part inaccessible. The river has been closed up from end to end, with the exception of one or two insignificant openings on a few days. No bare ice. ‘The crows have been remarkably bold, coming to eat the scraps cast out behind the houses. They alight in our yard. I think I have not noticed a tree sparrow during the month. Blue jays and chickadees also common in the village, more than usual. We have completely forgotten the summer. There has been no January thaw, though one prophesied it a fortnight ago because he saw snow-fleas. The ponds are yielding a good crop of ice. The eaves have scarcely run at all. It has been what is called “an old-fashioned winter.”

Snowed again last night, perhaps an inch, erasing the old tracks and giving us a blank page again, restoring the purity of nature. It may be even a trifle deeper now than hitherto.

Analyzed the crow blackbird’s nest from which I took an egg last summer, eight or ten feet up a white maple by river, opposite Island. Large, of an irregular form, appearing as if wedged in between a twig and two large contiguous trunks. From outside to outside it measures from six to eight inches; inside, four; depth, two; height, six. The foundation is a loose mass of coarse strips of grape-vine bark chiefly, some eighteen inches long by five eighths of an inch wide; also slender grass and weed stems, mikania stems, a few cellular river weeds, as rushes, sparganium, pipe-grass, and some soft, coarse, fibrous roots. The same coarse grape-vine bark and grass and weed stems, together with some harder, wiry stems, form the sides and rim, the bark being passed around the twig. The nest is lined with the finer grass and weed stems, ete. The solid part of the nest is of half-decayed vegetable matter and mud, full of fine fibrous roots and wound internally with grass stems, etc., and some grape bark, being an inch and a half thick at bottom. Pulled apart and lying loose, it makes a great mass of material. This, like similar nests, is now a great haunt for spiders. P. M. — Up North Branch. A strong northwest wind (and thermometer 11°), driving the surface snow like steam. About five inches of soft snow now on ice. See many seeds of the hem- lock on the snow still, and cones which have freshly rolled down the bank. Tracked some mice to a black willow by riverside, just above spring, against the open swamp; and about three feet high, in apparently an old woodpecker’s hole, was probably the mouse-nest, a double handful, consisting, four ninths, of fine shreds of inner bark, perhaps willow or maple; three ninths, the greenish moss, apparently, of button-bush; two ninths, the gray-slate fur, apparently, of rabbits or mice. Half a dozen hog’s bristles might have been brought by some bird to its nest there. These made a very warm and soft nest. Got some kind of vireo’s nest from a maple far up the stream, a dozen feet high, pensile; within, almost wholly rather coarse grape-vine shreds; without, the same and bark, covered with the delicate white spider- nests (?), birch-bark shreds, and brown cocoon silk. Returning, saw near the Island a shrike glide by, cold and blustering as it was, with a remarkably even and steady sail or gliding motion like a hawk, eight or ten feet above the ground, and alight in a tree, from which at the same instant a small bird, perhaps a creeper or nuthatch, flitted timidly away. The shrike was apparently in pursuit. We go wading through snows now up the bleak river, in the face of the cutting northwest wind and driving snow-steam, turning now this ear, then that, to the wind, and our gloved hands in our bosoms or pockets. Our tracks are obliterated before we come back. How different this from sailing or paddling up the stream here in July, or poling amid the rocks! Yet still, in one square rod, where they have got out ice and a thin transparent ice has formed, I can see the pebbly bot- tom the same as in summer. It is a cold and windy Sunday. The wind whistles round the northwest corner of the house and penetrates every crevice and consumes the wood in the stoves, — soon blows it all away. An armful goes but little way. Such a day makes a great hole in the wood-pile. [It] whisks round the corner of the house, in at a crevice, and flirts off with all the heat before we have begun to feel it. Some of the low drifts but a few inches deep, made by the surface snow blowing, over the river especially, are of a fine, pure snow, so densely packed that our feet make hardly any impression on them. River still tight at Merrick’s. There comes a deep snow in midwinter, covering up the ordinary food of many birds and quadrupeds, but anon a high wind scatters the seeds of pines and hemlocks and birch and alder, etc., far and wide over the surface of the snow for them. You may now observe plainly the habit of the rabbits to run in paths about the swamps. Mr. Emerson, who returned last week from lecturing on the Mississippi, having been gone but a month, tells me that he saw boys skating on the Mississippi and on Lake Erie and on the Hudson, and has no doubt they are skating on Lake Superior; and probably at Boston he saw them skating on the Atlantic. The inside of the gray squirrel, or leaf, nests is of leaves chewed or broken up finely. I see where one, by the snow lodging on it, has helped weigh down a birch. In Barber’s “Historical Collections,” page 476, there is a letter by Cotton Mather, dated “ Boston, 10th Dec. 1717,” describing the great snow of the previous February, from which I quote: — “On the twentieth of the last February there came on a snow, which being added unto what had covered the ground a few days before, made a thicker mantle for our mother than what was usual: And the storm with it was, for the following day, so violent as to make all communication between the neighbors everywhere to cease. People, for some hours, could not pass from one side of a street unto another. .. . On the 24th day of the month, comes Pelion upon Ossa: Another snow came on which almost buried the memory of the former, with a storm so famous that Heaven laid an interdict on the religious assemblies throughout the country, on this Lord’s day, the like whereunto had never been seen before. ‘The Indians near an hundred years old affirm that their fathers never told them of anything that equalled it. Vast numbers of cattle were destroyed in this calamity. Whereof some there were, of the stranger [stronger ? mine] sort, were found stand- ing dead on their legs, as if they had been alive many weeks after, when the snow melted away. And others had their eyes glazed over with ice at such a rate, that being not far from the sea, their mistake of their way drowned them there. One gentleman, on whose farms were now lost above 1100 sheep, which with other cattle, were interred (shall I say) or innived, in: the snow, writes me word that there were two sheep very singularly circumstanced. For no less than eight and twenty days after the storm, the people pulling out the ruins of above an hundred sheep out of a snow bank which lay sixteen foot high, drifted over them, there was two found alive, which had been there all this time, and kept themselves alive by eating the wool of their dead - companions. When they were taken out they shed their own fleeces, but soon got into good case again.” “A man had a couple of young hogs, which he gave over for dead, but on the 27th day after their burial, they made their way out of a snow-bank, at the bottom of which they had found a little tansy to feed upon.” “Hens were found alive after seven days; Turkeys were found alive after five and twenty days, buried in the snow, and at a distance from the ground, and altogether destitute of anything to feed them.” “The wild creatures of the woods, the out-goings of the evening, made their descent as well as they could in this time of scarcity for them towards the sea-side. A vast multitude of deer, for the same cause, taking the same course, and the deep snow spoiling them of their only defence, which is to run, they became such a prey to these devourers that it is thought not one in twenty escaped.”’ “Tt is incredible how much damage is done to the orchards, for the snow freezing to a crust, as high as the bows of the trees, anon split them to pieces. The cattle, also, walking on the crusted snow a dozen foot from the ground, so fed upon the trees as very much to damnify them.” “Cottages were totally covered with the snow, and not the very tops of their chimneys to be seen.”” These “odd accidents,” he says, “would afford a story. But there not being any relation to Philosophy in them, I forbear them.” He little thought that his simple testimony to such facts as the above would be worth all the philosophy he might dream of.