14 April 1856 – 20 April 1856

Monday. A raw, overcast morning. 8 a. M.— Up Assabet. See one striped squirrel chasing another round and round the Island, with a faint squeak from time to time and a rustling of the dry leaves. They run quite near to the water. Hear the flicker’s cackle on the old aspen, and his tapping sounds afar over the water. ‘Their tapping resounds thus far, with this peculiar ring and distinct- ness, because it is a hollow tree they select to play on, as a drum or tambour. It is a hollow sound which rings distinct to a great distance, especially over water. I still find small turtle’s eggs on the surface entire, while looking for arrowheads by the Island. See from my window a fish hawk flying high west of the house, cutting off the bend between Willow Bay and the meadow, in front of the house, between one vernal lake and another. He suddenly wheels and, straightening out his long narrow wings, makes one circle high above the last meadow, as if he had caught a glimpse of a fish beneath, and then continues his course down the river. P. M. — Sail to Hill by Bedford line.

6.30 a. mM. — To Hill. It is warmer and quite still; somewhat cloudy in the east. The water quite smooth, — April smooth waters. I hear very distinctly Barrett’s sawmill at my landing. The purple finch is singing on the elms about the house, together with the robins, whose strain its resembles, end- ing with a loud, shrill, ringing chilé chilt chilt chilt. I push across the meadow and ascend the hill. The white- bellied swallows are circling about and twittering above the apple trees and walnuts on the hillside. Not til I gain the hilltop do I hear the note of the Fringilla juncorum (buckleberry-bird) from the plains beyond. Returned again toward my boat, I hear the rich watery note of the martin, making haste over the edge of-the flood. A warm morning, over smooth water, before the wind rises, is the time to hear it. Near the water are many recent skunk probings, as if a drove of pigs had passed along last night, death to many beetles and grubs. From amid the willows and alders along the wall there, I hear a bird sing, a-chitter chitter chitter chitter chitter chatter, che che che che, with increasing intensity and rapidity, and the yellow redpoll hops in sight. A grackle goes over (with two females), and I hear from him a sound like a watchman’s rattle, — but little more musical. What I think the Alnus serrulata (?) will shed pollen to-day on the edge of Catbird Meadow. Is that one at 1856) THE FIRST TOAD OF THE YEAR 285 Brister’s Spring and at Depot Brook crossing? Also grows on the west edge of Trillium Wood. Coming up from the riverside, I hear the harsh rasping char-r char-r of the crow blackbird, hke a very coarsely vibrating metal, and, looking up, see three flying over. Some of the early willow catkins have opened in my window. As they open, they curve backwards, exposing their breasts to the light. By 9 a. M. the wind has risen, the water is ruffled, the sun seems more permanently obscured, and the character of the day is changed. It continues more or less cloudy and rain-threatening all day. First salmon and shad at Haverhill to-day. Ed. Emerson saw a toad in his garden to-day, and, coming home from his house at 11 p. M., a still and rather warm night, I am surprised to hear the first loud, clear, prolonged ring of a toad, when I am near Charles Davis’s house. The same, or another, rings again on a different key. I hear not more than two, perhaps only one. I had only thought of them as commencing in the warmest part of some day, but it would seem that [they] may first be heard in the night. Or perhaps this one may have piped in the day and his voice been drowned by day’s sounds. Yet I think that this night is warmer than the day has been. While all the hillside else, per- haps, is asleep, this toad has just awaked to a new year. It was a rather warm, moist night, the moon partially obscured by misty clouds, all the village asleep, only a few lights to be seen in some windows, when, as I passed along under the warm hillside, I heard a clear, shrill, prolonged ringing note from a toad, the first toad of the year, sufficiently countenanced by its Maker in the night and the solitude, and then again I hear it (before I am out of hearing, 2. e. it is deadened by intervening buildings), on a little higher key. At the same time, I hear a part of the hovering note of my first snipe, circling over some distant meadow, a mere waif, and all is still again. A-lulling the wa- tery meadows, fanning the air lke a spirit over some far meadow’s bay. And now for vernal sounds there is only the low sound of my feet on the Mill-Dam sidewalks.

I have not seen a tree sparrow, I think, since December. 5.30 a. M. — To Pinxter Swamp over Hill. A little sunshine at the rising. 1, standing by the river, see it first reflected from E. Wood’s windows before I can see the sun. Standing there, I hear that same stertorous note of a frog or two as was heard the 13th, apparently from quite across all this flood, and which I have so often observed before. What kind is it? It seems to come from the edge of the meadow, which has been recently left bare. Apparently this low sound can be heard very far over the water. The robins sing with a will now. What a burst of melody! It gurgles out of all conduits now; they are choked with it. There is such a tide and rush of song as when a river is straight- ened between two rocky walls. It seems as if the morn- ing’s throat were not large enough to emit all this sound. The robin sings most before 6 o’clock now. I note where some suddenly cease their song, making a quite remarkable vacuum. As I walk along the bank of the Assabet, I hear the yeep yeep yeep yecep yeeep yeep, or perhaps peop, of a fish hawk, repeated quite fast, but not so shrill and whistling as I think I have heard it, and directly I see his long curved wings undulating over Pinxter Swamp, now flooded. From the hilltop I see bare ground appearing in ridges here and there in the Assabet meadow. A grass-bird, with a sort of spot on its breast, sings, here here hé, che che che, chit chit chit, t’ chip chip chip chip chip. ‘The latter part especially fast. The F. juncorum says, phe phe phe phe ph-ph-p-p-p-p-p-p-p-p-P; faster and faster; flies as I advance, but is heard dis- tinctly still further off. A moist, misty, rain-threatening April day. About noon it does mizzle a little. The robin sings throughout it. It is rather raw, tooth-achy weather. P. M. — Round Walden. The Stellaria media is abundantly out. I did not look for it early, it was so snowy. It evidently blossomed as soon after the 2d of April—when I may say the [snow] began to go off in earnest —as possible. The shepherd’s-purse, too, is well out, three or four inches high, and may have been some days at least. Cheney’s elm shows stamens on the warm side pretty numerously. Probably that at Lee’s Chiff a little earlier.

Was awakened in the night by a thunder and lightning shower and hail-storm — the old familiar burst and rumble, as if it had been rumbling somewhere else ever since I heard it last, and had not lost the knack. I heard a thousand hailstones strike and bounce on the roof at once. What a clattering! Yet it did not last long, and the hail took a breathing-space once or twice. I did not know at first but we should lose our windows, the blinds being away at the painters’. These sounds lull me into a deeper slumber than before. Hail-storms are milked out of the first summer-like warmth; they belong to lingering cool veins in the air, which thus burst and come down. The thunder, too, sounds like the final rending and breaking up of winter; thus pre- cipitous is its edge. The first one is a skirmish between the cool rear-guard of winter and the warm and earnest vanguard of summer. Advancing summer strikes on the edge of winter, which does not drift fast enough away, and fire is elicited. Electricity is engendered by the early heats. I love to hear the voice of the first thunder as of the toad (though it returns irregularly like pigeons), far away in his moist meadow where he is warmed to life, and see the flash of his eye. Hear a chip-bird high on an elm this morning, and probably that was one I heard on the 15th. You would not be apt to distinguish the note of the earliest. I still see quite a snow-bank from my window on the hillside at the northeast end of Clamshell, say a northeast exposure. This is on the surface, but the snow lies there in still greater quantity, in two hollows where sand has been dug for the meadow, on the hillside, though sloping to the southeast, where it is quite below the general sur- face. We have had scarcely any rain this spring, and the snow has been melting very gradually in the sun. P. M. — Start for Conantum in boat, wind southwest. I can hide my oars and sail up there and come back another day. A moist muggy afternoon, rain-threaten- ing, true April weather, after a particularly warm and pleasant forenoon. ‘The meadows are still well covered, and I cut off the bends. The red-wing goes over with his che-e-e che-e-e, chatter, chatter, chatter. On Hub- bard’s great meadow I hear the sound of some fowl], perhaps a loon, rushing through the water, over by Dennis’s Hill, and push for it. Meanwhile it grows more and more rain-threatening,—all the air moist and muggy, a great ill-defined cloud darkening all the west, — but I push on till I feel the first drops, knowing that the wind will take me back again. Now I hear ducks rise, and know by their hoarse quacking that they are black ones, and see two going off as if with one mind, along the edge of the wood. Now comes the rain with a rush. In haste I put my boat about, raise my sail, and, cowering under my umbrella in the stern, with the steering oar in my hand, begin to move homeward. The rain soon fulls up my sail, and it catches all the little wind. From under the umbrella I look out on the scene. The big drops pepper the watery plain, the aequor, on every side. It is not a hard, dry pattering, as on a roof, but a softer, liquid pattering, which makes the impression of a double wateriness. You do not observe the drops descending but where they strike, for there they batter and indent the surface deeply like buckshot, and they, or else other drops which they create, rebound or hop up an inch or two, and these last you see, and also when they fall back broken into small shot and roll on the sur- face. Around each shot-mark are countless circling dimples, running into and breaking one another, and very often a bubble is formed by the force of the shot, which floats entire for half a minute. These big shot are battering the surface every three inches or thicker. I make haste to take down my sail at the bridges, but at the stone arches forgot my umbrella, which was un- avoidably crushed in part. Even in the midst of this rain I am struck by the variegated surface of the water, different portions reflecting the light differently, giving what is called a watered appearance. Broad streams of light water stretch away between streams of dark, as if they were different kinds of water unwilling to min- gle, though all are equally dimpled by the rain, and you detect no difference in their condition. As if Nature loved variety for its own sake. It is a true April shower, or rain, —I think the first. It rains so easy, —has a genius for it and infinite capacity for [it]. Many showers will not exhaust the moisture of April. When I get home and look out the window, I am surprised to see how it has greened the grass. It springs up erect like a green flame in the ditches on each side the road, where we had not noticed it before. Grass is born. There is a quite distinct tinge of green on the hillside seen from my window now. I did not look for the very first. I learn from the papers that an unusual number of fruit trees have been girdled by the mice under the deep snow of the past winter. Immense damage has been done to nurseries and orchards. I saw where a prostrate maple in the Great Meadows had been gnawed nearly bare. Our river was generally breaking up on the 3d of April, though some parts were frozen till the 12th. I see by the papers that the ice had left Lake St. Peter (St. Lawrence) the 12th. Another paper (of the 11th) has heard that the St. Lawrence was open from Quebec to Three Rivers, or before the Hudson. The ice on Lake Champlain was broken up on the 12th. Fair Haven Pond was quite open the 13th. The ice moved down the Penobscot, and the river opened the 15th. Lake Ontario was free of ice the 16th. The Kennebec is expected to open this week. (To-day is Thursday.) There is still ice in Walden.’

P. M. — To Lee’s Cliff by boat. A strong northwest wind. The waves were highest off Hubbard’s second grove, where they had acquired their greatest impetus and felt the full force of the wind. Their accumulated volume was less beyond on account of the turn in the river. The greatest undulation is at the leeward end of the longest broad reach in the direction of the wind. I was steering there diagonally across the black billows, my boat inclined so as almost to drink water. Scare up the same two black ducks (and twice again). The under sides of their wings show quite light and silvery as they rise in the light. Red maple stamens in some places project consider- ably, and it will probably blossom to-morrow if it is pleasant.” The farmer neglects his team to watch my sail. The slippery elm, with its round rusty woolly buds and pale-brown ashy twigs. That pretty, now brown- stemmed moss with green oval fruit. Common saxifrage and also early sedge I am surprised to find abundantly out — both—considering their backwardness April 2d. Both must have been out some, 7. e. four or five, days half-way down the face of the ledge. Crowfoot, apparently two or three days. Antennaria at end of Cliff as you descend, say yesterday. Turritis stricta. Columbine, and already eaten by bees. Some with a hole in the side. It is worth the while to go there to smell the catnep. I always bring some home for the cat at this season. See those great chocolate puffballs burst and diffus- ing their dust on the side of the hill. At the sandy place where I moored my boat, just this side this Cliff, the Selaginella apus is abundant, and on Conantum shore near elms thirty or forty rods below. Left boat opposite Bittern Cliff. Bear-berry grows by path from river, seven rods beyond last pine, south side, now strongly flower- budded. Observed a large mass of white lily root with the mud washed } up, the woolly steel-blue root, with / singular knobs for offshoots and long, large, succulent white roots from all ok sides, the leaf-buds yellow and lightly rolled up on each side. Small sallow next above fristis, three feet high, in path to Walden.

Was awakened in the night to a strain of music dying away, — passing travellers singing. My being was so expanded and infinitely and divinely related for a brief season that I saw how unexhausted, how almost wholly unimproved, was man’s capacity for a divine life. When I remembered what a narrow and finite life I should anon awake to! Though, with respect to our channels, our valleys, and the country we are fitted to drain, we are Amazons, we ordinarily live with dry channels. - The arbor-vitee by riverside behind Monroe’s appears to be just now fairly in blossom. I notice acorns sprouted. My birch wine now, after a week or more, has become pretty clear and colorless again, the brown part having settled and now coating the glass. Helped Mr. Emerson set out in Sleepy Hollow two over-cup oaks, one beech, and two arbor-vites. As dryness will open the pitch pine cone, so moisture closes it up again. I put one which had been open all winter into water, and in an hour or two it shut up nearly as tight as at first.

Rain, rain, rain, — a northeast storm. I see that it is raising the river somewhat again. Some little islets which had appeared on the meadow north- west of Dodd’s are now fast being submerged again. Apri 22. It has rained two days and nights, and now the sun breaks out, but the wind is still easterly, and the storm probably is not over. In a few minutes the air is full of mizzling rain again. 8 a. M. — Go to my boat opposite Bittern Cliff. Monroe’s larches by river will apparently shed pollen soon. The staminate flowers look forward, but the pistil- late scarcely show any red. There is snow still (of the winter) in the hollows where sand has been dug on the hillside east of Clamshell. Going through Hubbard’s root-fence field, see a pigeon woodpecker on a fence- post. He shows his lighter back between his wings cassock-lke and like the smaller woodpeckers. Joins his mate on a tree and utters the wooing note o-week o-week, ete.