12 May 1856 – 18 May 1856

A glorious day. P. M. — Walked round by Dennis’s and Hollowell place with Alcott. It is suddenly very warm. A washing day, with a slight haze accompanying the strong, warm wind. I see, in the road beyond Luther Hosmer’s, in different places, two bank swallows which were undoubtedly killed by the four days’ northeast rain we have just had. Puffer says he has seen two or three dead sparrows also. The sudden heat compels us to sit in the shade at the bars above Puffer’s, whence we hear the first bobolink. How suddenly the birds arrive after the storm, — even yesterday before it was fairly over, —as if they had foreseen its end! How much life the note of the bobo- link imparts to the meadow! I see a cultivated cherry in bloom, and Prichard’s Canada plum will probably bloom to-morrow. The river is higher than yesterday, about the same as when highest before this spring, and goes no higher. Thus attains its height the day after the rain.

Hear a warbling vireo. Dandelions by road- side; probably several days in some places. P. M. — Up river to Kalmia glauca Swamp. In the swallows’ holes behind Dennis’s, I find two more dead bank swallows, and one on the sand beneath, and the feathers of two more which some creature has eaten. ‘This makes at least seven dead bank swallows in consequence of the long, cold northeast rain. A male harrier, skimming low, had nearly reached this sand- pit before he saw me and wheeled. Could it have been he that devoured the swallows? These swallows were 10#+ alar extent, 4¢ inches long; a wing 4¢+ by 1$+. Above they were a light brown on their backs, wings blackish, beneath white, with a dark-brown band over the breast and again white throat and side of neck; bill small and black; reddish-brown legs, with long, sharp, slender claws. It chanced that each one of two I tried weighed between five and six sixteenths of an ounce, or between five and six drams avoirdupois. This seems to be the aver- age weight, or say six drams because they have pined a little. A man who weighs one hundred and fifty pounds weighs sixty-four hundred times as much as one. The wing of one contains about seven square inches, the body about five, or whole bird nineteen. If a man were to be provided with wings, etc., in proportion to his weight, they would measure about 844 square feet, and one wing would cover 311 feet, or be about 33 feet long by 14 wide. This is to say nothing of his muscles. The Kalmia glauca will not open for some days at least. Mrs. Ripley told me last night that Hill said the toads rang till they died if their call was not answered or at- tended to. At the swamp, hear the yorrick of Wilson’s thrush; the tweezer-bird or Sylvia Americana. Also the oven- bird sings. Caterpillars’ nests on an apple two inches [in] diameter. Downy amelanchier just out at Lupine Bank; elsewhere, maybe, a day or two. Where my sap has dried on the white birch bark it has now turned a bright light red. What a variety of colors it assumes! Potter has a remarkable field of mulleins, sown as thickly as if done with a machine (under Bear Garden Hill). YL remarked them last year. William Wheeler thinks the seed lies in the ground an indefinite period ready to come up. I thought that it might have been introduced with his grain when it was sown lately. Wheeler says that many a pasture, if you plow it up after it has been lying still ten years, will produce an abundant crop of wormwood, and its seeds must have lain in the ground. Why do not the chemists in their analyses of soils oftener mention the seeds of plants? Would not a careful analysis of old pasture sod settle the question ? I suspect that I can throw a little light on the fact that when a dense pine wood is cut down oaks, etc., may take its place. There were only pines, no other tree. They are cut off, and, after two years have elapsed, you see oaks, or perhaps a few other hard woods, springing up with scarcely a pine amid them, and you wonder how the acorns could have lain in the ground so long without decaying. There is a good example at Loring’s lot. But if you look through a thick pine wood, even the exclu- sively pitch pine ones, you will detect many little oaks, birches, etc., sprung probably from seeds carried into the thicket by squirrels, etc., and blown thither, but which are overshadowed and choked by the pines. This planting under the shelter of the pines may be carried on annually, and the plants annually die, but when the pines are cleared off, the oaks, etc., having got just the start they want, and now secured favorable conditions, immediately spring up to trees. Scarcely enough allowance has been made for. the agency of squirrels and birds in dispersing seeds.’ At the Kalmia Swamp, the parti-colored warbler, and was that switter switter switter switter swit! also by it? ?

Air full of golden robins. Their loud clear note betrays them as soon as they arrive. Yesterday and to-day I see half a dozen tortoises on a rail, — their first appearance in numbers. Catbird amid shrub oaks. Female red-wing. Flood tells me he saw cherry-birds on the 12th of April in Monroe’s garden.

A fog this morning. Our peach out. P. M. — To beeches. As I sat by the Riordan crossing, thought it was the tanager I heard? I think now, only because it is so early, that it may have been the yellow-throat vireo.' See also, for a moment, in dry woods, a warbler with blue-slate head and apparently all yellow beneath for a minute, nothing else conspicuous; note slightly like tseep, tseep, tseep, tseep, tsit sitter ra-re-ra, the last fast, on maples, etc. Maybe I heard the same yesterday.’ Northern wild red cherry out, cut by railroad; maybe day or two elsewhere. At Heywood Spring I see a clumsy woodchuck, now, at 4 p. M., out feeding, gray or grizzly above, brown beneath. It runs, or waddles, to its hole two or three rods off, and as usual pauses, listening, at its entrance till I start again, then dives in. Viola cucullata abundant now. Just on the brink of this Heywood Spring, I find what may be the Stellaria borealis (if it is not the longifolia, but it is not in cymes like that; only a single flower to each axil, now at ’ No; it must have been a tanager, which I hear frequently the 19th. least), though Bigelow makes its calyx-divisions nerve- less. These are three-nerved, and one flower, at least, has five (!) styles. It has been out perhaps several days. Some of the flowers are without petals, others with those very deeply cleft or divided white petals. The others may have pollen.’ Strawberry well out; how long? On Amelanchier Botryapvum, many narrow dark bronze-colored beetles (say three fourths inch long) coupled and at same time eating the flowers, calyx and all. Night-warbler. Hickory leafets not so large as beech. Beech leaves two inches long. Say it has leafed a day or two. White birch pollen. Beech not out yet. Checker-berries very abundant on south side of Pine Hull, by pitch pine wood. Now is probably best time to gather them. Cleared out the Beech Spring, which is a copious one. So I have done some service, though it was a wet and muddy job. Cleared out a spring while you have been to the wars. Now that warmer days make the traveller thirsty, this becomes an important work. This spring was filled and covered with a great mass of beech leaves, amid and beneath which, damp and wet as they were, were myriads of snow-fleas and also their white exuviee; the latter often whitening a whole leaf, mixed with live ones. It looks as if for coolness and moisture —which the snow had afforded —they were com- pelled to take refuge here. Cerasus pumila, south side Pine Hill, not yet by Cut woods. Perceive some of that delicious meadow fra- 1 'Two inches high; leaves rather broad. Vide the 2Ist. grance coming over the railroad causeway. Measured a chestnut stump cut last winter on Pine Hill; twenty- five inches in diameter and fifty-six rings.

Rainy day.

Rain still or lowering. P. M.— To my boat at Cardinal Shore, thence to Lee’s Cliff. Kingbird. The beech twigs I gathered the 15th show anthers to-day in chamber; so it probably blossoms to-day or to-morrow in woods. Vaccinium vacillans apparently a day or two at least. Veronica serpyllifolia abundant now on banks, erected. Maryland yellow- throat heard afar in meadows, as I go along the road to- wards Hubbard’s Bridge. It is warm, but still overcast and sprinkling occasionally, near the end of the rain, and the birds are very lively. A goldfinch twitters over. In the dry lupine bank pasture, about fifteen rods from the river, apparently travelling up the hill, I see a box tortoise, the first I have found in Con- cord.’ Beside being longer (its upper shell five and one half by four and one fourth inches), it is much flatter and more oblong, less oval, than the one I found on Cape Cod last July. Especially it is conspic- uously broader and flatter .-.1—.,, forward. The two rear marginal plates ; ly kawe a triangular sinus between them. “— while the Cape Cod ones come to a point. ay, The fifth and sixth marginal plates do — not project by their edges beyond the shell. The yellow marks are much narrower, and more interrupted and like Oriental characters, than in the Cape Cod one. The sternum also is less oval, uni- formly blackish-brown except a few slight bone- [?] or horn-colored blotches, while the Cape Cod one is light- yellow with a few brown blotches. The scales of the sternum in this are much less sharp-angled than in the Cape Cod one. The sternum more hollow or depressed. The tail about three eighths of an inch long only, beyond the anus (?). The bill is very upright, some- what like this: A beak likeany Ceesar’s. Fore legs covered hf with orange - colored scales. Hind ones mostly brown or bronze ~ with a few orange spots. Beside the usual hiss, uttered in the evening as I was carrying it, a single, as it were involuntary, squeak much like a croaking frog. Iris, bright light red, or rather vermilion, remarkable. Head, brown above with yellow spots; orange beneath and neck. The river is about a foot lower than on the 13th, notwithstanding yesterday’s and to-day’s rain. At the Kalmia Swamp, see and hear the redstart, very lively and restless, flirting and spreading its reddish tail. The sylvias — S. Americana and redstart and sum- mer yellowbird, etc. — are very lively there now after the rain, in the warm, moist air, amid the hoary burst- ing buds of maples,. oaks, etc. I stand close on the edge of the swamp, looking for the kalmia. Nothing of its flower to be seen yet. The rhodora there will open in a day or two. Meanwhile I hear a loud hum and see a splendid male hummingbird coming zigzag in long tacks, like a bee, but far swifter, along the edge of the swamp, in hot haste. He turns aside to taste the honey of the An- dromeda calyculata (already visited by bees) within a rod of me. This golden-green gem. Its burnished back looks as if covered with green scales dusted with gold. It hovers, as it were stationary in the air, with an intense humming before each little flower-bell of the humble Andromeda calyculata, and inserts its long tongue in each, turning toward me that splendid ruby on its breast, that glowing ruby. Even this is coal-black in some lights! There, along with me in the deep, wild swamp, above the andromeda, amid the spruce. Its hum was heard afar at first, like that of a large bee, bringing a larger summer. This sight and sound would make me think I was in the tropics, —in Demerara or Maracaibo.’ Nemopanthes on that very swamp-edge. Vaccinium corymbosum (?) or the high blueberry. Hear the first veery note and doubtless the Muscicapa olivacea. 'The Sylvia Americana (parti-colored warbler, etc.) is very numerous there, darting about amid the hoary buds of the maples and oaks, etc. It seems the most restless of all birds, blue more [or] less deep above, with yellow dust on the back, yellow breast, and white beneath (the male with bright-orange throat, and some with a rufous crescent on breast); wings and tail, dark, black, with two white bars or marks, dark bill and legs. At Lee’s the Turritis stricta pods three inches long, and plant two and a half feet high by measure. Get some to press. Myosotis stricta above there, maybe several days. Ranunculus bulbosus a day or two at least. Arenaria serpyllifolia. Mrs. Ripley showed me, from her son Gore in Minnesota, a few days ago, the first spring flower of the prairie there, a hairy-stemmed, slender-divisioned, and hairy-involucred, six-petalled blue flower, probably a species of hepatica. No leaves with it. Not described in Gray. Yellow columbine well out at Lee’s, one rod from rock, one rod east of ash. How plainly we are a part of nature! For we live like the animals around us. All day the cow is cropping the grass of yonder meadow, appropriating, as it were, a part of the solid earth into herself, except when she rests and chews the cud; and from time to time she wends her way to the river and fills her belly with that. Her food and drink are not scarce and precious, but the commonest elements of which nature is composed. The dry land in these latitudes, except in woods and deserts, is almost universally clothed with her food, and there are inland seas, ready mixed, of the wine that she loves. The Mississippi 1s her drink, the prairie grass her food. The shrub oak and some other oak leafets, just ex- panding, now begin to be pretty. Within the shell of my box turtle, in the cavity be- tween its thighs and its body, were small dry leaves and seeds, showing where it laid. From these I should say it had come from amidst the alders.

Ed. Emerson says he saw at Medford yes- terday many ground-birds’ nests and eggs under apple trees. R. W. E.’s black currant! (which the wild Rzbes floridum is said to be much like), maybe a day. R. W. E. says that Agassiz tells him he has had turtles six or seven years, which grew so little, com- pared with others of the same size killed at first, that he thinks they may live four or five hundred years. P. M.— To Kalmia Swamp. Go across fields from R. W. E.’s to my boat at Car- dinal Shore. In A. Wheeler’s stubble-field west of Deep Cut, a female (?) goldfinch on an oak, without any obvious black, is mewing incessantly, the note ending rather musically. When I get over the fence, a flock of twenty or more, male and female, rise from amid the stubble, and, alighting on the oaks, sing pleasantly all together, in a lively manner. Going along the Spring Path, hear an oft-repeated tchip tchar, tchip tchar, etc., or tchip tcharry (this is a common note with birds) from a large bird on a tree- top, a sort of flaxen olive. Made me think of a female rose-breasted grosbeak, though we thought the beak more slender. On the surface of the water amid the maples, on the Holden Wood shore where I landed, I noticed some of the most splendid iridescence or opalescence from some oily matter, where the water was smooth amid the maples, that I ever saw. It was where some sucker or other fish, perchance, had decayed. The colors are intense blue and crimson, with dull golden. The whole at first covering seven or eight inches, but broken by the ripples I have made into polygonal figures like the fragments of a most wonderfully painted mirror. These fragments drift and turn about, apparently, as stiffly on the sur- face as if they were as thick and strong as glass. The colors are in many places sharply defined in fine lines, making unaccountable figures, as if they were pro- duced by a sudden crystallization. How much color or expression can reside in so thin a substance! With such accompaniments does a sucker die and mix his juices with the river. This beauty like the rainbow and sunset sky marks the spot where his body has mingled with the elements. A somewhat similar beauty reap- pears painted on the clam’s shell. Even a dead sucker suggests a beauty and so a glory of its own. I leaned over the edge of my boat and admired it as much as ever I did a rainbow or sunset sky. ‘The colors were not faint, but strong and fiery, if not angrty. Found a young turtle about two inches long of a flat roundish form, with scales as rough as usual, but a dull reddish or yellowish spot in middle of each scale, and edges beneath were also a pinkish red. Can it be a young yellow-spot ? I have not noticed a tree sparrow since December! A Sylvia Americana, — parti-colored warbler, — in the Holden Wood, sings a, tshrea tshrea tshrea, tshre’ tshritty tshrit’. One low Kalmia glauca, before any rhodora there- abouts. Several kalmias, no doubt, to-morrow. The rhodora there maybe to-morrow. Elsewhere I find it (on Hubbard’s meadow) to-day. The swamp is all alive with warblers about the hoary expanding buds of oaks, maples, etc., and amid the pine and spruce. They swarm like gnats now. They fill the air with their little tshree tshree sprayey notes. I see close by, hopping close up to the main stem of young white pines, what you would call a Maryland yellow-throat, but less chubby, yellow throat, beneath, and vent, and dark under tail, black side; but hear no note. Also another clear pure white beneath, and vent, and side-head; black above, finely marked with yellow; yellow bars on wings; and golden crown; black bill and legs; with a clear, sweet warble like tche tche tche, tchut tchutter we. Can this be a chestnut-sided warbler, and I not see the chestnut ?! Hopping amid oak twigs? I think I hear a yellow-throated vireo. Hear a tree-toad. Sailed back on Hubbard’s redstart path, and there saw a mud turtle draw in his head, of which I saw the half, about eight rods off. Pushed to the spot, where the water was about a foot deep, and at length detected him spread out on the bottom, his monstrous head and tail and legs outspread, probably directly under where he had appeared. At first, I suspect, I mistook him for a rock, for he was thickly covered with a short green moss-like conferva (?),—a venerable object, a true son of the meadow, suggesting what vigor! what naturalness! Perchance to make the moss grow on your back without injuring your health! How many things can he sustain on his shell where the mosses grow? He looked like an antediluvian under that green, shaggy shell, tougher than the rock you mistake it for. No wonder the Indian reverenced him as a god. Think of the time when he was an infant. There is your na- tive American, who was before Columbus, perchance. Grown, not gray, but green with the lapse of ages. Living with the life of the meadow. I took off my coat, stripped up my shirt-sleeve, and caught him by his great rough tail. He snapped at me and my paddle, striking his snout against the side of the boat till he made it bleed. Though I held him down with an oar for a lever and my foot on it, he would suddenly lift all together, or run out his head and knock the oar and my leg aside. He held up his head to me and, with his mouth wide open, hissed in his breathing like a loco- motive for a quarter of an hour, and I could look straight down his monstrous gullet ten inches. The only way to hold him and paddle too was to turn him on his back, then, putting the end of a paddle under a seat, slantit over his sternum and press my foot on the other end. He was fourteen and one half inches long by twelve at the broadest places, and weighed twenty-five pounds and three ounces. The claws were an inch and a quarter long beyond the skin, and very stout. You had to exert yourself to turn him over on a plane surface, he held down so firmly with his claws, as if grown to it. He took my hand into his shell with his tail and took the skin off it. The sternum is broadest forward. This turtle was not roundish like the shell I have, but nearly an oblong square; nearly as long as that, but much less wide. The usual number of scallops behind. I know of a young lady who, when riding, came across one in the road, which not wishing to run over, she got out and tried to drive it out of the way with her whip, but it “screamed”’ at and terrified her. A caravan could not make him budge under those circumstances.