30 November 1857 – 6 December 1857

<A still, warm, cloudy, rain-threatening day. Surveying the J. Richardson lot. The air is full of geese. I saw five flocks within an hour, about 10 a..m., containing from thirty to fifty each, and afterward two more flocks, making in all from two hundred and fifty to three hundred at least, all flying southwest over Goose and Walden Ponds. The former was apparently well named Goose Pond. You first hear a faint honking from one or two in the northeast and think there are but few wandering there, but, looking up, see forty or fifty coming on in a more or less broken harrow, wedging their way southwest. I suspect they honk more, at any rate they are more broken and alarmed, when passing over a village, and are seen falling into their ranks again, assuming the perfect harrow form. Hearing only one or two honking, even for the seventh time, you think there are but few till you see them. According to my calculation a thou- sand or fifteen hundred may have gone over Concord to-day. When they fly low and near, they look very black against the sky.’

P. M.— Walking in Ebby Hubbard’s woods, I hear a red squirrel barking at me amid the pine and oak tops, and now I see him coursing from tree to tree. How securely he travels there, fifty feet from the ground, leaping from the slender, bending twig of one tree across an interval of three or four feet and catching at the nearest twig of the next, which so bends under him that it is at first hard to get up it. His travelling a succession of leaps in the air at that height without wings! And yet he gets along about as rapidly as on the ground. I hear the faintest possible quivet from a nuthatch, quite near me on a pine. [ thus always begin to hear this bird on the approach of winter,’ as if it did not breed here, but wintered here. I hear of two more flocks of geese going over to-day.

Measuring Little Goose Pond, I observed two painted tortoises moving about under the thin transparent ice. When I broke it with my fist over each in succession, it was stunned by the blow. I put them back through the hole; else they might have frozen outside. There was a brown leech spread broad and flat and roundish on the sternum of one, nearly an inch and a half across, apparently going to winter with it. Where are the respectabilities of sixty years ago, the village aristocracy, the Duncan Ingrahams who lived in the high house? An Englishman lived in the Vose house. How poor and short-lived a distinction to strive after! I find that, according to the deed of Duncan Ingra- ham to John Richardson in 1797, my old bean-field on Walden Pond then belonged to George Minott. (Minott thinks he bought it of an Allen.) This was Deacon George Minott, who lived in the house next below the East Quarter schoolhouse, and was a brother of my grandfather-in-law. He was directly descended from Thomas Minott, who, according to Shattuck, was secretary of the Abbot of Walden (!) in Essex, and whose son George was born at Saffron Walden (! ) and afterwards was one of the early settlers of Dor- chester. Roads were once described as leading to a meeting- house, but not so often nowadays.

Thursday. Surveying the Richardson lot, which bounds on Walden Pond, I turned up a rock near the pond to make a bound with, and found under it, attached to it, a collection of black ants (say a quarter of an inch long) an inch in diameter, collected around one monster black ant as big as four or five at least, and a small parcel of yellowish eggs (?). The large ant had no wings and was probably their queen. The ants were quite lively, though but little way under the edge of the rock. The eggs (?) adhered to the rock when turned up.

Surveying the Richardson Fair Haven lot. Rufus Morse, who comes to find his bounds on R., accounts for his deed being tattered by saying that some tame flying squirrels got loose and into a chest where he kept his papers and nibbled them, though the lid was not raised enough to get in a cent! They are so flat. I survey to a white oak called in 791 “a small white oak.”

At noon a few flakes fall.

Sunday. Flannery tells me he is cutting in Holbrook’s Swamp, in the Great Meadows, a lonely place. He sees a fox repeatedly there, and also a white weasel, —once with a mouse in its mouth, in the swamp.