29 March 1858 – 4 April 1858

Monday. Wear a pheebe early in the morning over the street. Considerable frost this morn- ing, and some ice formed on the river. The white maple stamens are very apparent now on one tree, though they do not project beyond the buds. P. M. — To Ball’s Hill. Nearly as warm and pleasant as yesterday. I see what I suppose is the female rusty grackle; black body with green reflections and purplish-brown head and neck, but I notice no light iris. By a pool southeast of Nathan Barrett’s, see five or six painted turtles in the sun, — probably some were out yester- day, — and afterward, along a ditch just east of the pine hill near the river, a great many more, as many as twenty within a rod. I must have disturbed this afternoon one hundred at least. They have crawled out on to the grass on the sunny side of the ditches where there is a sheltering bank. I notice the scales of one all turning up on the edges. It is evident that great numbers lie buried in the mud of such ditches and mud-holes in the winter, for they have not yet been crawling over the meadows. Some have very broad yellow lines on the back; others are almost uni- formly dark above. They hurry and tumble into the water at your approach, but several soon rise to the surface and just put their heads out to reconnoitre. Fach trifling weed or clod is a serious impediment in their path, catching their flippers and causing them to tumble back. They never lightly skip over it. But then they have patience and perseverance, and plenty of time. The narrow edges of the ditches are almost . paved in some places with their black and muddy backs. They seem to come out into the sun about the time the phoebe is heard over the water. At the first pool I also scared up a snipe. It rises with a single cra-a-ck and goes off with its zigzag flight, with its bill presented to the earth, ready to charge bayonets against the inhabitants of the mud. As I sit two thirds the way up the sunny side of the pine hill, looking over the meadows, which are now almost completely bare, the crows, by their swift flight and scolding, reveal to me some large bird of prey hovering over the river. I perceive by its markings and size that it cannot be a hen-hawk, and now it settles on the topmost branch of a white maple, bend- ing it down. Its great armed and feathered legs dangle helplessly in the air for a moment, as if feeling for the 1858 | A LARGE BIRD OF PREY 331 perch, while its body is tipping this way and that. It sits there facing me some forty or fifty rods off, pluming itself but keeping a good lookout. At this distance and in this light, it appears to have a rusty-brown head and breast and is white beneath, with rusty leg- feathers and a tail black beneath. When it flies again it is principally black varied with white, regular light spots on its tail and wings beneath, but chiefly a conspicuous white space on the forward part of the back; also some of the upper side of the tail or tail- coverts is white. It has broad, ragged, buzzard-like wings, and from the white of its back, as well as the shape and shortness of its wings and its not having a gull-like body, I think it must be an eagle. It lets itself down with its legs somewhat helplessly dangling, as if feeling for something on the bare meadow, and — then gradually flies away, soaring and circling higher and higher until lost in the downy clouds. This lofty soaring is at least a grand recreation, as if it were nourishing sublime ideas. I should like to know why it soars higher and higher so, whether its thoughts are really turned to earth, for it seems to be more nobly as well as highly employed than the laborers ditching in the meadow beneath or any others of my fellow- townsmen. Hearing a quivering note of alarm from some bird, I look up and see a male hen-harrier, the neatly built hawk, sweeping over the hill. While I was looking at the eagle (?), I saw, on the hillside far across the meadow by Holbrook’s clearing, what I at first took for a red flag or handkerchief carried along on a pole, just above the woods. It was a fire in the woods, and I saw the top of the flash- ing flames above the tree-tops. The woods are in a state of tinder, and the smoker and sportsman and the burner must be careful now. I do not see a duck on the Great Meadows to-day, as I did not up-stream yesterday. It is remarkable how suddenly and completely those that were here two days ago have left us. It is true the water has gone down still more on the meadows. I infer that water- fowl travel in pleasant weather. With many men their fine manners are a lie all over, a skim-coat or finish of falsehood. They are not brave enough to do without this sort of armor, which they wear night and day. The trees in swamps are streaming with gossamer at least thirty feet up, and probably were yesterday. I see at Gourgas’s hedge many tree sparrows and fox-colored sparrows. The latter are singing very loud and sweetly. Somewhat like ar, tea, — twe’-twe, twe’-twe, or ar te, ter twe’-twe, twe’-twe, variously. They are quite tame.

P. M.— To my boat at Cardinal Shore and thence to Lee’s Cliff. Another fine afternoon, warmer than before, I think. I walk in the fields now without slumping in the thawing ground, or there are but few soft places, and the distant sand-banks look dry and warm. The frogs are now heard leaping into the ditches on your approach, and their dimple is seen. I find a smallish bullfrog ! under my boat. Approaching carefully the little pool south of Hub- bard’s Grove, I see the dimples where the croakers which were on the surface have dived, and I see two or three still spread out on the surface, in the sun. They are very wary, and instantly 4% dive to the bottom on your approach and bury or them- selves in the weeds or mud. The water is quite smooth, and it is very warm here, just under the edge of the wood, but I do not hear any croaking. Later, in a pool behind Lee’s Cliff, I hear them, — the waking up of the leafy pools. The last was a pool amid the blue- berry and huckleberry and a few little pines. I do not remember that I ever hear this frog in the river or ponds. They seem to be an early frog, peculiar to pools and small ponds in the woods and fields. I notice, scampering over this water, two or three brown spiders, middling-sized. ‘They appear to be the ones which have spun this gossamer. There is at the bottom of this pool much of the ludwigia, that evergreen weed seen in winter at the bottom of pools and ditches. Methinks those peculiar bulbs, some of which I see near it, are of this plant. Landing at Bittern Cliff, I went round through the woods to get sight of ducks on the pond. Creeping down through the woods, I reached the rocks, and saw fifteen or twenty sheldrakes scattered about. The full- plumaged males, conspicuously black and white and often swimming in pairs, appeared to be the most wary, keeping furthest out. Others, with much less white and duller black, were very busily fishing just north the inlet of the pond, where there is about three feet of water, and others still playing and preening them- selves. These ducks, whose tame representatives are so sluggish and deliberate in their motions, were full of activity. A party of these ducks fishing and play- ing is a very lively scene. On one side, for instance, you will see a party of eight or ten busily diving and most of the time under water, not rising high when they come up, and soon plunging again. ‘The whole sur- face will be in commotion there, though no ducks may be seen. I saw one come up with a large fish, whereupon all the rest, as they successively came to the surface, gave chase to it, while it held its prey over the water in its bill, and they pursued with a great rush and clatter a dozen or more rods over the surface, making a great furrow in the water, but, there being some trees in the way, I could not see the issue. I saw seven or eight all dive together as with one consent, remaining under half a minute or more. On another side you see a party which seem to be playing and pluming themselves. They will run and dive and come up and dive again every three or four feet, occasionally one pursuing an- other; will flutter in the water, making it fly, or erect themselves at full length on the surface like a penguin, and flap their wings. This party make an incessant noise. Again you will see some steadily tacking this way or that in the middle of the pond, and often they rest there asleep with their heads in their backs. They readily cross the pond, swimming from this side to that. While I am watching the ducks, a mosquito is en- deavoring to sting me. At dusk I hear two flocks of geese go over.

P. M.— To Flint’s Pond. A fresh south or southeast wind. The most forward willow catkins are not so silvery now, more grayish, being much enlarged and the down less compact, revealing the dark scales. Flint’s, Fair Haven, and Walden Ponds broke up just about the same time, or March 28th, this year. This is very unusual. It is because on account of the mild- ness of the winter Walden did not become so cold as the others, or freeze so thick, and there was propor- tionally less thawing to be done in it. They are burning brush nowadays. You see a great slanting column of dun smoke on the northeast of the town, which turns out to be much farther off than you suppose. It is Sam Pierce burning brush. Thus we are advertised of some man’s occupation in a neigh- boring town. As I walk I smell the smoke of burnings, though I see none. In the wood-paths now I see many small red butter- flies, I am not sure of what species, not seeing them still. The earliest butterflies seem to be born of the dry leaves on the forest floor. I see about a dozen black ducks on Flint’s Pond, asleep with their heads in their backs and drifting across the pond before the wind. I suspect that they are nocturnal in their habits and therefore require much rest by day. So do the seasons revolve and every chink is filled. While the waves toss this bright day, the ducks, asleep, are drifting before it across the ponds. Every now and then one or two lift their heads and look about, as if they watched by turns. I see also two ducks, perhaps a little larger than these, I am pretty sure without red bills and therefore not shel- drakes (and they are not nearly as white as sheldrakes ordinarily), with more elevated heads and gibbous (?) bills. The heads, bills, and upper parts of neck, black;' breast, white or whitish; but back sober-colored. Can they be brant or mallards? The leaves are now so dry and loose that it is almost impossible to approach the shore of the pond without being heard by the ducks. I am not sure but I heard a pine warbler day before yesterday, and from what a boy asks me about a yellow bird which he saw there I think it likely. Just after sundown I see a large flock of geese in a perfect harrow cleaving their way toward the northeast, with Napole- onic tactics splitting the forces of winter. C. says he saw a great many wood turtles on the bank of the Assabet to-day. ‘The painted and wood tur- tles have seemed to be out in surprising abundance at an unusually early date this year, but I think I can account for it. The river is remarkably low, almost at summer level. I am not sure that I remember it so low at this season. Now, probably, these tortoises would always lie out in the sun at this season, if there were any bank at hand to lie on. Ordinarily at this season, the meadows being flooded, together with the pools and ditches in which the painted turtles lie, there 1 ‘Were they geese? is no bank exposed near their winter quarters for them to come out on, and I first noticed them under water | on the meadow. But this year it is but a step for them to the sunny bank, and the shores of the Assabet and of ditches are lined with them. C. heard hylas to-day.

White-bellied swallows. P. M. — Paddle up Assabet. The river is at summer level; has not been up this spring, and has fallen to this. The lowermost willow at my boat is bare. The white maples are abundantly out to-day. Probably the very first bloomed on the 29th. We hold the boat beneath one, surprised to hear the resounding hum of honey-bees, which are busy about them. It reminds me of the bass and its bees. The trees are conspicuous with dense clusters of light- colored stamens. ‘The alders above the Hemlocks do not yet shed pollen. What I called yellow wasps, which built over my window last year, have come, and are about the old nest; numbers have settled on it.! I observed night before last, as often before, when geese were passing over in the twilight quite near, though the whole heavens were still light and I knew which way to look by the honking, I could not dis- tinguish them. It takes but a little obscurity to hide a bird in the air. How difficult, even in broadest daylight, to discover again a hawk at a distance in the sky when you have once turned your eyes away! Pleasant it is to see again the red bark of the Cornus sericea shining in the warm sun at the hill swamp, above the spring. Walking through the maple [sic] there, I see a squirrel’s nest twenty-three or twenty-four feet high in a large maple, and, climbing to it, —for it was so peculiar, having a basketwork of twigs about it, that I did not know but it was a hawk’s nest, —I found that it was a very perfect (probably) red squir- rel’s nest, made entirely of the now very dark or black- ish green moss such as grows on the button-bush and on the swampy ground, —a dense mass of it about one foot through, matted together, — with an inobvious hole on the east side and a tuft of loose moss blowing up above it, which seemed to answer for a door or porch covering. The cavity within was quite small, but very snug and warm, where one or two squirrels might lie warmly in the severest storm, the dense moss walls being about three inches thick or more. But what was most peculiar was that this nest, though placed over the centre of the tree, where it divided into four or five branches, was regularly and elaborately hedged about and supported by a basketwork of strong twigs stretched across from bough to bough, which twigs I perceived had been gnawed green from the maple itself, the stub ends remaining visible all around. Near by I saw another much smaller and less per- fect nest of the same kind, which had fallen to the ground. This had been made in a birch, and the birch twigs had been gnawed off, but in this case I noticed a little fine broken grass within it, mixed with the moss. I notice large water-bugs.

P. M. — To yew and R. W. E.’s Cliff. At Hubbard’s Grove I see a woodchuck. He waddles to his hole and then puts out his gray nose within thirty feet to reconnoitre. It is too windy, and the surface of the croaker pool is too much ruffled, for any of the croakers to be lying out, but I notice a large mass of their spawn there well advanced. At the first little sluiceway just beyond, I catch a large Rana halecina, which puffs itself up considerably, as if it might be full of spawn. I must look there for its spawn. It is rather sluggish; cannot jump much yet. It allows me to stroke it and at length take it up in my hand, squatting still in it. Who would believe that out of these dry and withered banks will come violets, lupines, etc., in profusion? At the spring on the west side of Fair Haven Hill, I startle a striped snake. It is a large one with a white stripe down the dorsal ridge between two broad black ones, and on each side the last a buff one, and then blotchy brown sides, darker toward tail; beneath, greenish-yellow. ‘This snake generally has a pinkish cast. ‘There is another, evidently the same species but not half so large, with its neck lying affectionately across the first, —I may have separated them by my approach, — which, seen by itself, you might have thought a distinct species. ‘The dorsal line in this one is bright-yellow, though not so bright as the lateral ones, and the yellow about the head; also the black is more glossy, and this snake has no pink cast. No doubt on almost every such warm bank now you will find a snake lying out. The first notice I had of them was a Slight rustling in the leaves, as if made by a squir- rel, though I did not see them for five minutes after. The biggest at length dropped straight down into a hole, within a foot of where he lay. ‘They allowed me to lift their heads with a stick four or five inches without stirring, nor did they mind the flies that alighted on them, looking steadily at me without the slightest mo- tion of head, body, or eyes, as if they were of marble; and as you looked hard at them, you continually for- got that they were real and not imaginary. The hazel has just begun to shed pollen here, per- haps yesterday in some other places. This loosening and elongating of its catkins is a sufficiently pleasing sight, in dry and warm hollows on the hillsides. It is an unexpected evidence of life in so dry a shrub. On the side of Fair Haven Hill I go looking for bay- wings, turning my glass to each sparrow on a rock or tree. At last I see one, which flies right up straight from a rock eighty [or] one hundred feet and warbles a peculiar long and pleasant strain, after the manner of the skylark, methinks, and close by I see another, apparently a bay-wing, though I do not see its white in tail, and it utters while sitting the same subdued, rather peculiar strain. See how those black ducks, swimming in pairs far off on the river, are disturbed by our appearance, swimming away in alarm, and now, when we advance again, they rise and fly up-stream and about, uttering regularly a crack cr-r-rack of alarm, even for five or ten minutes, as they circle about, long after we have lost sight of them. Now we hear it on this side, now on that. The yew shows its bundles of anthers plainly, as if it might open in four or five days. Just as I get home, I think I see crow blackbirds about a willow by the river.’ It is not important that the poet should say some particular thing, but should speak in harmony with nature. The tone and pitch of his voice is the main thing. It appears to me that the wisest philosophers that I know are as foolish as Sancho Panza dreaming of his Island. Considering the ends they propose and ‘the obstructions in their path, they are even. One philoso- pher is feeble enough alone, but observe how each multiplies his difficulties, — by how many unnecessary links he allies himself to the existing state of things. He girds himself for his enterprise with fasting and prayer, and then, instead of pressing forward like a light-armed soldier, with the fewest possible hindrances, he at once hooks himself on to some immovable insti- tution, as a family, the very rottenest of them all, and begins to sing and scratch gravel towards his objects. Why, it is as much as the strongest man can do decently to bury his friends and relations without making a new world of it. But if the philosopher is as foolish as Sancho Panza, he is also as wise, and nothing so truly makes a thing so or so as thinking it so. Approaching the side of a wood on which were some pines, this afternoon, I heard the note of the pine warbler, calling the pines to life, though I did not see it. It has probably been here as long as I said before. Returning, I saw a sparrow-like bird flit by in an or- chard, and, turning my glass upon it, was surprised by its burning yellow. This higher color in birds sur- prises us like an Increase of warmth in the day.

Going down-town this morning, I am sur- prised by the rich strain of the purple finch from the elms. Three or four have arrived and lodged against the elms of our street, which runs east and west across their course, and they are now mingling their loud and rich strains with that of the tree sparrows, robins, bluebirds, etc. The hearing of this note implies some improvement in the acoustics of the air. It reminds me of that genial state of the air when the elms are in bloom. They sit still over the street and make a business of warbling. They advertise me surely of some addi- tional warmth and serenity. How their note rings over the roofs of the village! You wonder that even the sleepers are not awakened by it to inquire who is there, and yet probably not another than myself in all the town observes their coming, and not half a dozen ever distinguished them in their lives. And yet the very mob of the town know the hard names of Germanians or Swiss families which once sang here or elsewhere. About 9 a. m., C. and I paddle down the river. It is a remarkably warm and pleasant day. The shore is alive with tree sparrows sweetly warbling, also black- birds, etc. The crow blackbirds which I saw last night are hoarsely clucking from time to time. Approaching the island, we hear the air full of the hum of bees, which at first we refer to the near trees. It comes from the white maples across the North Branch, fifteen rods off. We hear it from time to time, as we paddle along all day, down to the Bedford line. There is no pause to the hum of the bees all this warm day. It is a very simple but pleasing and soothing sound, this susurrus, thus early in the spring. When off the mouth of the Mill Brook, we hear the stertorous tut tut tut of frogs from the meadow, with an occasional faint bullfrog-like er er er intermingled. I land there to reconnoitre. The river is remarkably low, quite down to summer level, and there is but very little water anywhere on the meadows. I see some » Shallow lagoons (west of the brook), whence the sound “ comes. There, too, are countless painted turtles out, around on the banks and hummocks left by the ice. Their black and muddy backs shine afar in the sun, and though now fifteen to twenty rods off, I see through my glass that they are already alarmed, have their necks stretched out and are beginning to slip into the water, where many heads are seen. Resolved to iden- tify this frog, one or two of whose heads I could already see above the surface with my glass, I picked my way to the nearest pool. Close where I landed, an R. hale- cina lay out on some sedge. In went all the turtles im- mediately, and soon after the frogs sank to the bottom, and their note was heard only from more distant pools. I stood perfectly still, and ere long they began to re- appear one by one, and spread themselves out on the surface. They were the R. halecina. I could see very plainly the two very prominent yellow lines along the sides of the head and the large dark ocellated marks, even under water, on the thighs, etc. Gradually they begin to recover their voices, but it is hard to say at first which one of the dozen within twenty feet is speaking. They begin to swim and hop along the surface toward each other. Their note is a hard dry tut tut tut tut, not at all ringing like the toad’s, and produced with very little swelling or motion of the throat, but as much trembling of the whole body; and from time to time one makes that faint somewhat bullfrog-like er er er. Both these sounds, then, are made by one frog, and what I have formerly thought an early bullfrog note was this. This, I think, is the first frog sound I have heard from the river meadows or anywhere, except the croaking leaf-pool frogs and the hylodes. ‘They are evidently breeding now like toads, and probably are about the water as exclusively as the toads will soon be. This sound we continue to hear all day long, es- pecially from the broad meadows in Bedford. Close at hand a single one does not sound loud, yet it is surprising how far a hundred or thousand croaking (?) at once can be heard. It comes borne on the breeze from north over the Bedford meadows a quarter of a mile off, filling the air. It is like the rattling of a wagon along some highway, or more like a distant train on a railroad, or else of many rills emptying in, or more yet like the sound of a factory, and it comes with an echo which makes it seem yet more distant and universal. At this distance it is a soft and almost purring sound, yet with the above-named bullfrog-like variation in it. Sometimes the meadow will be almost still; then they will begin in earnest, and plainly excite one an- other into a general snoring or eructation over a quar- ter of a mile of meadow. It is unusually early to hear them so numerously, and by day, but the water, being so very low and shallow on the meadows, is unusually warm this pleasant day. This might be called the Day of the Snoring Frogs, or the Awakening of the Meadows. Probably the frost is out of the meadows very early this year. It is a remarkable spring for reptile life. It remains now to detect the note of the palustris, wood frog, and fontinalis. I am not sure but I heard one kind of bullfrog’s note along the river once or twice. I saw several middle-sized frogs with green noses and dark bodies, small, bullfrog-like (?? ), sitting along the shore. At what perhaps is called the Holt just below N. Barrett’s, many grackles and red-wings together flit along the willows by our side, or a little ahead, keeping up a great chattering, while countless painted turtles are as steadily rustling and dropping into the water from the willows, etc., just ahead. We land at Ball’s Hill and eat our dinners. It is so warm we would fain bathe. We seek some shade and cannot easily find it. You wonder that all birds and insects are not out at once in such a heat. We find it delicious to take off our shoes and stockings and wade far through the shallows on the meadow to the Bedford shore, to let our legs drink air. How pretty the white fibrous roots of the eriocaulon, floating in tufts on the meadow, like beaded chains! In the hazy atmosphere yesterday we could hardly see Garfield’s old unpainted farmhouse. It was only betrayed by its elms. This would be the right color for painters to imitate. When the sun went into a cloud we detected the outlines of the windows only. When returning, we discovered, on the south side of the river, just at the old crossing-place from the Great Meadows, north of the ludwigia pool, a curious kind of spawn. It was white, each ovum about as big as a robin-shot or larger, with mostly a very minute white core, no black core, and these were agglutinated together in the form of zigzag hollow cylinders, two or three inches in di- ameter and one or two feet long, look- ing like a lady’s ruff or other muslin work, on the bottom or on roots and twigs of willow and button-bush, where the water was two or three feet deep. The greater part lay on the bottom, looking like a film, these cylinders being somewhat coiled about there. When you took it up, the two sides fell together, and it was flat in your hand like the leg of a stocking. In one place there were a dozen very large red-bellied and brown-backed leeches in it, evidently battening on it. This must be frog or fish spawn. If frog-spawn, I think it must be that of the Rana halecina,' the only ones fairly awake along the river; but how are leeches propagated? ‘There was a great abundance of it, many bushels, for at least a dozen rods along the shore, and it must afford food to many creatures. The consistency of a jelly we eat. We saw one perch there. Some on the ruts was quite up to the surface, but most lower. When you had taken up a handful and broken it, on dropping it into the water it recovered its form for the most part. I noticed that the fine willow root-fibres and weeds, potamogeton, etc., there were thickly covered with a whitish film or fuzz, an eighth to a quarter of an inch deep, or long, apparently con- nected with this spawn, which made them look like plants covered with frost in a winter morning, though it was a duller white; but out of water you did not perceive anything. Probably this was the milt. | When I have been out thus the whole day and spend the whole afternoon returning, it seems to me pitiful and ineffectual to be out as usual only in the afternoon, —as if you had come late to a feast, after your betters had done. The afternoon seems coarse and reversed, or at best a long twilight, after the fresh and bright forenoon. The gregariousness of men is their most contempti- ble and discouraging aspect. See how they follow each other like sheep, not knowing why. Day & Martin’s blacking was preferred by the last generation, and also is by this. They have not so good a reason for preferring this or that religion as in this case even. Apparently in ancient times several parties were nearly equally matched. They appointed a committee and made a compromise, agreeing to vote or believe so and so, and they still helplessly abide by that. Men are the inveterate foes of all improvement. Generally speaking, they think more of their hen-houses than of any desirable heaven. If you aspire to anything better than politics, expect no codperation from men. They will not further anything good. You must pre- vail of your own force, as a plant springs and grows by its own vitality. Hear the Rana halecina in the evening also, from my window.