5 April 1858 – 11 April 1858

What I call the young bullfrog, about two and a half inches long, — though it has no yellow on throat. It has a bright-golden ring outside of the iris as far as I can see round it. Is this the case with the bullfrog? May it not be a young Rana fontinalis ? No yellow to throat. I found it on the shore of the Clam- shell Hill ditch. Can jump much better than the others, and easily gets out of the deep pan.® Those to whom I showed the two R. sylvatica could not believe that they were one species, but this morn- ing, on taking them out of the water to examine mi- nutely, they changed so rapidly, chameleon-like, that I could only describe their first appearance from memory. The male grew a lighter brown and the female darker, till in ten minutes there was but a slight shade of differ- ence, and their whole aspect, but especially that of the male, seemed altered also, so that it was not easy to distinguish them. Yet they would readily be recog- nized for rather dark-colored wood frogs, the pos- terior extremities of both having distinct dark bars. The female was two and one tenth inches long, the male one and four fifths inches long. The female was (apparently involuntarily) dropping a little spawn in the pan this morning, and the black core was as big as the head of a pin when it issued from the body. The only difference in color that I now noticed, except that the male was a shade the darkest (both a pale brown), was that there was a very distinct dark mark on the front side at the base of the anterior extremities of the female, while there was but the slightest trace of it in the male. Also the female was more green on the flanks and abdomen; also she had some dusky spots beneath. What is described as a yellow line along the lower edge of the dark one through the eyes, 2. e. along the upper jaw, and which I observed to be such last spring, was in both these at all times a broad silvery or bright cream-colored line. Putting them into the water, after an hour they again acquired distinct colors, but not quite so distinct at first. It is singular that at the breeding-season, at least, though both are im- mersed in water, they are of a totally different color, — the male a very dark brown for a frog, darker than the ordinary color of any Massachusetts frog, without distinct bars to his posterior extremities or a distinct dark line along the snout, while the female is a light reddish brown or lively dead-leaf color, — and that, taken out of water, they rapidly approximate each other till there is only a shade of difference if any. At their breeding-season, then, the colors of the male are not livelier, as in the case of birds, but darker and more sombre. Considering how few of these or of the R. halecina you meet with in the summer, it is surprising how many are now collected in the pools and meadows. The woods resound with the one, and the meadows day and night with the other, so that it amounts to a general awakening of the pools and meadows. I hear this morning the seringo sparrow. In the proceedings of the Natural History Society for December, 1856, there were presented by Dr. H. R. Storer, “a globular concretion of grass said to have been formed by the action of waves upon the seashore.” Were not these some obtained by the Hoars or Emer- sons from Flint’s Pond? P. M.—I go to the meadow at the mouth of the Mill Brook to find the spawn of the R. halecina. They are croaking and coupling there by thousands, as be- fore, though there is a raw east wind to-day. I see them coupled merely, in a few instances, but no such balls or masses of them about one female as in the case of the R. sylvatica, though this may occur. You can easily get close to them and catch them by wading. The first lagoon within the meadow was not a foot deep any- where, and I found the spawn where it was about eight inches deep, with a grassy and mossy bottom. It was principally in two collections, which were near together and each about a yard in diameter. ‘The separate masses of this were from two to six, or commonly three or four, inches in diameter, and generally looked quite black and dense or fine-egged in the water. But it really on a closer inspection presented quite an interesting va- riety of appearances. The black core is about the size of a pin-head, and one half of it is white. It commonly lies with the black side up, and when you look directly down on it, has a rich, very dark blue-purple appear- ance. When with the white or wrong side up, it looks like a mass of small silvery points or bubbles, and you do not notice the jelly. But it lies also at all intermedi- ate angles, and so presents a variety of appearances. It is attached pretty firmly to the grass and rises just to the surface. There are very fine froth-like bubbles more or less mingled with it. I am not sure that I can distinguish it from that of the R. sylvatica. : I caught several of the first. The dark blotches on the back were generally more or less roundish with a crenate edge. There were distinct, raised, light bronze- colored ridges from the snout along the side-head and body, which were conspicuous at a distance. They were, all that I caught, distinctly yellow-white beneath, and some had green buttocks... And now, standing over them, I saw that there were considerable lateral bubbles formed when they croaked, 7. ¢., the throat was puffed out on each side quite far behind the snout. The tympanum was very convex and prominent. At evening I find that the male R. sylvatica couples with or fastens himself to the back of the young bull- frog (?), or whatever it is, and the latter meanwhile croaks, in short croaks four or five times repeated, much like the R. sylvatica, methinks. I hear the hylodes peeping now at evening, being at home, though I have not chanced to hear any during the day. ‘They prefer the evening.

A moist, foggy, and very slightly drizzly morning. It has been pretty foggy for several mornings. This makes the banks look suddenly greener, apparently making the green blades more prominent and more vividly green than before, prevailing over the withered ones. P. M. — Ride to Lee’s Cliff and to Second Division Brook. It begins to grow cold about noon, after a week or more of generally warm and pleasant weather. They with whom [ talk do not remember when the river was so low at this season. The top of the bathing-rock, above the island in the Main Branch, was more than a foot out of water on the 3d, and the river has been falling since. On examining the buds of the elm at Helianthus Bank, I find it is not the slippery elm, and therefore I know but one. At Lee’s Cliff I find no saxifrage in bloom above the rock, on account of the ground having been so exposed the past exceedingly mild winter, and no Ranunculus fascicularis anywhere there, but on a few small warm shelves under the rocks the saxifrage makes already a pretty white edging along the edge of the grass sod [?] on the rocks; has got up three or four inches, and may have been out four or five days. I also notice one columbine, which may bloom in a week if it is pleasant weather. The Ulmus Americana is apparently just out here, or possibly yesterday. The U. fulva not yet, of course. The large rusty blossom-buds of the last have been extensively eaten and mutilated, probably by birds, leaving on the branches which I examine mostly mere shells. I see, in [one] or two places in low ground, elder started half an inch, before any other shrub or tree. The Turritis stricta is four to six inches high. No mouse-ear there yet. I hear hylas in full blast 2.30 p. m. It is remarkable how much herbaceous and shrubby plants, some which are decidedly evergreen, have suffered the past very mild but open winter on account of the ground being bare. Accordingly the saxifrage and crow- foot are so backward, notwithstanding the warmth of the last ten days. Perhaps they want more moisture, too. The asplenium ferns of both species are very gen- erally perfectly withered and shrivelled, and in exposed places on hills the checkerberry has not proved an evergreen, but is completely withered and a dead-leaf color. I do not remember when it has suffered so much. Such plants require to be covered with snow to protect them. At Second Division, the Caltha palustris, half a dozen well out. The earliest may have been a day or two. The frost is but just coming out in cold wood-paths on the north sides of hills, which makes it very muddy, there only. Returned by the Dugan Desert and stopped at the mill there to get the aspen flowers. The very earliest aspens, such as grow in warm exposures on the south sides of hills or woods, have begun to be effete. Others are not yet out. Talked a moment with two little Irish (?) boys, eight or ten years old, that were playing in the brook by the mill. Saw one catch a minnow. I asked him if he used a hook. He said no, it was a “ dully-chunk,” or some such word. “ Dully what?” [I] asked. “Yes, dully,” said he, and he would not venture to repeat the whole word again. It was a small horsehair slip- noose at the end of a willow stick four feet long. The horsehair was twisted two or three together. He passed this over the fish slowly and then jerked him out, the noose slipping and holding him. It seems they are sometimes made with wire to catch trout. I asked him to let me see the fish he had caught. It was a little pickerel five inches long, and appeared to me strange, being transversely barred, and reminded me of the Wrentham pond pickerel; but I could not re- member surely whether this was the rule or the excep- tion; but when I got home I found that this was the one which Storer does not name nor describe, but only had heard of. Is it not the brook pickerel? Asking what other fish he had caught, he said a pike. “That,” said I, “is a large pickerel.”’ He said it had “a long, long neb like a duck’s bill.” It rapidly grows cold and blustering.

A cold and gusty, blustering day. We put on greatcoats again. P. M. — Down the Great Meadows. The river is low, even for summer. The ground about the outmost willow at my boat’s place is high and dry. I cross the meadows and step across the Mill Brook near Mrs. Ripley’s. You hear no stertorous sounds of the Rana halecina this cold and blustering day, unless a few when you go close to their breeding- places and listen attentively. Scarcely one has his head out of water, though I see many at the bottom. I wear india-rubber boots and wade through the shal- low water where they were found. In a shallow sheet of water on the meadow, with a grassy bottom, the spawn will commonly all be collected in one or two parcels in the deepest part, if it is generally less than eight or ten inches deep, to be prepared for a further fall. You will also find a little here and there in weedy ditches in the meadow. One of the first-named parcels will consist of even a hundred separate deposits about three or four inches in diameter crowded together. The frogs are most numerous to-day about and be- neath the spawn. Each little mass of ova is pretty firmly attached to the stubble, —not accidentally, but designedly and effectually, — and when you pull it off, leaves some of the jelly adhering to the stubble. If the mass is large it will run out of your hand this side or that, like a liquid, or as if it had life, — like * sun- squall.” It is not injured by any ordinary agitation of the water, but the mass adheres well together. It bears being carried any distance ina pail. When dropped into the water again, it falls wrong side up, showing the white sides of the cores or yolks (?). On the Great Meadows, I stand close by two coupled. The male is very much the smallest, an inch, at least, the shortest, and much brighter-colored. The line, or “halo” (?), or margin about its blotches is a distinct yellow or greenish yellow. The female has a distended paunch full of spawn. Snipes rise two or three times as I go over the meadow. The remarkable spawn of the 3d, just below the Holt (?), does not show its cylindrical form so well as before; appears to have been broken up considerably, perhaps by creatures feeding on it. I see the remains of a duck which has died on this meadow, and the southeast edge of the meadow is strewn with the feathers of the water-fowl that plumed themselves here before the water went down. There is no water anywhere on these meadows now — except the one or two permanent pools—which I cannot walk through in my boots. Where they have been digging mud the past winter in Beck Stow’s Swamp, I perceive that the crust, for one foot deep at least, consists chiefly, or perhaps half of it, — the rest mainly sphagnum, — of the dead and fallen stems of water andromeda which have ac- cumulated in course of time. I brought home the above two kinds of spawn in a pail. Putting some of the Rana halecina spawn in a tumbler of water, I cannot see the gelatinous part, but only the dark or white cores, which are kept asunder by it at regular intervals. The other (probably fish) spawn is seen to be ar- ranged in perfect hexagons; 7. e., the ova so impinge on each other; but where there is a vent or free side, it is a regular arc of a circle. Is not this the form that spheres pressing on each other equally on all sides assume? I see the embryo, already fish-like (? ), curved round the yolk, with a microscope.’

Surveying Kettell farm. Could I have heard Fringilla socialis along the street this morning?? Or may it have been the hye- malis ? Polly Houghton comes along and says, half believing it, of my compass, “This is what regulates the moon and stars.”’

April rain at last, but not much; clears up at night. At 4.30 p. m. to Well Meadow Field. ? Possibly, for I hear it the 14th, and perhaps the 12th. Vide 12th. The yew looks as if it would bloom in a day or two, and the staminate Salix humilis in the path in three or four days.' Possibly it is already out elsewhere, if, perchance, that was not it just beginning on the 6th on the Marlborough road. The pistillate appear more forward. It must follow pretty close to the earliest willows. I hear the booming of snipe this evening, and Sophia says she heard them on the 6th. The meadows having been bare so long, they may have begun yet earlier. Persons walking up or down our village street in still evenings at this season hear this singular winnowing sound in the sky over the meadows and know not what it is. This “booming” of the snipe is our regular village serenade. I heard it this evening for the first time, as I sat in the house, through the window. Yet common and annual and remarkable as it is, not one in a hundred of the villagers hears it, and hardly so many know what it is. Yet the majority know of the Germanians who have only been here once. Mr. Hoar was almost the only inhabitant of this street whom I had heard speak of this note, which he used annually to hear and listen for in his sundown or evening walks. R. Rice tells me that he has seen the pickerel-spawn hung about in strings on the brush, especially where a tree had fallen in. He thinks it was the pickerel’s because he has seen them about at the time. This seems to correspond with mine of April 3d, though he did [not] recognize the peculiar form of it. I doubt if men do ever simply and naturally glorify God in the ordinary sense, but it is remarkable how sincerely in all ages they glorify nature. The praising of Aurora, for instance, under some form in all ages is obedience to as irresistible an instinct as that which impels the frogs to peep. Apri 11. P. M. — To Lee’s Cliff. The black spheres (rather dark brown) in the Rana sylvatica spawn by Hubbard’s Grove have now opened and flatted out into a rude broad pollywog form. (This was an early specimen.) Yesterday saw moles working in a meadow, throwing up heaps. T notice at the Conantum house, of which only the chimney and frame now stand, a tnangular mass of rubbish, more than half a bushel, resting on the great mantel-tree against an angle in the chimney. It being mixed with clay, I at first thought it a mass of clay and straw mortar, to fill up with, but, looking further, I found it composed of corn-cobs, etc., and the excre- ment probably of rats, of this form and size, and of pure clay, or ger looking like the cells of aninsect. Either the wharf rat or this country rat. They had anciently chosen this warm place for their nest and carried a great store of eatables thither, and the clay of the chimney, washing down, had incrusted the whole mass over. So this was an old rats’ nest as well as human nest, and so it is with every old house. The rats’ nest may have been a hundred and fifty years old. Wherever you see an old house, there look for an old rats’ nest. In hard times they had, ap- parently, been compelled to eat the clay, or it may be that they love it. It is a wonder they had not set the house on fire with their nest. Conant says this house was built by Rufus Hosmer’s great-grandfather. Slippery elm. Crowfoot (Ranunculus fascicularis) at Lee’s since the 6th, apparently a day or two before this. Mouse-ear, not yet. What that large frog, bullfrog-like but with brown spots on a dirty-white throat, in a pool on Conantum? See thimble-berry and rose bush leafing under the rocks.