10 May 1858 – 16 May 1858

A rather warm and pleasant day. Going down-town in the morning, I hear the warbling vireo, golden robin, catbird, and summer yellowbird. For some days the Salix alba have shown their yellow wreaths here and there, suggesting the coming of the yellowbird, and now they are alive with them. About 8.30 a. m., I go down the river to Ball’s Hill. As I paddle along, hear the Maryland yellow-throat, the bobolink, the oven-bird, and the yellow-throated vireo. That early glaucous, sharp-pointed, erect sedge, grass- like, by the riverside is now apparently in prime. Is it the Carex aquatilis ? I hear in several places the low dumping notes of awakened bullfrogs, what I call their pebbly notes, as if they were cracking pebbles in their mouths; not the plump dont dont or ker dont, but kerdle dont dont. As if they sat round mumbling pebbles. At length, near Ball’s Hill, I hear the first regular bullfrog’s . trump. Some fainter ones far off are very like the looing [sic] of cows. This sound, heard low and far off over meadows when the warmer hours have come, grandly inaugurates the summer. I perspire with row- ing in my thick coat and wish I had worn a thin one. This trumpeter, marching or leaping in the van of advancing summer, whom I now hear coming on over the green meadows, seems to say, “ Take off your coat, take off your coat, take off your coat!” He says, “Here comes a gale that I can breathe. This is some- thing like; thisis what I call summer.” I see three or four of them sitting silent in one warm meadow bay. Evidently their breeding-season now begins. But they are soon silent as yet, and it is only an occasional and transient trump that you hear. That season which is bounded on the north, on the spring side at least, by the trump of the bullfrog. This note is like the first colored petals within the calyx of a flower. It conducts us toward the germ of the flower summer. He knows no winter. I hear in his tone the rumors of summer heats. By this note he reassures the season. Not till the air is of that quality that it can support this sound does he emit it. It requires a certain sonorousness. The van is led by the croaking wood frog and the little peeping hylodes, and at last comes this pursy trumpeter, the air growing more and more genial, and even sultry, as well as sonorous. As soon as Nature is ready for him to play his part, she awakens him with a warmer, perchance a sultry, breath and excites him to sound his trombone. It reminds me at once of tepid waters and of bathing. His trump is to the ear what the yellow lily or spatter-dock is to the eye. He swears by the powers of mud. It is enough for the day to have heard only the first half-trump of an early awak- ened one from far in some warm meadow bay. It is a certain revelation and anticipation of the livelong sum- mer to come. It gives leave to the corn to grow and to the heavens to thunder and lighten. It gives leave to the invalid to take the air. Our climate is now as tropical as any. It says, Put out your fires and sit in the fire which the sun has kindled. I hear from some far meadow bay, across the Great Meadows, the half-sounded trump of a bullfrog this warm morning. It is like the tap of a drum when hu- man legions are mustering. It reminds me that summer is now in eamest mustering her forces, and that ere long I shall see their waving plumes and glancing armor and hear the full bands and steady tread. ‘The bullfrog is earth’s trumpeter, at the head of the terrene band. He replies to the sky with answering thunder. I see still five or six ducks, which I scare from the Great Meadows. Some may be going to breed here. How much expression there is in the Viola pedata! I do not know on the whole but it is the handsomest of them all, it is so large and grows in such large masses. Yet I have thought there was a certain shallowness in its expression. Yet it spreads so perfectly open with its face turned upward that you get its whole expression. P. M. — To Walden. R. W. E. is sure that he heard a cuckoo to-day. A hair-bird’s nest in his yard with one egg. The northern wild red cherry by Everett’s, appar- ently to-morrow. Hear in various woods the yorrick note of the veery. So the bird seen long since probably was not the veery. A boy found yesterday one or two of the fringed polygala out. It is remarkable how many new birds have come all at once to-day. The hollow-sounding note of the oven-bird is heard from the depth of the wood. The warbling vireo cheers the elms with a strain for which they must have pined. The trees, in respect to these new arrivers, have been so many empty music-halls. The oriole is seen darting like a bright flash with clear whistle from one tree-top to another over the street. The very catbird’s mew in the copse harmonizes with the bare twigs, as it were shaming them into life and verdure, and soon he mounts upon a tree and is a new creature. ‘Toward night [the] wood thrush ennobles the wood and the world with his strain.

P. M. — Wishing to get one of the little brook (?) pickerel, of Hubbard’s ditches, in the arethusa meadow, I took a line in my pocket, and, baiting with a worm and cutting a pole there, I caught two directly. The biggest was nine inches long and thickly barred transversely with broken dark greenish- brown lines, alternating with golden ones. The back was the dark greenish brown with a pale-brown dorsal line. Both have the vertical dark or black line beneath the eyes and appearing, with the pupil and a mark above, to pass through it. Noticed the same in the reticulatus the other day. The head, 2. e. to the rear of the gills, just one fourth the whole length. From the front of the eye to the end of the lower jaw about one ninth the whole length. In the largest specimen the lower jaw projects one eleventh of an inch beyond the upper. I put the small one, six or seven inches long, in spirits. Opening the larger, I found that it was a female, and that the ova were few and small as yet!! I also found that apparently its last food was another pickerel two thirds as big as itself, the tail end not yet digested. So it appears that you may dig a ditch in the river meadow, for the sake of peat, and though it have no other connection with brook or river except that it is occasionally overflowed, though only twenty or thirty feet long by three or four wide and one to three deep, you may have pickerel in it nine inches long, at least, and these live in part by devouring one another. Surely it cannot be many pickerel that the bigger ones find to devour there. You might think they would have more sympathy with their fellow-prisoners. This ditch, or these ditches—for I caught one in two ditches — have not been overflowed or connected with the brook or river since the spring of ’57, I think, — certainly not any of them since last fall. Yet you may find a few sizable pickerel in such narrow quarters. I have seen them several together in much smaller and shallower ditches there, and they will bury themselves in the mud at your approach. Yet, opening one, you may per- chance discover that he has just swallowed his sole surviving companion! You can easily distinguish the transverse bars a rod off, when the fish is in the water. Melvin says they get to weigh about two pounds.’

Chimney swallows. P. M. — Up Assabet. On the 8th I noticed a little pickerel recently dead in the river with a slit in its upper lip three quarters of an inch long, apparently where a hook had pulled out. There was a white fuzzy swelling at the end of the snout accordingly, and this apparently had killed it. It rained last night, and now I see the elm seed or samare generally fallen or falling. It not only strews the street but the surface of the river, floating off in green patches to plant other shores. The rain evidently hastened its fall. This must be the earliest of trees and shrubs to go to seed or drop its seed. The white maple keys have not fallen. The elm seed floats off down the stream and over the meadows, and thus these trees are found bordering on the stream. By the way, I notice that birches near meadows, where there is an exceedingly gentle inclination, grow in more or less parallel lines a foot or two apart, parallel with the shore, apparently the seed having been dropped there either by a freshet or else lodged in the parallel waving hollows of the snow. It clears off in the forenoon and promises to be warm in the afternoon, though it at last becomes cool. I see now, as I go forth on the river, the first summer shower coming up in the northwest, a dark and well- defined cloud with rain falling sheaf-like from it, but fortunately moving off northeast along the horizon, or down the river. The peculiarity seems to be that the sky is not generally overcast, but elsewhere, south and northeast, is a fair-weather sky with only innocent cumuli, etc., in it. The thunder-cloud is like the ovary of a perfect flower. Other showers are merely stami- niferous or barren. ‘There are twenty barren to one fertile. It is not commonly till thus late in the season that the fertile are seen. In the thunder-cloud, so distinct and condensed, there is a positive energy, and I notice the first as the bursting of the pollen-cells in the flower of the sky. Waded through the west-of-rock, or Wheeler, meadow,’ but I find no frog-spawn there!! I do not even notice tadpoles. Beside that those places are now half -full of grass, some pools where was spawn are about dried up (!), as that in Stow’s land by railroad. Where are the tadpoles? There is much less water there than.a. month ago. Where, then, do the Rana palustris lay their spawn? I think im the river, because it is there I hear them, but I cannot see any. Perhaps they choose pretty deep water, now it is so warm. Now and for a week I have noticed a few pads with wrinkled edges blown up by the wind. Already the coarse grass along the meadow shore, or where it is wettest, is a luxuriant green, answering in its deep, dark color to the thunder-cloud, — both summer phe- nomena,—as if it too had some lightning in its bosom. Some early brakes at the Island woods are a foot high and already spread three or four inches. The Polygonatum pubescens is strongly budded. The Salex lucida above Assabet Spring will not open for several days. The early form of the cinquefoil is now appar- ently in prime and very pretty, spotting the banks with its clear bright yellow. See apparently young toad tadpoles now, — judging from their blackness, — now quite free from the eggs or spawn. If I remember rightly, the toad is colored and spotted more like a frog at this season when it is found in the water. Observed an Emys insculpta, as often before, with the rear edge on one side of its shell broken off for a couple of inches, as if nibbled by some animal. Do not foxes or musquash do this? In this case the under jaw was quite nervy. Found a large water adder by the edge of Farmer's large mud-hole, which abounds with tadpoles and frogs, on which probably it was feeding. It was sunning on the bank and would face me and dart its head toward me when I tried to drive it from the water. It is barred above, but indistinctly when out of water, so that it then appears almost uniformly dark-brown, but in the water broad reddish-brown bars are seen, very distinctly alternating with very dark brown ones. The head was very flat and suddenly broader than the neck behind. / Beneath it was whitish and red- dish flesh-color. 1 c It was about two inches in di- ameter at the thickest part. They are the biggest and most formidable-looking snakes that we have. The inside of its mouth and throat was pink. It was awful to see it wind along the bottom of the ditch at last, raising wreaths of mud, amid the tadpoles, to which it must be a very sea-serpent. I afterward saw another running under Sam Barrett’s grist-mill the same after- noon. He said that he saw a water snake, which he distinguished from a black snake, in an apple tree near by, last year, with a young robin in its mouth, having taken it from the nest. There was a cleft or fork in the tree which enabled it to ascend. Find the Viola Muhlenbergii abundantly out (how long ?), in the meadow southwest of Farmer’s Spring. The cinnamon and interrupted ferns are both about two feet high in some places. The first is more uni- formly woolly down the stem, the other, though very woolly at top, being partly bare on the stem. The wool of the last is coarser. George, the carpenter, says that he used to see a great many stone-heaps in the Saco in Bartlett, near the White Mountains, like those in the Assabet, and that there were no lampreys there and they called them “snake-heaps.” Saw some unusually broad chestnut planks, just sawed, at the mill. Barrett said that they came from Lincoln; whereupon I said that I guessed I knew where they came from, judging by their size alone, and it turned out that I was right. I had often gathered the nuts of those very trees and had observed within a year that they were cut down. So it appears that we have come to this, that if I see any peculiarly large chestnuts at the sawmill, I can guess where they came from, even know them in the log. These planks were quite shaky, and the heart had fallen out of one. Barrett said that it was apt to be the case with large chestnut. They use this wood for coffins, instead of black walnut.

P. M. — To Island. Uvularia sessilifolia is well out in Island woods, opposite Bath Rock; how long? The early willows now show great green wands a foot or two long, consisting of curled worm-like catkins three inches long, now in their prime. They present conspicuous masses of green now before the leaves are noticeable, like the fruit of the elm at present. Some have begun to show their down. So this is apparently the next tree (or shrub ? ) after the elm to shed its seeds. I wade through the great Lee farm meadow. Many Emys picta which I see have perfectly fresh and clear black scales now. I can even see the outlines of the bony plates beneath impressed in the scales. These turtles abound now in the shallow pools in the meadows with grassy or weedy bottoms. I notice on one, part of whose rear marginal plate is broken, two small claw-like horny appendages on the skin, just over the tail. Viola lanceolata, how long? As I sat in my boat near the Bath Rock at Island, I saw a red squirrel steal slyly up a red maple, as if he were in search of a bird’s nest (though it is early for most), and I thought I would see what he was at. He crept far out on the slender branches and, reaching out his neck, nibbled off the fruit-stems, sometimes bending them within reach with his paw; and then, squatting on the twig, he voraciously devoured the half-grown keys, using his paws to direct them to his mouth, as a nut. Bunch after bunch he plucked and ate, letting many fall, and he made an abundant if not sumptuous feast, the whole tree hanging red with fruit around him. It seemed like a fairy fruit as I sat looking toward the sun and saw the red keys made all glowing and transparent by the sun between me and the body of the squirrel. It was certainly a cheer- ing sight, a cunning red squirrel perched on a slender twig between you and the sun, feasting on the hand- some red maple keys. He nibbled voraciously, as if they were a sweet and luscious fruit to him. What an abundance and variety of food is now ready for him! At length, when the wind suddenly began to blow hard and shake the twig on which he sat, he quickly ran down a dozen feet. The large globular masses of oat spawn, often on the very top of the old pontederia stems and also on the shooting Equisetum limosum, of the same color with the weeds and bottom, look like a seedy fruit which is divested of its rind.

5.30 a. m. — Up railroad. Hear and see the red-eye on an oak. The tail is slightly forked and apparently three quarters of an inch beyond wings; all whitish beneath. Hear and see a redstart. Methinks I did also on the 10th? The rhythm a little way off is ah, tche tche tche’-ar. 10 a. mM. — To Hill. A kingbird. Saw a young robin dead. Saw the Viola palmata, early form, yesterday; how long? Look at White Avens Shore. See what I call vernal grass in bloom in many places. The Salix sericea, large and small, and the petiolaris or loose-catkinned (so far as I know their staminate flowers) are now out of bloom. The rostrata not quite done. Some of its catkins now three and a half inches long. The alba not quite done. S. pedicellaris by rail- ; road about done, and the Torreyana done. Picked up, floating, an Emys picta, hatched last year. Itis an inch and one twentieth long in the upper shell and agrees with Agassiz’s description at that age. Agassiz says he could never obtain a specimen of the insculpta only one year old, it is so rarely met with, and young Emydide are so aquatic. I have seen them frequently. To-day, for the first time, it appears to me summer- like and a new season. There is a tender green on the meadows and just leafing trees. The blossoms of the cherry, peach, pear, etc., are conspicuous, and the air is suddenly full of fragrance. Houses are seen to stand amid blossoming fruit trees, and the air about them is full of fragrance and the music of birds. As I go down the railroad at evening, I hear the incessant evening song of the bay-wing from far over the fields. It suggests pleasant associations. Are they not heard chiefly at this season ? The fruit of the early aspen is almost as large — its catkins — as those of the early willow. It will soon be ripe. The very common puffed-up yellow ovaries make quite a show, like some normal fruit; even quite pretty. I discovered this morning that a large rock three feet in diameter was partially hollow, and broke into it at length with a stone in order to reach some large black crystals which I could partly see. I found that it had been the retreat of a squirrel, and it had left many nuts there. It had entered a small hole bristling with crystals, and there found a chamber or grotto a foot long at least, surrounded on all sides by crystals. They thus explore and carry their nuts into every crevice, even in the rocks. Celandine by cemetery. One tells me he saw to-day the arum flower.’

7.30 a. m. — Ride to the Shawsheen in the northeast of Bedford. Meadow saxifrage well out, many of them, at the tan-yard meadow. The Equise- tum limosum will apparently (?) open there in two or three days. Thalictrum dioicum abundant, apparently in prime; how long? It is a very interesting, graceful, and delicate plant, especially the sterile, with its pretty, commonly purple, petal-like sepals, and its conspic- uous long yellow anthers in little bare clusters (?), trembling over the meadow. Yet a frail and rather inobvious plant. It grows on moist, commonly rocky slopes next to meadows at the base of hills, or by rocks in rather swampy woods. The meadows are now full of sedges in bloom, which shed clouds of pollen and cover my shoes with it. The cassia has not come up yet. High blueberries well out. Hear the evergreen-forest note. Also, in rather low ground in Bedford, a note much like the summer yellowbird’s, or between that and the redstart, and see the bird quite near, but hopping quite low on the bushes. It looked like the yellowbird with a bluish- ash top of head. What was it?? The shad-bush in bloom is now conspicuous, its white flags on all sides. Is it not the most massy and conspicuous of any wild plant now in bloom? I see where the farmer mending his fence has just cut one to make part of the fence, and it is stretched out hori- zontally, a mass of white bloom. Measured two apple trees by the road from the middle of Bedford and Fitch’s mill. One, which divided at the ground, was thirteen and a half feet in circumfer- ence there, around the double trunk; but another, in a field on the opposite side of the road, was the most remarkable tree for size. This tree was exceedingly low for the size of its trunk, and the top rather small. At three feet from the ground it measured ten and a quarter feet in circumference, and immediately above this sent off a branch as big as a large apple tree. It was hollow, and on one side part of the trunk had fallen out. ‘These trees mark the residence of an old settler evidently.

A. M. — Up Assabet. Aralia nudicaulis at Island. The leaf-stalks are often eaten off, probably by some quadruped. The flower-buds of the Cornus florida are five eighths of an inch in diameter. “The Salix lucida will hardly bloom within two days. The S. Torreyana catkins are so reddish that at a little distance it looks some- what like the common black cherry now leafing. A hummingbird yesterday came into the next house and was caught. Flew about our parlor to-day and tasted Sophia’s flowers. In some lights you saw none of the colors of its throat. In others, in the shade the throat was a clear bright scarlet, but in the sun it glowed with splendid metallic, fiery reflections about the neck and throat. It uttered from time to time, as it flew, a faint squeaking chirp or chirrup. The hum sounded more hollow when it approached a flower. Its wings fanned the air so forcibly that you felt the cool wind they raised a foot off, and nearer it was very remark- able. Does not this very motion of the wings keep a bird cool in hot weather? The only indigenous willow I noticed yesterday on © the Shawsheen — a mile below Fitch’s mill — was the small sericea, such as by Assabet white maple. What was that loud but distant note’ of a bird, apparently in the low land, somewhat like the guinea-hen note, also reminding me a little of the plover about Truro light, but apparently a hawk? Got quite a view down the valley of the Shawsheen below the junction of Vine Brook, northeast, from a hill in the extreme northeast of Bedford. P. M. — To Uvularia perfoliata at Flint’s Pond. See again the warbler of yesterday. All bright yellow beneath and apparently bluish-slate above, but I do not see it well. Its note, with little variation, is like twit twit, twit twit, twitter twitter twe. It must be the parti-colored warbler.* Sat down in the sun in the path through Wright’s wood-lot above Goose Pond, but soon, hearing a slight . rustling, I looked round and saw a very large black snake about five feet long on the dry leaves, about a rod off. When I moved, it vibrated its tail very rapidly and smartly, which made quite a loud rustling or - rattling sound, reminding me of the rattlesnake, as if many snakes obeyed the same instinct as the rattle- snake when they vibrate their tails. Once I thought I heard a low hiss. It was on the edge of a young wood of oaks and a few white pines from ten to eighteen feet high, the oaks as yet bare of leaves. As I moved toward the snake, I thought it would take refuge in some hole, but it appeared that it was out on a scout and did not know of any place of refuge near. Suddenly, as it moved along, it erected itself half its length, and when I thought it was preparing to strike at me, to my sur- prise it glided up a slender oak sapling about an inch in diameter at the ground and ten feet high. It ascended this easily and quickly, at first, I think, slanting its body over the lowest twig of the next tree. There were seven little branches for nine feet, averaging about the size of a pipe-stem. It moved up in a somewhat zig- zag manner, availing itself of the branches, yet also in part spirally about the main stem. It finds a rest (or hold if necessary) for its neck or forward part of its body, moving crosswise the small twigs, then draws up the rest of its body. From the top of this little oak it passed into the top of a white pine of the same height an inch and a half in diameter at the ground and two feet off; from this into another oak, fifteen feet high and three feet from the pine; from this to another oak, three feet from the last and about the same height; from this to a large oak about four feet off and three or four inches in diameter, in which it was about fourteen feet from the ground; thence through two more oaks, a little lower, at intervals of four feet, and so into a white pine; and at last into a smaller white pine and thence to the ground. The distance in a straight line from where it left the ground to where it descended was about twenty-five feet, and the greatest height it reached, about fourteen feet. It moved quite deliberately for the most part, choosing its course from tree to tree with great skill, and resting from time to time while it watched me, only my approach compelling it to move again. It surprised me very much to see it cross from tree to tree exactly like a squirrel, where there appeared little or no support for such a body. It would glide down the proper twig, its body resting at intervals of a foot or two, on the smaller side twigs, per- chance, and then would easily cross an interval of two feet, sometimes in an ascending, sometimes a descending, direction. If the latter, its weight at last bent the first twig down nearer to the opposite one. It would extend its neck very much, as I could see by the increased width of the scales exposed, till its neck rested across the opposite twig, hold on all the while tightly to some part of the last twig by the very tip of its tail, which was curled round it just like a.monkey’s. I have hardly seen a squirrel rest on such slight twigs as it would rest on in mid-air, only two or three not bigger than a pipe-stem, while its body stretched clear a foot at least between two trees. It was not at all like creeping over a coarse basket- work, but suggested long practice and skill, like the rope- dancer’s. There were no limbs for it to use comparable for size with its own body, and you hardly noticed the few slight twigs it rested on, as it glided through the air. When its neck rested on the opposite twig, it was, as it. were, glued to it. It helped itself over or up them as surely as if it grasped with a hand. There were, no doubt, rigid kinks in its body when they were needed for sup- port. It is a sort of endless hook, and, by its ability to bend its body in every direction, it finds some support on every side. Perhaps the edges of its scales give it a hold also. It is evident that it can take the young birds out of a sapling of any height, and no twigs are so small and pliant as to prevent it. Pendulous sprays would be the most difficult for it, where the twigs are more nearly parallel with the main one, as well as nearly vertical, but even then it might hold on by its tail while its head hung below. I have no doubt that this snake could have reached many of the oriole-nests which I have seen. I noticed that in its anger its rigid neck was very much flattened or compressed vertically. At length it coiled itself upon itself as if to strike, and, I presenting a stick, it struck it smartly and then darted away, running swiftly down the hill toward the pond. Yellow butterflies. Nabalus leaves are already up and coming up in the wood-paths. Also the radical leaves of one variety of Solidago arguta, and apparently of S. altis- syma, are conspicuously up. A golden-crowned thrush hops quite near. It is quite small, about the size of the creeper, with the upper part of its breast thickly and distinctly pencilled with black, a tawny head; and utters now only a sharp cluck for a chip. See and hear a redstart, the rhythm of whose strain is tse!-tse, tse'-tse, tse’, emphasizing the last syllable of all and not ending with the common fsear. Hear the night-warbler. The Uvularia perfoliata, which did not show itself at all on the 3d, is now conspicuous, and one is open but will not shed pollen before to-morrow. It has shot up about ten inches in one case and bloomed within thir- teen days!! Ranunculus repens at Brister’s Spring; how long? Was that R. repens at the Everett Spring on the 3d?' The whip-poor-will heard. E. Hoar detected the other day two ovaries under one scale of a Salix rostrata, and, under another, a stamen and another stamen converted into an ovary.