10 January 1859 – 16 January 1859

P. M.—Up Assabet to Sam Barrett’s Pond. Cold weather at last; — 8° this forenoon. This is much the coldest afternoon to bear as yet, but, cold as it is, —four or five below at 3 p. m., —I see, as I go round the Island, much vapor blowing from.a bare space in the river just below, twenty rods off. I see, in the Island wood, where squirrels have dug up acorns in the snow, and frequently where they have eaten them on the trees and dropped the shells about on the snow. Hemlock is still falling on the snow, like the pitch pine. The swamp white oaks apparently have fewer leaves — are less likely to have any leaves, even the small ones — than any oaks except the chinquapin, me- thinks. Here is a whole wood of them above Pinxter Swamp, which you may call bare. Even the tawny (?) recent shoots of the black willow, when seen thickly and in the sun along the river, are a warm and interesting sight. These gleaming birch and alder and other twigs are a phenomenon still perfect, — that gossamer or cobweb-like reflection. The middle of the river where narrow, as south side Willow Island, is lifted up into a ridge considerably higher than on the sides and cracked broadly. The alder is one of the prettiest of trees and shrubs in the winter, it is evidently so full of life, with its con- spicuous pretty red catkins dangling from it on all sides. It seems to dread the winter less than other plants. It has a certain heyday and cheery look, and less stiff than most, with more of the flexible grace of summer. With those dangling clusters of red catkins which it switches in ever Le . z r % Bi % , + a ee se aan 4 eS aA me wr d the face of winter, it brags for all vegetation. It is not daunted by the cold, but hangs gracefully still over the frozen stream. At Sam Barrett’s Pond, where Joe Brown is now get- ting his ice, [ think I see about ten different freezings in ice some fifteen or more inches thick. Perhaps the suc- cessive cold nights might be discovered recorded in each cake of ice. See, returning, amid the Roman wormwood in front of the Monroe place by the -river, half a dozen gold- finches feeding just like the sparrows. How warm their yellow breasts look! They utter the goldfinches’ watery twitter still. I come across to the road south of the hill to see the pink on the snow-clad hill at sunset. About half an hour before sunset this intensely clear cold evening (thermometer at five —6°), I observe all the sheets of ice (and they abound everywhere now in the fields), when I look from one side about at right angles with the sun’s rays, reflect a green light. This is the case even when they are in the shade. I walk back’ and forth in the road waiting to see the pink. The win- dows on the skirts of the village reflect the setting sun with intense brilliancy, a dazzling glitter, it is so cold. Standing thus on one side of the hill, I begin to see a pink light reflected from the snow there about fifteen minutes before the sun sets. This gradually deepens to purple and violet in some places, and the pink is very distinct, especially when, after looking at the simply white snow on other sides, you turn your eyes to the hill. Even after all direct sunlight is withdrawn from the hill- top, as well as from the valley in which you stand, you see, if you are prepared to discern it, a faint and delicate tinge of purple or violet there. This was in a very clear and cold evening when the thermometer was — 6°. This is one of the phenomena of the winter sunset, this distinct pink light reflected from the brows of snow-clad hills on one side of you as you are facing the sun. The cold rapidly increases; it is — 14° in the evening. I hear the ground crack with a very loud sound and a great jar in the evening and in the course of the night several times. It is once as loud and heavy as the ex- plosion of the Acton powder-mills. This cracking is heard all over New England, at least, this night.

At 6 a. mM. — 22° and how much more I know not, ours having gone into the bulb; but that is said to be the lowest. Going to Boston to-day, I find that the cracking of the ground last night is the subject of conversation in the cars, and that it was quite general. I see many cracks in Cambridge and Concord. It would appear then that the ground cracks on the advent of very severe cold weather. I had not heard it before, this winter. It was so when I went to Amherst a winter or two ago.

Mr. Farmer brings me a hawk which he thinks has caught thirty or forty of his chickens since summer, for he has lost so many, and he has seen a hawk like this catch some of them. Thinks he has seen this same one sitting a long time upright on a tree, high or low, about his premises, and when at length a hen or this year’s chicken had strayed far from the rest, it skimmed along and picked her up without pausing, and bore her off, the chicken not having seen him approach- ing. He found this, caught by one leg and frozen to death, in a trap which he had set for mink by a spring and baited with fish. This measures nineteen by forty-two inches and is, according to Wilson and Nuttall,a young Falco lineatus, or red-shouldered hawk. It might as well be called red or rusty breasted hawk.* Nuttall says it lives on frogs, crayfish, etc., and does not go far north, — not even to Massachusetts, he thought. Its note, kee-oo. He never saw one soar, at least in winter. According to all ac- counts Wilson’s Falco hyemalis is the old of this bird, for there is a remarkable difference between old and young. Mine agrees with Wilson’s F’. lineatus, or the young, except that the greater wing-coverts and secondaries are hardly what I should call “pale olive brown thickly spotted,” etc., but rather dusky-brown, somewhat indis- tinctly barred with whitish (which is pure white on each edge of the feathers) and edged with rusty; that the shafts of the breast-feathers are only dark-brown; that the tail is not quite black, but very dark brown, and is not ‘broadly tipped” with white, but only with a quarter of an inch of it; vent not “pale ochre,” but white; legs and feet hardly fine yellow, but dull green- ish-yellow; femorals as bright rusty as the breast. It differs from Wilson’s winter falcon, which is consid- ered by Audubon and Brewer the same as the lineatus, in not having what I should call a “tooth in the upper mandible; ’’ head, sides of neck, etc., hardly “streaked with white;’’ above, all primaries and exterior tail- feathers not “brownish orange,” and tail not “barred alternately with dark and pale brown,” and coverts not “white;” and what is very important, the breast and beneath is not “white.” Since Nuttall makes it a southern bird, and it is not likely to come north in the winter, it would seem that it breeds here. Farmer says that he saw what he calls the common hen-hawk, one soaring high with apparently a chicken in its claws, while a young hawk circled beneath, when former suddenly let drop the chicken, but the young failing to catch, he shot down like lightning and caught and bore off the falling chicken before it reached the earth.

The cold spell is over, and here this morning is a fog or mist; the wind, if there is any, I think, northerly; and there is built out horizontally on the north side of every twig and other surface a very re- markable sort of hoar frost, the crystallized fog, which is still increasing. Mr. Edwin Morton was telling me night before last of a similar phenomenon witnessed in central New York, the fog of highlands or mountains crystallizing in this way and forming a white fringe or frost on the trees even to an inch and a half. This is already full an inch deep on many trees, and gets to be much more, perhaps an inch and a half even, on some in the course of the day. It is quite rare here, at least on this scale. The mist lasts all this day, though it is far from warm (+ 11° at 8 a. M.), and till noon of the 14th, when it becomes rain, and all this time there is exceed- ingly little if any wind. I go to the river this morning and walk up it to see the trees and bushes along it. As the frostwork (which is not thin and transparent like ice, but white and snow-like, or between the distinctly leaf with veins and a mere aggregation of snow, though you easily distinguish the distinct leaves) is built out northward from each surface, spreading at 7 an angle of about forty-five de- grees, 2.e. some twenty-odd each side of the north, you must 27 A stand on the north side and look south at the trees, etc., when they appear, except the large limbs and trunk, wholly of snow or frostwork, mere ghosts of trees, seen softly against the mist for a back- ground. It is mist on mist. The outline and character of each tree is more distinctly exhibited, being exag- gerated, and you notice any peculiarity in the disposi- tion of the twigs. Some elm twigs, thus enlarged into snowy fingers, are strikingly regular and handsome, thus: In the case of most evergreens, it amounts to a very rich sugaring, be- ing so firmly attached. The weep- ing willow seems to weep with more remarkable and regular curve than ever, and stands still and white with thickened twigs, as if carved in white marble or alabaster. Those trees, like alders, which have not grown much the past year — which have short and angular twigs—are the richest in effect. The end of each alder twig is recurved where the drooping cat- kin is concealed. On one side you see the dark-brown fruit, but on the north that too is concealed. I can see about a quarter of a mile through the mist, and when, later, it 1s somewhat thinner, the woods, the pine woods, at a distance are a dark-blue color.

The fog-frosts and the fog continue, though considerable of the frostwork has fallen. This forenoon I walk up the Assabet to see it. The hemlocks are perhaps a richer sight than any tree, — such Christmas trees, thus sugared, as were never seen. On [sic] side you see more or less greenness, but when you stand due north they are unexpectedly white and rich, so beautifully still, and when you look under them you see some great rock, or rocks, all hoary with the same, and a finer frost on the very fine dead hemlock twigs there and on hanging roots and twigs, quite like the cobwebs in a grist-mill covered with meal, — and it implies a stillness like that; or it is like the light- est down glued on. The birch, from its outline and its numerous twigs, 1s also one of the prettiest trees in this dress.

P. M.— To Walden and thence via Cas- sandra Ponds to Fair Haven and down river. There is still a good deal of ice on the north sides of woods and in and about the sheltered swamps. As we go southwestward through the cassandra hollows toward the declining sun,’ they look successively, both by their form and color, like burnished silvery shields in the midst of which we walked, looking toward the sun. ‘he whole surface of the snow the country over, and of the ice, as yesterday, is rough, as if composed of hailstones half melted together. This being the case, I noticed yesterday, when walking on the river, that where there was little or no snow and this rough sur- face was accordingly dark, you might have thought that the ice was covered with cinders, from the innu- merable black points reflecting the dark water. My companion thought that cinders had fallen on that part of the ice. The snow which three-quarters conceals the cassan- dra in these ponds, and every twig and trunk and blade of withered sedge, is thus covered or cased with ice, and accordingly, as I have said, when you go facing the sun, the hollows look like a glittering shield set round with brilliants.1 That bent sedge in the midst of the shield, each particular blade of it being married to an icy wire twenty times its size at least, shines like pol- ished silver rings or semicircles. It must have been far more splendid here yesterday, before any of the ice fell off. No wonder my English companion? says that our scenery is more spirited than that of England. The snow-crust is rough with the wreck of brilliants under the trees, — an inch or two thick with them under many trees, where they last several days. When, this evening, I took a split hickory stick which was very slightly charred or scorched, but quite hot, out of my stove, I perceived a strong scent precisely like that of a burnt or roasted walnut, — as was natural enough.