7 March 1859 – 13 March 1859

6.30 a. m. — To Hill. I come out to hear a spring bird, the ground gen- erally covered with snow yet and the channel of the river only partly open. On the Hill I hear first the tap- ping of a small woodpecker. I then see a bird alight on the dead top of the highest white oak on the hilltop, on the topmost point. It is a shrike. While I am watch- ing him eight or ten rods off, I hear robins down be- low, west of the hill. Then, to my surprise, the shrike begins to sing. It is at first a wholly ineffectual and inarticulate sound without any solid tone to it, a mere hoarse breathing, as if he were clearing his throat, un- like any bird that I know, —a shrill hissing. Then he uttered a kind of mew, a very decided mewing, clear and wiry, between that of a catbird and the note of the nuthatch, as if to lure a nuthatch within his reach; then rose into the sharpest, shrillest vibratory or tremu- lous whistling or chirruping on the very highest key. This high gurgling jingle was like some of the notes of a robin singing in summer. But they were very short spurts in all these directions, though there was all this variety. Unless you saw the shrike it would be hard to tell what bird it was. This variety of notes covered considerable time, but were sparingly uttered with intervals. It was a decided chinking sound — the clearest strain — suggesting much ice in the stream. I heard this bird sing once before, but that was also in early spring, or about this time. It is said that they imitate the notes of the birds in order to attract them within their reach. Why, then, have I never heard them sing in the winter? (I have seen seven or eight of them the past winter quite near.) The birds which it imi- tated —if it imitated any this morning — were the catbird and the robin, neither of which probably would it catch, — and the first is not here to be caught. Hear- ing a peep, I looked up and saw three or four birds passing rather [sc], which suddenly descended and settled on this oak-top. They were robins, but the shrike in- stantly hid himself behind a bough and in half a min- ute flew off to a walnut and alighted, as usual, on its very topmost twig, apparently afraid of its visitors. The robins kept their ground, one alighting on the very point which the shrike vacated. Is not this, then, prob- ably the spring note or pairing note or notes of the shrike ? The first note which I heard from the robins, far under the hill, was sveet sveet, suggesting a certain haste and alarm, and then a rich, hollow, somewhat plain- tive peep or peep-eep-cep, as when in distress with young just flown. When you first see them alighted, they have a haggard, an anxious and hurried, look. I hear several jays this morning. I think that many of the nuts which we find in the crevices of bark, firmly wedged in, may have been placed there by jays, chickadees, etc., to be held fast while they crack them with their bills. ™ A lady tells me that she saw, last Cattle-Show Day, putting up a specimen of hairwork in a frame (by his niece) in the exhibition hall. I think it repre- sented flowers, and underneath was written “this Hare - was taken from 8 different heads.’’ She made some sort of exclamation, betraying that there was some mistake in the writing, whereupon took it down and carried it off, but soon came back with a new descrip- tion or label, “this hare was taken from 8 different heads,” and thus it stood through the exhibition. P. M. — To Ministerial Swamp. I hear of two who saw bluebirds this morning, and one says he saw one yesterday. This seems to have been the day of their general arrival here, but I have not seen one in Concord yet. It is a good plan to go to some old orchard on the south side of a hill, sit down, and listen, especially in the morning when all is still. You can thus often hear the distant warble of some bluebird lately arrived, which, if you had been walking, would not have been audible to you. As I walk, these first mild spring days, with my coat thrown open, stepping over tinkling rills of melting snow, excited by the sight of the bare ground, especially the reddish subsoil, where it is exposed by a cutting, and by the few green radical leaves, I stand still, shut my eyes, and listen from time to time, in order to hear the note of some bird of passage just arrived. There are few, if any, so coarse and insensible that they are not interested to hear that the bluebird has come. The Irish laborer has learned to distinguish him and report his arrival. It is a part of the news of the season to the lawyer in his office and the mechanic in his shop, as well as to the farmer. One will remem- ber, perchance, to tell you that he saw one a week ago in the next town or county. Citizens just come into the country to live put up a bluebird box, and record in some kind of journal the date of the first arrival observed, — though it may be rather a late one. The farmer can tell you when he saw the first one, if you ask him within a week. I see a great many of those glow-worm-like cater- pillars observed in the freshet in midwinter, on the snowy ice in the meadows and fields now; also small beetles of various kinds, and other caterpillars. I think this unusual number is owing to that freshet, which washed them out of their winter quarters so long ago, and they have never got back to them. I also see — but their appearance is a regular early spring, or late winter, phenomenon —a great many of those slender black-bodied insects from one quarter to (with the feelers) one inch long, with six legs and long gray wings, two feelers before, and two forks or tails like feelers ~~’ behind. The last are some- Cosas CC =e times concealed by the wings. This is what I have called for convenience Perla. They are crawling slowly about over the snow. I have no doubt that crows eat some of the above-named caterpillars, but do other birds ? eo The mystery of the life of plants is kindred with that of our own lives, and the physiologist must not presume to explain their growth according to mechan- ical laws, or as he might explain some machinery of his own making. We must not expect to probe with our fingers the sanctuary of any life, whether animal or vegetable. If we do, we shall discover nothing but surface still. The ultimate expression or fruit of any created thing is a fine effluence which only the most ingenuous worshipper perceives at a reverent distance from its surface even. ‘The cause and the effect are equally evanescent and intangible, and the former must be investigated in the same spirit and with the same reverence with which the latter is perceived. Science is often like the grub which, though it may have nestled in the germ of a fruit, has merely blighted or consumed it and never truly tasted it. Only that intellect makes any progress toward conceiving of the essence which at the same time perceives the effluence. The rude and ignorant finger is probing in the rind still, for in this case, too, the angles of incidence and excidence [sic] are equal, and the essence is as far on the other side of the surface, or matter, as reverence detains the worshipper on this, and only reverence can find out this angle instinctively. Shall we presume to alter the angle at which God chooses to be worshipped ? Accordingly, I reject Carpenter’s explanation of the fact that a potato vine in a cellar grows toward the light, when he says, “The reason obviously is, that, in con- sequence of the loss of fluid from the tissue of the stem, on the side on which the light falls, it is contracted, whilst that of the other side remains turgid with fluid; the stem makes a bend, therefore, until its growing point becomes opposite to the light, and then increases in that direction.” (C.’s ‘‘ Vegetable Physiology,” page 174.) : There is no ripeness which is not, so to speak, some- thing ultimate in itself, and not merely a perfected means to a higher end. In order to be ripe it must serve a transcendent use. The ripeness of a leaf, being per- fected, leaves the tree at that point and never returns to it. It has nothing to do with any other fruit which the tree may bear, and only the genius of the poet can pluck it. The fruit of a tree is neither in the seed nor the tim- ber, — the full-grown tree, — but it is simply the highest use to which it can be put.

A rainy day. P. M. —To Hill in rain. To us snow and cold seem a mere delaying of the spring. How far we are from understanding the value of these things in the economy of Nature! The earth is still mostly covered with ice and snow. As usual, I notice large pools of greenish water in the fields, on an icy bottom, which cannot owe their greenness to the reflected blue mingled witb the yellowish light at sundown, as I supposed in the case of the green ice and water in clear winter days, for I see the former now at midday and in a rain-storm, when no sky is visible. I think that these green pools over an icy bot- tom must be produced by the yellow or common earth- stain in the water mingling with the blue which is re- flected from the ice. Many pools have so large a propor- tion of this yellow tinge as not to look green but yellow. The stain, the tea, of withered vegetation — grass and leaves — and of the soil supplies the yellow tint. But perhaps those patches of emerald sky, sky just tinged with green, which we sometimes see, far in the horizon or near it, are produced in the same way as I thought the green ice was, — some yellow glow reflected from a cloud mingled with the blue of the atmosphere. One might say that the yellow of the earth mingled with the blue of the sky to make the green of vegetation. I see, under the pitch pines on the southwest slope of the hill, the reddish bud-scales scattered on the snow which fell on the 4th, and also settled an inch into it, and, examining, I find that in a great many cases the buds have been eaten by some creature and the scales scattered about, or, being opened, have closed over a cavity. Many scales rest amid the needles. There is no track on the snow, which is soft, but the scales must have been dropped within a day or two. I see near one pine, however, the fresh track of a partridge and where one has squatted all night. Tracks might possibly have been obliterated by the rapid melting of the snow the last day or two. Yet I am inclined to think that these were eaten by the red squirrel; or was it the crossbill? for this is said to visit us in the winter. Have I ever seen a squirrel eat the pine buds?! There is a fine freezing rain with strong wind from the north; so I keep along under shelter of hills and woods, along their south sides, in my india-rubber coat and boots. Under the south edge of Woodis Park, in the low ground, I see many radical leaves of the So- lidago altissima and another — I am pretty sure it is the S. stricta —and occasionally also of the Aster undulatus, and all are more or less lake beneath. The first, at least, have when bruised a strong scent. Some of them have recently grown decidedly. So at least several kinds of goldenrods and asters have radical leaves lake-colored at this season. ‘The common straw- berry leaves, too, are quite fresh and a handsome lake- color beneath in many cases. ‘There are also many little rosettes of the radical leaves of the Epilobium coloratum, half brown and withered, with bright-green centres, at least. And even the under side of some mul- lein leaves is lake or crimson also. There is but a narrow strip of bare ground reach- ing a few rods into the wood along the south edge, but the less ground there is bare, the more we make of it. Such a day as this, I resort where the partridges, etc., do —to the bare ground and the sheltered sides of woods and hills — and there explore the moist ground for the radical leaves of plants, while the storm blows overhead, and I forget how the time is passing. If the weather is thick and stormy enough, if there is a good chance to he cold and wet and uncomfortable, in other words to feel weather-beaten, you may consume the afternoon to advantage thus browsing along the edge of some near wood which would scarcely detain you at all in fair weather, and you will [be] as far away there as at the end of your longest fair-weather walk, and come home as if from an adventure. There is no better fence to put between you and the village than a storm into which the villagers do not venture out. I go looking for green radical leaves. What a dim and shadowy existence have now to our memories the fair flowers whose localities they mark! How hard to find any trace of the stem now, after it has been flattened under the snows of the winter! I go feeling with wet and freezing fingers amid the withered grass and the snow for these prostrate stems, that I may reconstruct the plant. But greenness so absorbs our attention that sometimes I do not see the former rising from the midst of those radical leaves when it almost puts my eyes out. The shepherd’s-purse radical leaves are particu- larly bright. I see there a dead white pine, some twenty-five feet high, which has been almost entirely stripped of its bark by the woodpeckers. Where any bark is left, the space between it and the wood is commonly closely packed with the gnawings of worms, which appear to have consumed the inner bark. But where the bark is gone, the wood also is eaten to some depth, and there are numerous holes penetrating deep into the wood. Over all this portion, which is almost all the tree, the wood- peckers have knocked off the bark and enlarged the holes in pursuit of the worms. The fine rain with a strong north wind is now form- ing a glaze on my coat. When I get home the ther- mometer is at 29°. Soa glaze seems to be formed when a fine rain is falling with the thermometer very little below the freezing-point. Men of science, when they pause to contemplate “the power, wisdom, and goodness” of God, or, as they sometimes call him, “the Almighty Designer,” speak of him as a total stranger whom it is necessary to treat with the highest consideration. ‘They seem suddenly to have lost their wits.

P. M. — To Lee’s Cliff with C. C. says that he heard and saw a bluebird on the 7th, and R. W. E. the same. This was the day on which they were generally observed. I am doubtful about one having been seen on the 20th of February by a boy, as stated February 23d. C. also saw a skater- insect on the 7th, and a single blackbird flying over Cassandra Ponds, which he thought a grackle. A true spring day, not a cloud in the sky. The earth shines, its icy armor reflecting the sun, and the rills of melting snow in the ruts shine, too, and water, where exposed in the right light on the river, is a remarkably living blue, just as the osiers appear brighter. Yet it is cool and raw and very windy. The ice over the chan- nel of the river, when not quite melted, is now gener- ally mackerelled (the water representing the blue por- aS —™, <5 = Ee o— ee tions) with parallel openings, riddling it or leaving a sort of network of ice over it, answering to the ridges of the waves. You can best observe them from bridges. In some cases the snow upon the ice, having lain in successive drifts, might also assist or modify this phe- nomenon. The rain of yesterday has been filling the meadows again, flowing up under the dry ice of the winter freshet, which for the most part rested on the ground, and so this rise is at first the less observed until it shows itself beyond the edge of the ice. At Corner Spring Brook the water reaches up to the crossing and stands over the ice there, the brook being open and some space on each side of it. When I look, from forty or fifty rods off, at the yellowish water covering the ice about a foot here, it is decidedly purple (though, when close by and looking down on it, it is yellowish merely), while the water of the brook- channel and a rod on each side of it, where there is no ice beneath, is a beautiful very dark blue. These colors are very distinct, the line of separation being the edge of the ice on the bottom, and this apparent juxtaposi- tion of different kinds of water is a very singular and pleasing sight. You see a light-purple flood, about the color of a red grape, and a broad channel of dark-pur- ple water, as dark as a common blue-purple grape, sharply distinct across its middle. I see at Lee’s the long, narrow radical leaves of the Turritis stricta Just beginning to push their shoots, — the most forward-looking plant there. We cross Fair Haven Pond on the ice, though it is difficult getting on and off, it being melted about the edges, as well as overflowed there. It is worth while to hear the wind roar in the woods to-day. It sounds further off than it is. Came across a stout and handsome woodchopper with a full dark or black beard, but that on his upper lip was a distinct sandy color. It was a very pleasing contrast, suggesting a sympathy with the centre of light and intelligence nearer to which it grew.

6 a. m.— To Hill. I see at near [sic] the stone bridge where the strong northwest wind of last night broke the thin ice just formed, and set the irregular triangular pieces on their edges quite perpendicular and directed northwest and southeast and pretty close together, about nine inches high, for half a dozen rods, like a dense fleet of schooners with their mainsails set. And already, when near the road, I hear the warble of my first Concord bluebird, borne to me from the hill through the still morning air, and, looking up, I see him plainly, though so far away, a dark speck in the top of a walnut. When I reach the Assabet above the Hemlocks, I hear a loud crashing or brattling sound, and, looking through the trees, see that it is the thin ice of the night, half an hour after sunrise, now swiftly borne down the stream in large fleets and going to wreck against the thick old ice on each side. This evidently is a phenomenon of the morning. The river, too, has just waked up, and, no doubt, a river in midsummer as well as in winter recognizes the advent of the morn- ing as much as a man or an animal does. They retire at night and awake in the morning. Looking northeast over Hosmer’s meadow, I see still the rosy light reflected from the low snow-spits, alternating with green ice there. Apparently because the angles of incidence and excidence are equal, there- fore we see the green in ice at sundown when we look aslant over the ice, our visual ray making such an angle with it as the yellow light from the western horizon does in coming to it. P. M. — To Witherell Vale. There are some who never do nor say anything, whose life merely excites expectation. Their excellence reaches no further than a gesture or mode of carrying them- selves. They are a sash dangling from the waist, or a sculptured war-club over the shoulder. They are like fine-edged tools gradually becoming rusty in a shop-window. I like as well, if not better, to see a piece of iron or steel, out of which many such tools will be made, or the bush-whack in a man’s hand.! When I meet gentlemen and ladies, I am reminded of the extent of the inhabitable and uninhabitable globe; I exclaim to myself, Surfaces! surfaces! If the outside of a man is so variegated and extensive, what must the inside be? You are high up the Platte River, tra- versing deserts, plains covered with soda, with no deeper hollow than a prairie-dog hole tenanted also by owls and venomous snakes.

6 A. mM. — By riverside I hear the song of many song sparrows, the most of a song of any yet. And on the swamp white oak top by the stone bridge, I see and hear a red-wing. It sings almost steadily on its perch there, sitting all alone, as if to attract com- panions (and I see two more, also solitary, on different tree-tops within a quarter of a mile), calling the river to life and tempting ice to melt and trickle like its own sprayey notes. Another flies over on high, with a tchuck and at length a clear whistle. The birds an- ticipate the spring; they come to melt the ice with their songs. But methinks the sound of the woodpecker tapping is as much a spring note as any these mornings; it echoes peculiarly in the air of a spring morning. P. M. — To Hunt house. I go to get one more sight of the old house which Hosmer is pulling down, but I am too late to see much of it. The chimney is gone and little more than the oblong square frame stands. E. Hosmer and Nathan Hosmer are employed taking it down. The latter draws all the nails, however crooked, and puts them in his pockets, for, beg wrought ones, he says it is worth the while.

Saturday. P. M.— Walk in rain to Min- isterial Swamp. Going up the railroad in this rain, with a south wind, I see a pretty thick low fog extending across the rail- road only against Dennis’s Swamp. There being much more ice and snow within the swamp, the vapor is con- densed and is blown northward over the railroad. I see these local fogs with always the same origin, 7. ¢., large masses of snow or ice, in swamps or woods, per- haps the north sides of hills, in several places after- ward. The air is warm. As often as we came to a par- ticularly icy or snowy place, as Harrington’s road in woods, we found ourselves in a fog. It is a regular spring rain, such as I remember walk- ing in, — windy but warm. It alternately rains hard and then holds up a little. A similar alternation we see in the waves of water and all undulating surfaces, —ain snow and sand and the clouds (the mackerel sky). Now you walk in a comparative lull, anticipat- ing fair weather, with but a slight drizzling, and anon the wind blows and the rain drives down harder than ever. In one of these lulls, as I passed the Joe Hosmer (rough-cast) house, I thought I never saw any bank so handsome as the russet hillside behind it. It is a very barren, exhausted soil, where the cladonia lichens abound, and the lower side is a flowing sand, but this russet grass with its weeds, being saturated with mois- ture, was in this light the richest brown, methought, that I ever saw. There was the pale brown of the grass, red browns of some weeds (sarothra and pinweed probably), dark browns of huckleberry and sweet-fern stems, and the very visible green of the cladonias thirty rods off, and the rich brown fringes where the broken sod hung over the edge of the sand-bank. I did not see the browns of withered vegetation so rich last fall, and methinks these terrestrial lichens were never more fair and prominent. On some knolls these vivid and rampant lichens as it were dwarf the oaks. A pecul- iar and unaccountable light seemed to fall on that bank or hillside, though it was thick storm all around. A sort of Newfoundland sun seemed to be shining on it. It was such a light that you looked around for the sun that might be shining on it. Both the common largest and the very smallest hypericums (Sarothra) and the pinweeds were very rich browns at a little distance, coloring whole fields, and also withered and fallen ferns, reeking wet. It was a prospect to excite a reindeer. These tints of brown were as softly and richly fair and sufficing as the most brilliant autumnal tints.’ In fair and dry weather these spots may be common- place, but now they are worthy to tempt the painter’s brush. The picture should be the side of a barren lichen-clad hill with a flowing sand-bank beneath, a few blackish huckleberry bushes here and there, and bright white patches of snow here and there in the ra- vines, the hill running east and- west and seen through the storm from a point twenty or thirty rods south. This kind of light, the air being full of rain and all vegetation dripping with it, brings out the browns wonderfully.” I notice now particularly the sallows by the railroad, full of dark cones, as a fruit. The broad radical leaves of (apparently) water dock are very fresh and con- spicuous. : See two ducks flying over Ministerial Swamp. In one place in the meadow southeast of Tarbell’s, [ find on the ice, about a couple of holes an inch across where a little stubble shows itself, a great many small ants dead, — say a thousand. They are strewn about the holes for six or eight inches, and are collected in a dense heap about the base of the stubble. I take up a mass of them on my knife, each one entire, but now, of course, all wet and adhering together. It looks as if they had been tempted out by the warmth of the sun and had been frozen or drowned; or is it possible that they were killed by the frost last fall and now washed up through the ice? I think, from their position around the base of the stubble in that little hole in the ice, that they came out of the earth and clustered there since the ice melted to that extent. There are many other insects and worms and caterpillars (and espe- cially spiders, dead) on the ice, there as well as else- where. I perceive that a freshet which washes the earth bare in the winter and causes a great flow of water over it in that state — when it is not soaked up— must de- stroy a great many insects and worms. I find a great many that appear to have been drowned rather than frozen. May not this have tempted the bluebirds on early this year?

7 a. mM. — F. hyemalis in yard. Going down railroad, listening intentionally, I hear, far through the notes of song sparrows (which are very numerous), the song of one or two larks. Also hearing a coarse chuck, I look up and see four black- birds, whose size and long tails betray them crow blackbirds. Also I hear, I am pretty sure, the cackle of a pigeon woodpecker. The bright catkins of the willow are the springing most generally observed. P. M. — To Great Fields. Water rising still. Winter-freshet ice on meadows still more lifted up and partly broken in some places. The broad light artery of the river (and some meadows, too) very fair in the distance from Peter’s. Talking with Garfield to-day about his trapping, he said that mink brought three dollars and a quarter, a remarkably high price, and asked if I had seen any. I said that I commonly saw two or three in a year. He said that he had not seen one alive for eight or ten years. “But you trap them?” “O yes,” he said. “I catch thirty or forty dollars’ worth every winter.” This suggests how little a trapper may see of his game. Gar- field caught a skunk lately. In some meadows I see a great many dead spiders on the ice, where apparently it has been overflowed — or rather it was the heavy rain, methinks — when they had no retreat. Hear a ground squirrel’s sharp chirrup, which makes you start, it is so sudden; but he is probably earthed again, for I do not see him. On the northeast part of the Great Fields, I find the broken shell of a Crstudo Blandingit, on very dry soil. This is the fifth, then, I have seen in the town. All the rest were three in the Great Meadows (one of them in a ditch) and one within a rod or two of Beck Stow’s Swamp. It is remarkable that the spots where I find most arrowheads, etc., being light, dry soil, — as the Great Fields, Clamshell Hill, etc., —are among the first to be bare of snow, and the frost gets out there first. It is very curiously and particularly true, for the only parts of the northeast section of the Great Fields which are so dry that I do not slump there are those small in area, where perfectly bare patches of sand occur, and there, singularly enough, the arrowheads are particu- larly common. Indeed, in some cases I find them only on such bare spots a rod or two in extent where a sin- gle wigwam might have stood, and not half a dozen rods off in any direction. Yet the difference of level may not be more than a foot, —if there is any. It is as if the Indians had selected precisely the driest spots on the whole plain, with a view to their advantage at this season. If you were going to pitch a tent to-night on the Great Fields, you would inevitably pitch on one of these spots, or else lie down in water or mud or on ice. It is as if they had chosen the site of their wigwams at this very season of the year. I see a small flock of blackbirds flying over, some rising, others falling, yet all advancing together, one flock but many birds, some silent, others tchucking, — incessant alternation. This harmonious movement as in a dance, this agreeing to differ, makes the charm of the spectacle to me. One bird looks fractional, naked, like a single thread or ravelling from the web to which it belongs. Alternation! Alternation! Heaven and hell! Here again in the flight of a bird, its ricochet mo- tion, is that undulation observed in so many materials, as in the mackerel sky. If men were to be destroyed and the books they have written [were to] be transmitted to a new race of crea- tures, in a new world, what kind of record would be found in them of so remarkable a phenomenon as the rainbow ? I cannot easily forget the beauty of those terrestrial browns in the rain yesterday. The withered grass was not of that very pale hoary brown that it is to-day, now that it is dry and lifeless, but, being perfectly saturated and dripping with the rain, the whole hillside seemed to reflect a certain yellowish light, so that you looked around for the sun in the midst of the storm. All the yellow and red and leather-color in the fawn-colored weeds was more intense than at any other season. The withered ferns which fell last fall — pinweeds, saro- thra, etc. — were actually a glowing brown for the same reason, being all dripping wet. The cladonias crowning the knolls had visibly expanded and erected themselves, though seen twenty rods off, and the knolls appeared swelling and bursting as with yeast. All these hues of brown were most beautifully blended, so that the earth appeared covered with the softest and most harmoniously spotted and tinted tawny fur coat of any animal. The very bare sand slopes, with only here and there a thin crusting of mosses, was [sic] a richer color than ever it Is. In short, in these early spring rains, the withered herbage, thus saturated, and reflecting its brightest withered tint, seems in a certain degree to have revived, and sympathizes with the fresh greenish or yellowish or brownish lichens in its midst, which also seem to have withered. It seemed to me — and I think it may be the truth —that the abundant moisture, bringing out the highest color in the brown surface of the earth, generated a certain degree of light, which, when the rain held up a little, reminded you of the sun shining through a thick mist. Oak leaves which have sunk deep into the ice now are seen to be handsomely spotted with black (of fungi or lichens?), which spots are rarely perceived in dry weather. All that vegetable life which loves a superfluity of moisture is now rampant, cold though it is, compared with summer. Radical leaves are as bright as ever they are. The barrenest surfaces, perhaps, are the most in- teresting in such weather as yesterday, when the most terrene colors are seen. The wet earth and sand, and especially subsoil, are very invigorating sights. The Hunt house, to draw from memory, — though I have given its measures within two years in my Jour- nal, — looked like this: — This is only generally correct, without a scale. Probably grackles have been seen some days. I think I saw them on the 11th? Garfield says he saw black ducks yesterday.