25 April 1853 – 1 May 1853

Haverhill. — The warbling vireo. Talked with a fisherman at the Burrough [szc], who was cracking and eating walnuts on a post before his hut. He said he got twenty cents a stick for saw- ing marked logs, which were mostly owned at Lowell, but trees that fell in and whatever was not marked belonged to them. Much went by in the ice and could not be got. They haul it in and tie it. He called it Little Concord where I lived. They got some small stuff which came from that river, and said he knew the ice, it was blue (it is not) and was turned over by the falls. The Lawrence dam breaks up the ice so now that it will not be so likely to jam below and pro- duce a freshet. Said a thousand dollars’ damage was done by a recent freshet to the farm just above, at the great bend. The .wind blowing on to the shore ate it away, trees and all. In the greatest freshet he could remember, methinks about ten years ago, the water came up to his window-sill. His family took refuge on the hillside. His barn was moved and tipped over, his well filled up, and it took him, with help, a day or more to clear a passage through the ice from his door to his well. His trees were all prostrated by the ice. ‘This was apparently between twenty and thirty feet above the present level. Says the railroad bridge hurts the fishing by stopping the ice and wearing away and deepening the channel near the north shore, where they fish,— draw their seines. Call it sixty rods wide, — their seines being thirty rods long, — and twenty-five feet deep in the middle. Interesting to me are their habits and conversation who live along the shores of a great river. The shore, here some seventy or eighty feet high, is broken by gullies, more or less sandy, where water has flowed down, and the cottages rise not more than one sixth or one seventh the way up.

Return to Concord. At Natural History Rooms in Boston. Have I seen the least bittern? It is so brown above and yellowish, woolly, white beneath. The American goshawk is slate above, gray beneath; the young spotted dark and white beneath, and brown above. Fish hawk, white be- neath. Young of marsh hawk, reddish-brown above, iron-rusty beneath. Summer duck with a crest. Dusky duck, not black, but rather dark brown. The vel- vet ducks I saw, hardly large enough for this. My whiter ducks may be the Merganser castor, or the red- breasted.

Concord. — Cultivated cherry in bloom. Moses Emerson, the kind and gentlemanly man who assisted and looked after me in Haverhill, said that a good horse was worth $75, and all above was fancy, and that when he saw a man driving a fast horse he expected he would fail soon.

Sunday. A cold northwest wind. Now, on my return to Concord, I am struck by the increased greenness of the country, or landscape. I find that since I left Concord, April 11th, there have blossomed here, probably nearly in the follow- ing order, these plants, including those I saw in Haver- hill: dandelion, field horse-tail, Antennaria plantagi- nifolia, sweet-gale, epigza, Populus grandidentata, Salix tristis, Viola ovata (Ellen Emerson found it April 20th), Potentilla Canadensis, comptonia, Tha- lictrrum anemonoides, Anemone nemorosa, V. blanda, P. balsamifera, Aquilegia Canadensis, Hedyotis ceru- lea, andromeda, Fragaria Virginiana (?) (distinguished from the other species in fruit), Salix alba, benzoin, Amelanchier Canadensis var. Botryapiwm. Peach, cultivated cherry, and the following apparently just begun: Viola pedata, Ostrya Virginica, V. cucullata (Ellen Emerson says she saw it the 30th wli.; it is to be looked for at Depot Field Brook). And Rumex Acetosella shows red and is eight inches high on Colum- bine Cliff. The expanding leaves of the sugar maples now make small crosses against the sky. Other conspicu- ous green leaves are the gooseberry, currant, elder, the willows just beginning, and alder, and apple trees and high blackberry, amelanchier, meadow-sweet, beside many herbaceous plants. Drosera (round- leaved) leaves now. Sedge-grass (early sedge) very abundant still. The Vacciniwm Pennsylvanicum is. just ready to bloom and also the vacillans nearly. These things observed on way — To Cliffs. The oak leaves on the plain are fallen. The colors are now: light blue above (where is my cyanometer? Saussure invented one, and Humboldt used it in his travels); landscape russet and greenish, spotted with fawn-colored plowed lands, with green pine and gray or reddish oak woods intermixed, and dark-blue or slate-colored water here and there. It is greenest in the meadows and where water has lately stood, and a strong, invigorating scent comes up from the fresh meadows. It is like the greenness of an apple faintly or dimly appearing through the russet. A phcebe’s nest and one cream-colored white egg at the spring-house; nest of mud, lined with grass and edged with hypnum. Channing has seen a robin’s nest and eggs. I hear a black and white creeper at the Cliffs, and a chewink. The shrub oaks are well budded. The young ivy leaves are red on Cliffs. Oaks and hickory buds just ready to open. How aromatic the balm-of-Gilead buds now! The large woolly ferns and others stand up a foot on banks. The skunk-cabbage leaves green the warm, springy meads. Was it not the black and yellow or spotted warbler I saw by the Corner Spring? Apparently black, brown- striped, with a yellow rump and also yellow wing, shoulders, and sides of breast, with a large black spot on breast; size of phoebe nearly; note somewhat like yellowbird. Yet I think it much too dark for the myrtle-bird. Columbine Cliff a place to look for early rue anem- ones and nemorosa and dandelions. The columbines have been out some days. How ornamental to these dark-colored perpendicular cliffs, nodding from the clefts and shelves! The barn swallow is about. Have we the Viola lanceolata? ? Is not the Botry- apium our earliest variety of amelanchier, and what difference in the fruit? Channing says he has heard the wood thrush, brown thrasher, and stake-driver (?), since I have been gone. This and last page for birds which I find come in the interval. Did I not see the oven-bird yester- day? - May 2. Summer yellowbird on the opening Saliz alba. Chimney swallows and the bank or else cliff ditto. Small pewee? Our earliest gooseberry in garden has bloomed. What is that pondweed-like plant floating in a pool near Breed’s, with a slender stem and linear leaves and a small whorl of minute leaves on the surface, and nutlets in the axils of the leaves, along the stem, as if now out of bloom?! Missouri currant.