26 February 1855 – 4 March 1855

Still clear and cold and windy. No thaw- ing of the ground during the day. This and the last two or three days have been very blustering and un- pleasant, though clear. P. M. — To Clamshell Hill, across river. I see some cracks in a plowed field, — Depot Field corn-field, — maybe recent ones. I think since this last cold snap, else I had noticed them before. ‘Those great cakes of ice which the last freshet floated up on to uplands now lie still further from the edge of the recent ice. You are surprised to see them lying with perpendicular edges a foot thick on bare, grassy upland where there is no other sign of water, sometimes wholly isolated by bare grass there. In the last freshet the South Branch was only broken up on the meadows for a few rods in width next the shores. Where the ice did not rise with the water, but, appar- ently being frozen to the dry bottom, was covered by the water, — there and apparently in shallow places here, then far from the shore, the ground ice was at length broken and rose up in cakes, larger or smaller, the smaller of which were often floated up higher on to the shore by a rod or so than the ice had originally reached. Then, the water going down, when the weather became colder and froze, the new ice only reached part way up these cakes, which lay high and dry. It is therefore pretty good skating on the river itself and on a greater part of the meadows next the river, but it is interrupted by great cakes of ice rising above the general level near the shore. Saw several of those rather small reddish-brown dor-bugs on the ice of the meadow, some frozen in. Were they washed out of their winter quarters by the freshet? Or can it be that they came forth of their own accord on the 22d? I cannot revive them by a fire. C. says he saw a lark to-day close to him, and some other dark-colored spring bird. Directly off Clamshell Hill, within four rods of it, where the water is three or four feet deep, I see where the musquash dived and brought up clams before the last freezing. Their open shells are strewn along close to the edge of the ice, and close together, for about three rods in one place, and the bottom under this edge of older ice, as seen through the new black ice, is perfectly white with those which sank. They may have been blown in, or the ice melted. The nacre of these freshly opened shells is very fair, — azure, or else a delicate salmon pink (?), or rosaceous, or violet. I find one not opened, but frozen, and several have one valve quite broken in two in the rat’s effort to wrench them open, leaving the frozen fish half ex- posed. All the rest show the marks of their teeth at one end or the other, 2. e., sometimes at one end, some- times at another. You can see distinctly, also, the marks of their teeth where they have scraped off, with a scrap- ing cut, the tough muscles which fasten the fish to its shell, also sometimes all along the nacre next the edge. One shell has apparently a little caddis-case of iron- colored sand on it. These shells look uncommonly large thus exposed; at a distance like leaves. They lie thickly around the edge of each small circle of thinner black ice in the midst of the white, showing where was open water a day or two ago. At the beginning and end of winter, when the river is partly open, the ice serves them instead of other stool. Some are red- dish-brown in thick and hard layers like iron ore out- side; some have roundish copper-colored spots on the nacre within. This shows that this is still a good place for clams, as it was in Indian days. Examined with glass some fox-dung (?) from a tussock of grass amid the ice on the meadow. It ap- peared to be composed two thirds of clay, and the rest a slate-colored fur and coarser white hairs, black-tipped, — too coarse for the deer mouse. Was it that of the rabbit? This mingled with small bones. A mass as long as one’s finger.

Another cold, clear day, but the weather gradually moderating.

Still cold and clear. Ever since the 23d inclusive a succession of clear but very cold days in which, for the most part, it has not melted perceptibly during the day. My ink has frozen, and plants, etc., have frozen in the house, though the thermometer has not indicated nearly so great a cold as before. Since the 25th it has been very slowly moderating. The skating began again the 24th after the great freshet had gone down some two feet or more, but that part of the old ice which was broken up by the freshet and floated from its place, either on to the up- land or meadow or on to the firm ice, made it remark- ably broken and devious, not to be used by night. The deep bays and sides of the meadows have pre- sented a very remarkable appearance, a stretching pack of great cakes of ice, often two or more upon each other and partly tilted up, a foot thick and one to two or more rods broad. The westering sun reflected from their edges makes them shine finely. In short, our meadows have presented and still present a very wild and arctic scene. Far on every side, over what is usually dry land, are scattered these great cakes of ice, the water having now gone down about five feet on the South Branch. P. M. — To further railroad bridge and Ministerial Swamp. m ch I see that same kind of icicle terracing “24 about the piers of Wood’s Bridge and others that I saw, I think, last spring, but not now quite so perfect, as if where the water had stood at successive levels. The lower edge now about a foot or two above water. Examined where the white maple and the apple tree were tipped over by the ice the other day at the railroad bridge. It struck them seven or eight feet from the ground, that being the height of the water, rubbed off the bark, and then bent flat and broke them. They were about ten inches in diameter, the maple partly dead before. I see where many trees have been wounded by the ice in former years. They have a hard time of it when a cake half a dozen rods in diameter and nearly two feet thick is floated and blown against them. Just south of Derby’s Bridge lie many great cakes, some one upon another, which were stopped by the bridge and causeway, and a great many have a crust of the meadow of equal thickness — six inches to one foot — frozen to their under surfaces. Some of these are a rod in diameter, and when the ice melts, the meadow where they are landed will present a singu- lar appearance. I see many also freshly deposited on the Elfin Burial-Ground, showing how that was formed. The greater part of those hummocks there are prob- ably, if not certainly, carried by the ice, though I now see a few small but thick pieces of meadow four or five feet broad without any ice or appearance of its having been attached to them. This is a powerful agent at work. Many great cakes have lodged on a ridge of the meadow west of the river here, and sug- gest how such a ridge may be growing from year to year. This North River is only partially open. I see where a bright gleam from a cake of ice on the shore is re- flected in the stream with remarkable brightness, in a pointed, flame-like manner. Look either side you see it. Standing here, still above the Elfin Burial- Ground, the outlines of Heywood the miller’s house in the distance against the pine and oak woods come dimly out, and by their color are in very pleasing har- mony with this wood. I think it is a dull-red house against the usual mixture of red oak leaves and dark pines. There is such a harmony as between the gray limbs of an overshadowing elm and the lichen-clad roof. We crossed the river at Nut Meadow Brook. The ice was nearly worn through all along there, with wave- like regularity, in oblong (round end) or thick crescent or kidney shaped holes, as if worn by the summits of waves, — like a riddle to sift a man through. These » holes are hard to detect in some lights except by shaking the water. I saw some 0 0 thick, lodged with one end on the top of f a fence-post and some seven or eight feet 9 { 0 in the air, the other on the bottom. There is a fine pack of large cakes away in the bay behind Hubbard’s Grove. I notice, looking at their edges, that the white or rotted part extends downward in points or triangles, alternating with the sound greenish parts, thus: — MAT Wc Most, however, are a thin white, or maybe snow ice, with all beneath solid and green still. Found a hangbird’s nest fallen from the ivy maple, composed wholly of that thread they wipe the loco- motive with! and one real thread, all as it were woven into a perfect bag. I have a piece of a limb (alder or maple ?), say five eighths of an inch in diameter, which has been cut off by a worm boring spirally, but in one horizontal plane, three times round. I observed how a new ravine is formed in a sand- hill. A new one was formed in the last thaw at Clam- shell Hill thus: Much melted snow and rain being col- lected on the top of the hill, some apparently found its 1 “Cotton waste.”

10 a. m. — To Derby’s Bridge and return by Sam Barrett’s, to see ice cakes and meadow crust. The last day for skating. It is a very pleasant and warm day, the finest yet, with considerable coolness in the air, however, — winter still. The air is beauti- fully clear, and through [it] I love to trace at a distance the roofs and outlines of sober-colored farmhouses amid the woods. We go listening for bluebirds, but only hear crows and chickadees. A fine seething air over the fair russet fields. The dusty banks of snow by the railroad reflect a wonderfully dazzling white from their pure crannies, being melted into an uneven, sharp, wavy surface. This more dazzling white must be due to the higher sun. I see some thick cakes of ice where an ice-car has broken up. In one I detect a large bubble four inches in diameter about a foot be- neath the upper surface and six inches from the lower. In confirmation of my theory, the grain of the ice, as indicated by the linear bubbles within it, was converging beneath this bubble, as wt, a < [% pli! Soar e A Ie ota [*4 7 ey the rays of light under a burning- Riyal eae glass, and what was the under 6 mw surface at that time was melted in a concave manner to within one and a half inches of the bubble, as appeared by the curvature in the horizontal grain of the more recently formed ice be- neath. I omit to draw the other horizontal grain. The situation of this bubble also suggests that ice perhaps increases more above than below the plane of its first freezing in the course of a winter, by the addi- tion of surface water and snow ice.

Another still, warm, beautiful day like yesterday. 9 a. M. — To Great Meadows to see the ice. Saw yesterday one of those small slender-winged insects on the ice. A. Wright says that about forty years ago an acre of meadow was carried off at one time by the ice on the Colburn place. D. Clark tells me he saw a piece of meadow, on his part of the Great Meadows, five or six rods square, which had been taken up in one piece and set down again a little distance off. I observe that where there is plowed ground much of it has been washed over the neigh- boring grass ground to a great distance, discoloring it. The Great Meadows, as all the rest, are one great field of ice a foot thick to their utmost verge, far up the hillsides and into the swamps, sloping upward there, without water under it, resting almost every- where on the ground; a great undulating field of ice, rolling prairie-like,—the earth wearing this dry, icy shield or armor, which shines in the sun. Over brooks and ditches, perhaps, and in many other places, the ice, a foot thick in some places, is shoved (?) or puffed up in the form of a pent-roof, in some places three feet high and stretching twenty or thirty rods. There is certainly more ice than can lie flat there, as if the adjacent ices had been moved toward each other. Yet this general motion is not likely, and it is more probably the result of the expansion of the ice under the sun and of the warmth of the water (?) there. In many places the ice is dark and transparent, and you see plainly the bottom on which it lies. The various figures in the partially rotted ice are very interesting, — white bubbles which look like coins of various sizes overlapping each other; €Qpo» parallel waving lines, with sometimes very slight intervals, on the under side of sloping white ice, marking the successive levels at which the water has stood; Se me SS also countless white cleavages, perpendicular or in- clined, straight and zigzag, meeting and crossing each other at all possible angles, and making all kinds of geometrical figures, checkering the whole surface, like white frills or ruffles in the ice. (At length the ice melts on the edge of these cleavages into little gut- ters which catch the snow.) There is the greatest noise from the ice cracking about 10 a. M., yesterday and to-day. Where the last year’s shoots or tops of the young white maples, at the Salia Purshiana shore, are brought together, as I walk, into a mass, a quarter of a mile off, with the sun on them, they present a fine dull- scarlet streak. Young twigs are thus more florid than the old wood, as if from their nearness to the flower, or like the complexion of children. You see thus a fine dash of red or scarlet against the distant hills, which near at hand or in their midst is wholly unob- servable. I go listening, but in vain, for the warble of a bluebird from the old orchard across the river. I love to look now at the fine-grained russet hillsides in the sun, ready to relieve and contrast with the azure of the bluebirds. I made a burning-glass of ice, which produced a slight sensation of warmth on the back of my hand, but was so untrue that it did not concentrate the rays to a sufficiently small focus. Returning over Great Fields, found half a dozen arrowheads, one with three scallops in the base. If we have a consid- erable freshet before the ice melts much, appar- ently much meadow crust will be moved on the South Branch. There is about six inches of frost in the swamps. Heard two hawks scream. There was something truly March-like in it, like a prolonged blast or whis- tling of the wind through a crevice in the sky, which, like a cracked blue saucer, overlaps the woods. Such are the first rude notes which prelude the summer’s quire, learned of the whistling March wind.

Saturday. P. M. —'To Conantum. This afternoon it is somewhat overcast for the first time since February 18th inclusive. I see a dirty-white miller fluttering about over the winter-rye patch next to Hubbard’s Grove. A few rods from the broad pitch pine beyond, I find a cone which was probably dropped by a squirrel in the fall, for I see the marks of its teeth where it was cut off; and it has probably been buried by the snow till now, for it has apparently just opened, and I shake its seeds out. Not only is this cone, resting upright on the ground, fully blossomed, a very beautiful object, but the winged seeds which half fill my hand, small triangular black seeds with thin and delicate flesh- colored wings, remind me of fishes, — alewives, per- chance, — their tails more or less curved. LL. » I do not show the curve of the tail. Isee, “—. in another place under a pitch pine, many cores of cones which the squirrels have completely stripped of their scales, excepting the (about) three at extremity which cover no seeds, cutting them off regularly at the seeds or close to the core, leaving it in this form, or more regular: — ' From some partially stripped I see that they begin at the base. ‘These you find left on and about stumps where they have sat, and under the pines. Most fallen pitch pine cones show the marks of squirrels’ teeth, showing they were cut off. Day before yesterday there was good skating, and it was a beautiful warm day for it. Yesterday the ice began to be perceptibly softened. To-day it is too soft for skating. I might have said on the 2d that though it is warm there is no trouble about getting on to the river, for, the water having fallen about six feet on the South Branch, the ice, about a foot thick, slopes upward in many places half a dozen rods or more on to the upland, like the side of an earthen milk-pan, and you do not know when you have passed the water-line. Also I noticed yesterday that the ice, along the river- edge at the Great Meadows, still clinging to the alders and maples three or four feet from the ground, was remarkably transparent and solid, or without bubbles, like purest crystal, not rotted; probably because the rays of the sun passed through it, and there was no surface beneath to reflect them back again and so rot the ice. Of this I made my burning-glass. I think it was yesterday morning that I first noticed a frost on the bare russet grass. This, too, is an early spring phenomenon. I am surprised to see that the radical johnswort leaves, which have been green all winter, are now wilted and blackened by it, and where a wood was cut off this winter on a hillside, all the rattlesnake-plantain has suffered in like manner. Again I observe the river breaking up (from the bank). The thin and rotted ice, saturated with water, is riddled with oblong open places, whose prevailing form is curving commonly up-stream, a—— though not always,—vz. e. p southerly here. Has this any- } p thing to do with the direction of the prevailing winds of winter, which make the waves bend southerly ? Since the cold of a week ago — they may be of older date — I see many tracks in the earth, especially in plowed fields, which are cracked up into vast cakes in some places, apparently on the same principle that ice is.

Sunday. River channel fairly open. P. M. — To Bee Tree Hill over Fair Haven Pond. For some time, or since the ground has been bare, I have noticed the spider-holes in the plowed land. We go over the Cliffs. Though a cold and strong wind, it is very warm in the sun, and we can sit in the sun where sheltered on these rocks with impunity. It is a genial warmth. The rustle of the dry leaves on the earth and in the crannies of the rocks, and gathered in deep windrows just under their edge, midleg deep, reminds me of fires in the woods. They are almost ready to burn. I see a fly on the rock. The ice is so much rotted and softened by the sun that it looks white like snow now as I look down on the meadows. There is considerable snow on the north side of hills in the woods. At the Bee Hill-side, a striped squirrel, which quickly dives into his hole at our approach.’ May not this season of springlike weather between the first decidedly springlike day and the first blue- bird, already fourteen days long, be called the striped © squirrel spring? In which we go listening for the blue- bird, but hear him not. Returning by the Andromeda Ponds, I am surprised to see the red ice visible still, half a dozen rods off. It is melted down to the red bubbles, and I can tinge my finger with it there by rubbing it in the rotted ice.