5 May 1856 – 11 May 1856

To Clamshell by river. 2 Our earliest currant out. Oat spawn showing little pollywogs (?) in meadow water. The horse-chestnut and mountain-ash leafing. Knawel out at Clamshell; how long? Cerastium out there under the bank. That early white birch there, has about done running sap. Equisetum sylvaticum a day or two on the ditch bank there.

Wednesday. Fresh easterly wind. 2 p. M. — To bear-berry on Major Heywood road. In Deacon Hosmer’s barn meadows, hear the don’t don’t of a bullfrog. In the first hollow in the bank this side of Clam- shell, where sand has been dug for the meadow, are a hundred or more bank swallows at 2 p. Mm. (I suspect I have seen them for some time) engaged in pros- pecting and digging their holes and circling about. It is a snug place for them,—though the upright portion ef the bank is only four or five feet high, — a semi- circular recess facing the southeast. Some are within scratching out the sand, — I see it cast out of the holes behind them,— others hanging on to the entrance of the holes, others on the flat sandy space beneath in front, and others circling about, a dozen rods off over the meadow. ‘Theirs is a low, dry, grating twitter, or rather rattle, less metallic or musical than the vite vite and twittering notes of barn and white-bellied swallows. They are white-bellied, dark winged and tailed, with a crescent of white [szc] nearly around the lower part of the neck, and mouse-colored heads and backs. The upper and greater part of this bank is a coarse sliding gravel, and they build only in the per- pendicular and sandy part (I sit and watch them within three or four rods) and close to the upper part of it. While I am looking, they all suddenly with one consent take to wing, and circle over the hillside and meadow, as if they chose to work at making their holes a little while at a time only. I find the holes on an average about a foot deep only as yet, some but a few inches. In the meanwhile I hear, through this fresh, raw east wind, the te-a-lea of myrtle-birds* from the woods across the river. The bear-berry will perhaps open to-morrow.’ I hear the evergreen-forest note close by; and hear and see many myrtle-birds, at the same time that I hear what I have called the black and white creeper’s note. Have I ever confounded them ? Over the edge of Miles’s mill-pond, now running off, a bumblebee goes humming over the dry brush. I think I saw one on the 5th also. Miles began last night to let the water run off. The pond falls about three inches in twenty-four hours. The brook below is full of fishes, — suckers, pouts, eels, trouts, — endeavoring to get up, but his dam prevents. This morning his young man killed a number of pouts and eels and suckers with a shovel. Here he comes now, at 4 p. M., with a spear, and raises the gate and waits a few moments for the water, which was two or three feet deep just below the mill, to run off; and then I see a good-sized trout, four or five pouts, and several suckers, and one eel still making their way upward, though the water hardly covers their backs. They do not turn and go down the stream with the water which is thus suddenly and rapidly let off. Meanwhile this young man picks out half a dozen pouts, eels, and suckers with his spear. ‘Twenty rods down the brook I saw many more suckers trying to make their way up. They found it difficult now to get over the bars where the water was very shallow, and were some- times confined to the hollows between. I saw two or three in company trying to squeeze through a narrow passage under some alder boughs, which was ‘blocked up by two spotted tortoises; and one large eel squirm- ing directly over an indifferent wood turtle, concluding to go down the stream, but it soon hid under a project- ing bank. The pouts, etc., would suddenly bury them- selves in the sand or mud and be lost. The fishes seemed unwilling to turn and go down the brook, and for the most part would come so near in the shallow water that they could easily be struck with the spear. The waiter thus suddenly let off, there were many spotted and wood tortoises seen crawling about on the bottom. One little snapping (making the fifth of its species here), three and a half inches long, going down a few rods below the dam. This, like the larger ones, going down the brook. Where to? and why? He can- not be old enough to breed yet, and it is too early to be laying at the desert. This young snapping turtle was very strong-scented. Its tail appeared particularly long, as long as its shell, and very tapering, and very dis- tinctly and sharply keeled. The first half-dozen of its dorsal serrations were very prominent and sharp, and its bill was very sharp also. It had four sharp points on each side of its shell behind, and I noticed that it swam better than other kinds of tortoises. Its head was as large as that of an ordinary wood tortoise. There were tracks of other turtles on the sandy bank. The young man said that the eels came along as many as three in an hour in the night, and this morn- ing there were a great many of them about the wheel. Last fall (this dam being made late in the fall), they found in the hollow under the wheel which they bailed out sixteen trout which weighed eight pounds. It is surprising how many fishes will run up and breed in such a little brook as this. ‘The fishes generally would conceal themselves in the mud under a projecting bank, or in some deep hole in the sand in mid-channel which communicated with the mud beneath. One of those larger snapping turtles seized the one I had by the head and they braced and struggled awhile. The miller now raises his gate and lets his pond run off. Do they not generally earlier? For a week the road has been full of cattle going up country.

The third day of rain. The river has again gone over the meadows, which were almost bare. P. M. — To Walden in rain. R. Rice speaks of having seen myriads of eels formerly, going down the Charles River, young ones not longer than his hand, stopped behind a board at the dam. That once there, when repairing the dam, he saw, while stand- ing on the bared bottom below it, a large eel come up close by it through hard gravel and he believed it had just come down the river and had penetrated through six feet in thickness of the same character, for the dam was carried down to that depth below the bottom of the river. That the snapping turtle caught fish by lying buried in the mud with only his eyes out, was Rice’s supposition. Some Vaccinium Pennsylvanicum out in Cut woods; maybe a day, as it has rained steadily the last two days. It seems to bloom with or immediately after the bear- berry. I would gladly walk far in this stormy weather, for now I see and get near to large birds. Two quails whir away from the old shanty stubble-field, and two turtle doves go off from an apple tree with their clikit. Also at Walden shore a pigeon hawk (or else sharp- shinned), with deep-brown back, went off from close at hand. I see there, just above the edge of the Pool in Hub- bard’s Wood Path, the Viola blanda passing into the V.. lanceolata, which last also is now in bloom, probably earlier there than in wetter places. May have been as early as the blanda. Where the pitch pines were cut some years ago on Thrush Alley, I now see birches, oaks, and pitch and white pines.

Rains still. I noticed the other day that the stump of the large oak at Clamshell Hill, cut down fifteen years ago or more, was quite rotten, while the trunk which lay by its side, having never been removed, was comparatively sound. The Roman writers Columella and Palladius warn not to build in a low valley or by a marsh, and the same rule is observed here to-day. In the West the prudent settler avoids the banks of rivers, choosing high and open land. It suggests that man is not completely at one with Nature, or that she is not yet fitted to be his abode. Adam soon found that he must give a marsh a wide berth, — that he must not put his bower in or near a swamp in the new country, — else he would get the fever and ague or an intermittent fever. Either nature may be changed or man. Some animals, as frogs and musquash, are fitted to live in the marsh. Only a portion of the earth is habitable by man. Is the earth improving or deteriorating in this respect? Does it require to be improved by the hands of man, or is man to live more naturally and so more safely ? P. M. — To Cedar Swamp up Assabet. There is at length a prospect of fair weather. It will clear up at evening this fourth day of the rain. The river is nearly as high as it has been this spring. The Salix alba by my boat is out and beaten by the rain; perhaps three or four days in some places, but not on the 6th. It does not rain now, though completely overcast, but looks as if it would clear up before night. There are many swallows circling low over the river behind Monroe’s, — bank swallows, barn, republican, chimney, and white-bellied. These are all circling to- gether a foot or two over the water, passing within ten or twelve feet of me in my boat. It is remarkable how social the different species of swallow are one with another. ‘They recognize their affinity more than usual. On the prospect of fair weather after so long a storm, the birds are more lively than ever. As I float through the Wheeler Indian field meadow, I see a veery hopping silent under the alders. The black and white creeper also is descending the oaks, etc., and uttering from time to time his seeser seeser seeser. What a rich, strong striped blue-black (?) and white bird, much like the myrtle-bird at a little distance, when the yellow of the lat- ter is not seen. Ata distance I hear the first yellow-bird. The Salix sericea at Island rock is out, also the S. cordata off Prichard’s, both apparently with S. alba. But I have not yet compared them (for date) quite accurately enough. I think I can pretty well distinguish the sericea by the grayness of the female catkins, twig and all, but am not sure I have seen the staminate. Neither am I sure that I see the staminate S. cordata. Those at Prichard’s are apparently all female. There are many staminate ones now in full bloom in the Wheeler meadow, I suspect like that of the railroad causeway, male and female side by side, five rods north of S. alba; also male, west side below ring-post (vide May 10th), or they may be staminate plants of S. cor- data, or some perhaps of S. sericea. Vide how many dif- ferent kinds of leaves and mark them six weeks hence. Vide if those just off the north end of Holden Wood (Conantum) are all S. cordata, for there are many stam- inate ones like the last-named; also vide that one on the north side of the road and root fence beyond brook on Corner road (perhaps like the railroad one), male and female now a little past prime. All these willows blos- som when the early willows, which bloom before leaf- ing, are going to seed. Large white maples are leafing. I see, near the top of the bank at the further end of the first hemlocks, dirty-white fungi in nests, each about three quarters of an inch [in] diameter, without any thick rind which peels off. Each one is burst a little at top, and is full of dust of a yellowish rotten-stone color, which is perfectly dry and comes forth like a puff of smoke on being pinched, now after four days of rain, before the fair weather has come, and though each one is nearly half full of water. This dust certainly has but little affinity for moisture and might be of use in some cases. i: : I leave my boat in Hosmer’s poke-logan and walk up the bank. A bluebird’s nest and five eggs in a hollow apple tree three feet from ground near the old bank swallow pit, made with much stubble and dried grass. Can see the bird sitting from without. There are a great many large flat black cockroach(? )- like beetles floating and paddling on the flood on the meadows, which have perhaps fallen in in the night (if not washed out of the grass); also a few of the thick dull reddish-brown ones.