18 April 1859 – 24 April 1859

8 a. mM. — To the south part of Acton, surveying, with Stedman Buttrick. When B. came to see me the other evening, and stood before the door in the dark, my mother asked, “ Who is it?” to which he replied, quite seriously, “Left- tenant [szc] Stedman Buttrick.”’

A little snow fell on the 11th with the rain, and on some very warm banks, the south sides of houses and hills, the grass looked quite green by contrast in spots. The streets are strewn with the bud-scales of the elm, which they, opening, have lost off, and their tops present a rich brown already. I hear a purple finch on one, and did I not hear a martin’s! rich warble also? The birds are not so early now as I should have expected. Were they not deterred from coming north by the very strong and cold northwest wind, notwith- standing that the ground has been bare so long? The Salix purpurea will hardly open for five days yet.? P. M. — Paddle to Ball’s Hill and sail back. I see the small botrychium fresh and yellow still, so it is as much an evergreen as any fern. It is pleasant and pretty warm. To-day is the awak- ening of the meadows now partly bare. I hear the stuttering note of probably the Rana halecina (see one by shore) come up from all the Great Meadow, especially the sedgy parts, or where the grass was not cut last year and now just peeps above the surface. There is something soothing and suggestive of halcyon days in this low but universal breeding-note of the frog. Methinks it is a more unmistakable evidence of warmer weather — of the warmest we have at this date —than almost anything else. The hylodes and wood frogs are other degrees on the thermometer of the season, indicating that the weather has attained a higher temperature than before and winter fairly ended, but thas note marks what you may call April heat (or spring heat). I see no ducks on the meadows to-day, perhaps be- cause there is so much less water and it is so fair. Saw a great bird flying rather low and circling more or less over the Great Meadows, which I at first thought was a fish hawk, having a fair sight of it from Ball’s Hill, but with my glass I saw that it was a gull, but, I should say, wholly slate-color and dark at that, — though there may have been small spots which made no impression of another color. It was at least as large, maybe larger than the herring gull. Was it the saddle- back gull? Is that a potamogeton, or a pontederia, or a sium, coming up so thickly now on the bottom of the river near the shore, especially on a grassy bottom, with two little roundish leafets becoming spatulate, and a seed triangular and pointed with one side more flat than the others ?

Was it a vireo I heard this forenoon on the elms? Channing sees the same small flock of sheldrakes, three birds, in Walden still. They have been there a week or two, but I cannot see them the 22d. P. M. — Began to set white pines in R. W. E.’s Wyman lot.

Hear and see my ruby-crowned or crested wren singing at 6 a. M. on Wheildon’s pines. Setting pines all day.

Setting pines all day. This makes two and a half days, with two men and a horse and cart to help me. We have set some four hundred trees at fifteen feet apart diamondwise, covering some two acres. I set every one with my own hand, while another digs the holes where I indicate, and occasionally helps the other dig up the trees. We prefer bushy pines only one foot high which grow in open or pasture land, yel- low-looking trees which are used to the sun, instead of the spindling dark-green ones from the shade of the woods. Our trees will not average much more than two feet in height, and we take a thick sod with them fifteen to eighteen inches in diameter. There are a great many more of these plants to be had along the edges and in the midst of any white pine wood than one would suppose. One man charged us five or six cents for them about a mile and a half distant! Got about one hun- dred and twenty from George Heywood’s land and the rest from the Brister lot and this Wyman lot itself. R. W. E. has bought a quarter of a pound of white pine seed at $4.00 per pound. We could not dig up pines on the north side of the wood on the Brister lot to-day on account of frost! Though we had quite forgotten it, and put the winter so far behind us. See the Vanessa Antiopa. C. has seen it a week or so. C. sees a cicindela to-day. I hear of a robin’s nest begun, and that geese go over to-day. Put out a fire in the woods, the Brister lot. Quite a warm day. Storer’s account of the salamanders concludes with these words, “All the salamanders here described, feed upon insects, which they devour in very large num- bers, and hence their utility cannot be questioned.” The same might be said in behalf of the creatures that devour the salamanders. In those little Ripple Lakes in the cool hollows in the woods, there you find these active bright-spotted salamanders, —S. dorsalis, the brown (olive-brown or palish-brown), with carinated and wave-crenate thin tail, and the S. symmetrica, the bright orange salmon, with a thick, straight-edged tail, — both with vermilion spots on back and countless fine black dots above and beneath. The first-named is quite voracious, catching many of the larvee in the aquarium, in fact depopulating it. He gulps them down very deliberately after catching them.

‘The Salix purpurea in prime, out probably three or four days; say 19th. Arbor-vite, how long? P. M. — In a fine rain, around Walden. I go by a Populus grandidentata on the eastern sand slope of the Deep Cut just after entering, whose aments (which apparently here began to shed pollen yester- day) in scattered clusters at the ends of the bare twigs, but just begun to shed their pollen, not hanging loose and straight yet, but curved, are a very rich crimson, hike some ripe fruit, as mulberries, seen against the sand. I cannot represent the number in a single clus- ter, but they are much the hand- > a F somest now before the crimson an- thers have burst, and are all the more remarkable for the very open and bare habit of the tree. When setting the pines at Walden the last three days, I was sung to by the field sparrow. For music I heard their jingle from time to time. That the music the pines were set to, and I have no doubt they will build many a nest under their shelter. It would seem as if such a field as this —a dry open or half-open pasture in the woods, with small pines scattered in it — was well-nigh, if not quite, abandoned to this one alone among the sparrows. The surface of the earth is por- tioned out among them. By a beautiful law of dis- tribution, one creature does not too much interfere with another. I do not hear the song sparrow here. As the pines gradually increase, and a wood-lot is formed, these birds will withdraw to new pastures, and the thrushes, etc., will take their place. Yes, as the walls of cities are fabled to have been built by music, so my pines were established by the song of the field sparrow. They commonly place their nests here under the shel- ter of a little pine in the field. As I planted there, wandering thoughts visited me, which I have now forgotten. My senses were busily suggesting them, though I was unconscious of their origin. E. g., I first consciously found myself enter- taining the thought of a carriage on the road, and di- rectly after I was aware that I heard it. No doubt I had heard it before, or rather my ears had, but I was quite unconscious of it, — it was not a fact of my then state of existence; yet such was the force of habit, it affected my thoughts nevertheless, so double, if not treble, even, are we. Sometimes the senses bring us information quicker than we can receive it. Perhaps these thoughts which run in ruts by themselves while we are engaged in some routine may be called auto- matic. I distinctly entertained the idea of a carriage, without the slightest suspicion how it had onginated or been suggested to my mind. I have no doubt at all that my ears had heard it, but my mind, just then pre- occupied, had refused to attend to it. This suggests that most, if not all, indeed, of our ideas may be due to some sort of sensuous impression of which we may or may not be conscious. This afternoon there is an east wind, and a rain-storm accordingly beginning, the eighth of the kind with this wind. I still see a large flock of grackles. Within a few days I pricked my fingers smartly against the sharp, stiff points of some sedge coming up. At Heywood’s meadow, by the railroad, this sedge, rising green and dense with yellow tips above the withered clumps, is very striking, suggesting heat, even a blaze, there. Scare up partridges feeding about the green springy places under the edge of hills. See them skim or scale away for forty rods along and upward to the woods, into which they swiftly scale, dodging to right and left and avoiding the twigs, yet without once flapping the wings after having launched themselves.

Rain, rain. Hear seringo, by chance the first, and while it rains. The tree sparrows abundant and singing in the yard, but I have not noticed a hyemalis of late. The field sparrow sings in our yard in the rain. The sidewalk is all strewn with fishworms this fore- noon, up and down the street, and many will evidently die in the cold rain. Apparently the rain tempted them to remain on the surface, and then the cold and wet benumbs and drowns them. Some of them are slowly crawling across the paths. What an abundant supply of food for the birds lately arrived! From Gil- bert White, and the notes by others to his last edition, I should infer that these were worms which, having been tempted out in unusual numbers by the rain, lost their way back to their holes. They say that they never take their tails out of their holes. In about five quarts of scarlet oak acorns gathered the other day there [were] only some three gills that had life in them, or say one in seven. I do not know how many the squirrels had got, but as it was quite near a house, a tree by itself, I think not a great many. The rest were apparently destroyed by worms; so that I should say the worms destroyed before spring three fourths of them. As the grub is already in the acorn, it may be just as well (except for the squirrels) to sow them now as in the fall, whatever you can get. Clears up at 3 Pp. M., and a very strong south wind blows. I go on the water. I frequently observe that the waves do not always run high in proportion to the strength of the wind. The wind seems sometimes to flat them down, perhaps when it blows very hard in gusts, which interrupt a long roll. What is that small willow on the north side of S. Brown’s stump, which apparently began to open two days ago? A large hickory by the wall on the north side (or northeast side) of the hill apparently just blown down, the one I saw the screech ow] go into two or three years ago. I think it may have fallen in this very high vind which arose within an hour; at any rate it has fallen since the grass began to spring, for the owl-hole con- tains a squirrel’s nest made of half-green grass some- what withered, which could only have been found quite recently, and also the limbs have been driven so deep into the ground that I cannot pull them out, which shows that the ground was thawed when it fell; also the squirrel’s nest, which is perfectly sheltered, now the tree is fallen, was quite wet through with rain, that of the morning, as I think. This nest, which I suppose was that of a red squirrel, was at the bottom of a large hole some eighteen inches deep and twenty-five feet from the ground, where a large limb had been broken off formerly. An opening on the side had been stopped with twigs as big as a pipe-stem and larger, some of them the hickory twigs quite green and freshly gnawed off with their buds, forming a rude basketwork which kept up and in the grass and rotten wood, four or five handfuls of which, mixed with the rotten wood of the inside, composed the nest. This was the half old and withered and half green grass gathered a few days since about the base of the tree.

Sunday. P. M.— To Pine Hill and Hey- wood’s meadow. The weather is windy still and cool. I see for sev- eral days past tipulide of larger size dancing like the small. A great many oak leaves have their petioles broken off half an inch or more from the base, so that the leaves fall before they are regularly cast off by the tree. I see many young oaks — a scarlet one this after- noon — the half of whose petioles have been thus broken mechanically by the force of the wind on the blade of the leaf in the winter. These stub ends will, [of] course, be cast soon, like the entire leaves. Thus you may have small trees entirely divested of their leaves excepting a fragment of the petioles by merely mechanical means or violence, long before they have all fallen regularly. They are whirled about by the wind till they break off, and these broken and stringy petioles give to the tree a ragged appearance. I notice that the white pine cones in Wheildon’s grove have now almost entirely fallen.