5 March 1860 – 11 March 1860

The meadows skim over at night. White pine cones half fallen. The old naturalists were so sensitive and sympa- thetic to nature that they could be surprised by the ordinary events of life. It was an incessant miracle to them, and therefore gorgons and flying dragons were not incredible to them. The greatest and saddest defect is not credulity, but our habitual forgetfulness that our science is ignorance. Chickweed and shepherd’s-purse in bloom in C.’s garden, and probably all winter, or each month. The song sparrows begin to sing hereabouts. I see some tame ducks in the river, six of them. It is amusing to see how exactly perpendicular they will stand, with their heads on the bottom and their tails up, plucking some food there, three or four at once. Perhaps the grass, etc., is a little further advanced there for them. George Buttrick thinks that forty musquash have been killed this spring between Hunt’s and Flint’s Bridge. The best time to hunt them is early morning and evening. His father goes out at daybreak, and can kill more in one hour after that than from that time to near sunset. He says that he has found eleven young in one musquash, and that Joel Barrett observed that one pair near his house bred five times in one year. Thought it would hardly pay to shoot them for their fur alone, but would if you owned river-meadow banks, they undermine them so. So far as the natural history is concerned, you often have your choice between uninteresting truth and in- teresting falsehood. As the ancients talked about “hot and cold, moist and dry,” so the moderns talk about “electric’’ qualities. As we sat under Lupine Promontory the other day, watching the ripples that swept over the flooded meadow and thinking what an eligible site that would be for a cottage, C. declared that we did not live in the country as long as we lived on that village street and only took walks into the fields, any more than if we lived in Boston or New York. We enjoyed none of the immortal quiet of the country as we might here, for instance, but per-.

3 pv. M. 44°. Fair and springlike, 2. e. rather still for March, with some raw wind. Pleasant in sun. Going by Messer’s, I hear the well-known note and see a flock of F. hyemalis flitting in a lively manner about trees, weeds, walls, and ground, by the roadside, showing their two white tail-feathers. they are more fearless than the song sparrow. These attract notice by their numbers and incessant twittering in asocial manner. The linarias have been the most numerous birds the past winter. Mr. Stacy tells me that the flies buzzed about him as he was splitting wood in his yard to-day. I can scarcely see a heel of a snow-drift from my window. Jonas Melvin says he saw hundreds of “speckled” turtles out on the banks to-day in a voyage to Billerica for musquash. Also saw gulls. Sheldrakes and black ducks are the only ones he has seen this year. They are fishing on Flint’s Pond to-day, but find it hard to get on and off. C. hears the nuthatch. Jonas Melvin says that he shot a sheldrake in the river late last December. A still and mild moonlight night and people walking about the streets.

Frost this morning, though completely overcast. A little sleety snow falling all day, which does not quite cover the ground, —a sugaring. Song sparrow heard through it; not bluebird. White maple buds partly opened, so as to admit light to the stamens, some of them, yesterday at least. C. says that he saw a swarm of very small gnats in the air yesterday.

2.30 p.m.—50° To Cliffs and Walden. See a small flock of grackles on the willow-row above railroad bridge. How they sit and make a business of chattering! for it cannot be called singing, and no improvement from age to age perhaps. Yet, as nature is a becoming, their notes may become melodious at last. At length, on my very near approach, they flit sus- piciously away, uttering a few subdued notes as they hurry off. This is the first flock of blackbirds I have chanced to see, though Channing saw one the 6th. I suspect that I have seen only grackles as yet. : I saw, in Monroe’s well by the edge of the river, the other day, a dozen frogs, chiefly shad frogs, which had been dead a good while. It may be that they get into that sort of spring-hole in the fall to hiber- nate, but for some reason die; or perhaps they are always jumping into it in the summer, but at that season are devoured by some animal before they infest the water. Now and for some days I see farmers walking about their fields, knocking to pieces and distributing the cow- dung left there in the fall, that so, with the aid of the spring rains, they fertilize a larger surface and more equally. To say nothing of fungi, lichens, mosses, and other cryptogamous plants, you cannot say that vegetation absolutely ceases at any season in this latitude; for there is grass in some warm exposures and in springy places, always growing more or less, and willow catkins expanding and peeping out a little further every warm day from the very beginning of winter, and the skunk- cabbage buds being developed and actually flowering sometimes in the winter, and the sap flowing [in] the maples in midwinter in some days, perhaps some cress growing a little (?), certainly some pads, and various naturalized garden weeds steadily growing if not blooming, and apple buds sometimes expanding. Thus much of vegetable life or motion or growth is’ to be detected every winter. There is something of spring in all seasons. There is a large class which is evergreen in its radical leaves, which make such a show as soon as the snow goes off that many take them to be new growth of the spring. At the pool on the south side of Hubbard’s Grove, I notice that the crowfoot, 2. e. buttercup, leaves which are at the bottom of the water stand up and are much more advanced than those two feet off in the air, for there they receive warmth from the sun, while they are sheltered from cold winds. Nowadays we separate the warmth of the sun from the cold of the wind and observe that the cold does not pervade all places, but being due to strong northwest winds, if we get into some sunny and sheltered nook where they do not penetrate, we quite forget how cold it is elsewhere. In some respects our spring, in its beginning, fluc- tuates a whole month, so far as it respects ice and snow, walking, sleighing, etc., etc.; for some years winter may be said to end about the first of March, and other years it may extend into April. That willow-clump by railroad at Walden looks really silvery. I see there that moles have worked for several days. There are several piles on the grass, some quite fresh and some made before the last rain. One is as wide as a bushel-basket and six inches high; contains a peck at least. When I carefully remove this dirt, I cannot see, and can scarcely detect by feeling, any looseness in the sod beneath where the mole came to the surface and discharged all this dirt. I do feel it, to be sure, but it is scarcely perceptible to my fingers. The mole must have filled up this doorway very densely with earth, perhaps for its protection.

Snows this forenoon, whitening the ground again. 2 and 3 p.m. — Thermometer 41°. I have seen three or four pieces of coral in the fields of Concord, and Mr. Pratt has found three or four on his farm. How shall they be accounted for? Who brought them here? and when? These barns shelter more beasts than oxen and horses. If you stand awhile in one of them now, espe- cially where grain is piled, you will hear ever and anon a rustling in it made by the mice, which take the barn to be their home, as much as the house is yours. As I recall it, February began cold, with some dry and fine driving snow, making those shell-shaped drifts behind walls, and some days after were some wild but low drifts on the meadow ice. I walked admiring the winter sky and clouds. After the first week, methinks, it was much milder, and I noticed that some sounds, like the tinkling of rail- road rails, etc., were springlike. Indeed, the rest of the month was earine, river breaking up a part and closing again, and but little snow. About 8th and 12th, the beauty of the ice on the meadows, partly or slightly rotted, was noticeable, with the curious figures in it, and, in the coolest evenings, the green ice and rosy isles of flat drifts.

2 vp. ma. — About 30°.

Sunday. 2 ep. m.— About 40°. It is cold and blustering walking in the wind, though the thermometer is at 40; 2. e., though the temperature is thus high, the strong and blustering northwest winds of March make this notorious March weather, which is worse to bear than severe cold without wind. The farmers say that there is nothing equal to the March winds for drying wood. It will dry more this month than it has in all the winter before. I see a woodchuck out on the calm side of Lee’s Hill (Nawshawtuct). He has pushed away the withered leaves which filled his hole and come forth, and left his tracks in those slight patches of the recent snow which are left about his hole. I was amused with the behavior of two red squirrels as I approached the hemlocks. They were as gray as red, and white beneath. I at first heard a faint, sharp chirp, like a bird, within the hemlock, on my account, and then one rushed forward on a descending limb toward me, barking or chirruping at me after his fashion, within a rod. They seemed to vie with one another who should be most bold. For four or five minutes at least, they kept up an incessant chirruping or squeaking bark, vibrating their tails and their whole bodies and fre- quently changing their position or point of view, making a show of rushing forward, or perhaps darting off a few feet like lightning and barking still more loudly, 7. e. with a yet sharper exclamation, as if frightened by their own motions; their whole bodies quivering, their heads and great eyes on the qui vive. You are uncertain whether it is not half in sport after all.