4 June 1860 – 10 June 1860

Leave off flannel. Yesterday and to-day un- comfortably warm when walking. The foliage of the elms over the street impresses me as dense and heavy already, — comparatively. , The black-poll warblers (Sylvia striata) appear to have left, and some other warblers, if not generally, with this first clear and bright and warm, peculiarly June weather, immediately after the May rain. About a month ago, after the strong and cold winds of March and April and the (in common years) rain and high water, the ducks, etc., left us for the north. Now there is a similar departure of the warblers, on the expansion of the leaves and advent of yet warmer weather. Their season with us, 2. e. those that go further, is when the buds are bursting, till the leaves are about expanded; and probably they follow these phenomena north- ward till they get to their breeding-places, flying from tree to tree, 2. e. to the next tree which contains their insect prey. 2 p.mM.— To Fair Haven Hill. They began to carry round ice about the Ist. What I called Carex conoidea in *59, was seen June 2d this year in fruit, and may have flowered with C. pallescens. C. Hubbard’s first meadow, south side of Swamp Brook willows. Glyceria fluitans, say two or three days, Depot Brook. I see the great blue devil’s-needles coasting along the river now, and coupled. Carex retrorsa (much of it going to seed), Hubbard’s Bath shore, say ten days. Has the general aspect of pallescens. At Staples Meadow I observe that a great deal of the pitcher-plant is quite dry, dead, and slate-colored, with some green flower-buds pushing up, perhaps. I think it was thus half killed by the drought of April and May. The clear brightness of June was well represented yesterday by the buttercups (Ranunculus bulbosus) along the roadside. Their yellow so glossy and varnished within; but not without. Surely there is no reason why the new butter should not be yellow now. The time has come now when the laborers, having washed and put on their best suits, walk into the fields on the Sabbath, and lie on the ground at rest. Aphides on alders, which dirty your clothes with their wool as you walk. A catbird has her nest in our grove. We cast out strips of white cotton cloth, all of which she picked up and used. I saw a bird flying across the street with so long a strip of cloth, or the like, the other day, and so slowly, that at first I thought it was a little boy’s kite with a long tail. ‘The catbird sings less now, while its mate is sitting, or maybe taking care of her young, and probably this is the case with robins and birds generally. At the west spring of Fair Haven Hill I cast a bit of wood against a pitch pine in bloom (perhaps not yet in prime generally), and I see the yellow pollen-dust blown away from it in a faint cloud, distinctly for three rods at least, and gradually rising all the while (rising five or six feet perhaps). I hear that the nest of that marsh hawk which we saw on the 29th (q. v.) has since been found with five eggs in it. So that bird (male), whose mate was killed on the 16th of May, has since got a new mate and five eggs laid. One asks me to-day when it is that the leaves are fully expanded, so that the trees and woods look dark and heavy with leaves. I answered that there were leaves on many if not on most trees already fully ex- panded, but that there were not many on a tree, the shoots having grown only some three inches, but by and by they will have grown a foot or two and there will be ten times as many leaves. Each tree (or most trees) now holds out many little twigs, some three inches long, with two or three fully expanded leaves on it, between us and the sun, making already a grateful but thin shade, like a coarse sieve, so open that we see the fluttering of each leaf in its shadow; but in a week or more the twigs will have so extended themselves, and the number of fully expanded leaves be so increased, that the trees will look heavy and dark with foliage and the shadow be dark and opaque, — a gelid shade. Hazy, and mountains concealed. I notice to-day, for example, that most maple, birch, willow, alder, and elm leaves are fully expanded, but most oaks and hickories, ash trees, etc., are not quite. You may say that now, when most trees have fully expanded leaves and the black ash fairly shows green, the leafy season has fairly commenced. (I see that I so called it May 31 and 27, 1853.)

A. M.— Northeast wind and rain, steady rain. Hemlock bead-work handsome, but hardly yet large ones. When I open my window at night I hear the peeping of hylodes distinctly through the rather cool rain (as also some the next morning), but not of toads; more hylodes than in the late very warm evenings when the toads were heard most numerously. The hylodes evidently love the cooler nights of spring; the toads, the warm days and nights of May. Now it requires a cool (and better if wet) night, which will silence the toads, to make the hylodes distinct.

Rain still (the second day), — clears up be- fore night, — and so cool that many have fires. The grass began to look fairly green or summer-like generally about the Ist. 6.30 Pp. M. — On river, up Assabet, after the rain. The water has risen to eight and three quarters inches above summer level, and is rising fast. But little rain has fallen this afternoon. The hemlocks generally have not grown quite enough to be handsomest, but the younger and lower growths are seen now in the dark and cavernous recesses, very fair with so many bright eyes on their green. Saw those swarms of black moths fluttering low over the water on the 2d and to-night. The Salix nigra is now getting stale. It is a very densely flowered willow, perhaps the most so of any. The sterile ones seen afar (even by moonlight on the 2d) are dense masses of yellow (now more pale) against the green of trees in the rear. They have but little leafiness themselves as yet. Not only the foliage begins to look dark and dense, but many ferns are fully grown, as the cinnamon and interrupted, perfectly recurved over the bank and shore, adding to the leafy impression of the season. The Osmunda regalis looks later and more tender, reddish- brown still. It preserves its habit of growing in circles, though it may be on a steep bank and one half the circle in the water. The new leaves are now very fair, pure, unspotted green, commonly more or less yellowish. The swamp white oak leaf looks particularly tender and delicate. The red maple is much harder and more matured. Yet the trees commonly are not so densely leaved but that I can see through them; e. g., I see through the red oak and the bass (below Dove Rock), looking toward the sky. ‘They are a mere network of light and shade after all. ‘The oak may be a little the thickest. The white ash is considerably thinner than either. The grass and foliage are particularly fresh and green after the two days of rain, and we mark how the darken- ing elms stand along the highways. Like wands or wreaths seen against the horizon, they streak the sky with green. How full the air of sound at sunset and just after, especially at the end of a rain-storm! Every bird seems to be singing in the wood across the stream, and there are the hylodes and the sounds of the village. Beside, sounds are more distinctly heard. Ever and anon we hear a few sucks or strokes from the bittern, the stake-driver, wherever we lie to, as if he had taken the job of extending all the fences into the river to keep cows from straying round. We hear but three or four toads in all, to-night, but as many hylodes as ever. It is too cool, both water and air (especially the first), after the rain, for the toads. At 9 a. M. it is 58. This temperature now, after a rain-storm has cooled the water, will silence the toads generally but make the hylodes more musical than ever. As the light is obscured after sunset, the birds rapidly cease their songs, and the swallows cease to flit over the river. And soon the bats are seen taking the places of the swallows and flying back and forth like them, and commonly a late kingbird will be heard twittering still in the air. After the bats, or half an hour after sunset, the water-bugs begin to spread themselves over the stream, though fifteen minutes earlier not one was seen without the pads, — now, when it is difficult to see them or the dimples they make, except you look toward the reflected western sky. It is evident that they dare not come out thus by day for fear of fishes, and probably the nocturnal or vespertinal fishes, as eels and pouts, do not touch them. I think I see them all over Walden by day, and, if so, it may be because there is not much danger from fishes in that very deep water. I wonder if they spread thus over the whole breadth of Flint’s Pond. It would be a measure of the size of a lake to know that it was so large that these insects did not cross it. See to-night three dead (fresh) suckers on the Assabet. What has killed them ? June 7 6 a. M.— River nine and fifteen six- teenths above summer level; has risen one and three sixteenths inches since last evening at 6.30. Thus, it having rained two days most of the time, though not much the last afternoon, the river had risen some six inches at the end of the last afternoon, by the time it cleared up, and only some one and a quarter inches in the next twelve hours of night. P. M. — To Gowing’s Swamp and Copan. Red maple seed is still in the midst of its fall; 1s blown far from the trees. This is a southwest-breezy day, after the rain of the last two days. There is on the whole a fresh and breezy coolness in June thus far, perhaps owing to the rains and the expanded foliage. White clover already whitens some fields and resounds with bees.

River at 6 a.m. twelve and seven eighths inches above summer level. 2 p.m. — To Well Meadow via Walden. Within a day or two has begun that season of summer when you see afternoon showers, maybe with thunder, or the threat of them, dark in the horizon, and are uncertain whether to venture far away or without an umbrella. I noticed the very first such cloud on the 25th of May, —the dark iris of June. When you go forth to walk at 2 p. M. you see perhaps, in the south- west or west or maybe east horizon, a dark and threaten- ing mass of cloud showing itself just over the woods, its base horizontal and dark, with lighter edges where it is rolled up to the light, while all beneath is the kind of dark slate of falling rain. These are summer showers, come with the heats of summer. June-grass just begun to bloom in the village. A great yellow and dark butterfly (C. saw something like it a week ago).’ | What delicate fans are the great red oak leaves now just developed, so thin and of so tender a green! They hang loosely, flaccidly, down at the mercy of the wind, like a new-born butterfly or dragon-fly. A strong and cold wind would blacken and tear them now. They remind me of the frailest stuffs hung around a dry- goods shop. They have not been hardened by exposure yet, these raw and tender lungs of the tree. The white oak leaves are especially downy, and lint your clothes. This is truly June when you begin to see brakes (dark green) fully expanded in the wood-paths. That sedge which grows in the Fox Path Hollow (by the Andromeda Ponds), the coarser one, rather around the sides or slopes than at the very bottom, is a slender Carex siccata, almost all out of bloom, — all except that which is at the bottom of the hollow. For I see here on a smaller scale the same phenomena as at Holbrook Poplar Hollow (vide yesterday). ‘The panicled cornel looks generally dead, just beginning to leaf; young white and black oaks are in the red; and the second amelanchier is in the flower still here. Indeed, shrub oaks, and young oaks generally and conspicuously, are quite late — just in the red — now in hollows and other cold parts of the woods; and generally these shrubs, including hazel even, have not been frost-bitten, but have not put forth till now. Carex bromoides may have been out a fortnight at Well Meadow; and C. scabrata, say ten days. C. tenella (near the earliest cowslip) all in seed and much seed fallen and no sterile flower; say three weeks. C. intumescens, say five or six days (e. g., just south of earliest cowslip). Hoed potatoes first time two or three days ago; my corn to-day. All stagnant water is covered with the lint from the new leaves, — harmless to drink, — especially after rain. If you [take] a scarlet oak leaf and rub the under side on your coat-sleeve, it will not whiten it, but a white oak leaf will color it as with meal. Carex polytrichoides grows at Well Meadow. I see a small mist of cobweb, globular, on a dead twig eight inches above the ground in the wood-path. It is from an inch and a half to two inches in diameter, and when I disturb it I see it swarming with a mass of a thousand minute spiders. A spider-nest lately hatched. In early June, methinks, as now, we have clearer days, less haze, more or less breeze, — especially after rain, — and more sparkling water than before. (I look from Fair Haven Hill.) As there is more shade in the woods, so there is more shade in the sky, 2. e. dark or heavy clouds contrasted with the bright sky, — not the gray clouds of spring. The leaves generally are almost fully expanded, 1. e. some of each tree. You seek the early strawberries in any the most favor- able exposure, — on the sides [of] little knolls or swells, or in the little sandy hollows where cows have pawed, settling the question of superiority and which shall lead the herd, when first turned out to pasture. As I look at the mountains in the horizon, I am struck by the fact that they are all pyramidal — pyramids, ——— more or less low — iin and have a peak. Why have the mountains usually a peak? This is not the common form of hills. ‘They do not so impress us at least. River at 7 p.m. fourteen and a half above summer level.

7 aA. M.— River fourteen and one eighth above summer level only, though after considerable rain in the night. We have had half a dozen showers to-day, distinct summer showers from black clouds suddenly wafted up from the west and northeast; also some thunder and hail, — large white stones. Standing on the Mill-Dam this afternoon, after one of these showers, I noticed the air full of some kind of down, which at first I mistook for feathers or lint from some chamber, then for light-winged insects, for it-rose and fell just like the flights of may-flies. At length I traced it to the white willow behind the blacksmith’s shop, which apparently the rain has released. The wind was driving it up between and over the buildings, and it was flying all along the Mill-Dam in a stream, filling the air like a flight of bright-colored gauze-winged insects, as high as the roofs. It was the willow down with a minute blackish seed in the midst or beneath. In the moist air, seen against the still dark clouds, like large white dancing motes, from time to time falling to earth. The rain had apparently loosened them, and the slight breeze succeeding set them a-going. As I stood talking with one on the sidewalk, I saw two yellow dor-bugs fall successively to the earth from the elm above. They were sluggish, as usual by day, and appeared to have just lost their hold, perhaps on account of the rain or the slight wind arising. I also see them floating in the river, into which they have fallen, or perhaps they have been carried off by its rising. They might be called blunderers. 6 p. M. — Paddle to Flint’s hedge. . River fourteen and three quarters above summer level. Viburnum Lentago nearly in prime. An abundance of Carex scoparia now conspicuously browns the shores, especially below Flint’s willows. The C. lagopodioides is apparently in prime (out say one week or less) at Flint’s hedge. That is apparently the C. rosea there under the hickory; observed the 23d of May. The C. monile is now quite conspicuous along the river, as well as the C. bullata. A kingbird’s nest and one egg. C. says that a fox stood near, watching him, in Brit- ton’s Hollow to-day. No doubt she had young. The water-bugs begin to venture out on to the stream from the shadow of a dark wood, as at the Island. So soon as the dusk begins to settle on the river, they begin, to steal out, or to extend their circling from amid the bushes and weeds over the channel of the river. They do not simply then, if ever, venture forth, but then in- variably, and at once, the whole length of the stream, they one and all sally out and begin to dimple its broad surface, as if it were a necessity so to do.

Another showery day, or rather shower- threatening. : 2 p.m. — To Annursnack. A very strong northwest wind, and cold. At 6 P.M. it was 58°. This, with wind, makes a very cold day at this season. Yet I do not need fire in the house. This violent and cool wind must seriously injure the just developed tender leaves. I never observed so much harm of this kind done. Leaves of all kinds are blown off and torn by it, as oak, maple, birch, etc. As I sit under a white oak, I see the fragments torn off —a quarter or half the leaf — filling the air and showering down at each ruder blast, and the ground is spotted green with them. There are not many whole leaves of the white oak blown off, but these torn fragments rather. At the Assabet stone bridge, the water along the shore is lined with a broad green mass of them, which have been blown into it, three or four feet wide, washed against the shore. Such a wind makes tearing work with them, now that they are so tender. There is much handsome interrupted fern in the Painted-Cup Meadow, and near the top of one of the clumps we noticed something like a large cocoon, the color of the rusty cinnamon fern wool. It was a red bat, the New York bat, so called. It hung suspended, head directly downward, with its little sharp claws or hooks caught through one of the divisions at the base of one of the pinne, above the fructification. It was a delicate rusty brown in color, very like the wool of the cinnamon fern, with the whiter bare spaces seen through it early in the season. I thought at first glance it was a broad brown cocoon, then that it was the plump body of a monstrous emperor moth. It was rusty or reddish brown, white or hoary within or beneath the tips, with a white apparently triangular spot beneath, about the insertion of the wings. Its wings were very compactly folded up, the principal bones (darker-reddish) lying flat along the under side of its body, and a hook on each meeting its opposite under the chin of the creature. It did not look like fur, but more like the plush of the ripe cat-tail head, though more loose, — all trembling in the wind and with the pulsations of the animal. I broke off the top of the fern and let the bat lie on its backin my hand. I held it and turned it about for ten or fifteen minutes, but it did not awake. Once or twice it opened its eyes a little, and even it raised its head, opened its mouth, but soon drowsily dropped its head and fell asleep again. Its ears were rounded and nearly bare. It was more attentive to sounds than to motions. Finally, by shaking it, and especially by hissing or whistling, I thoroughly awakened it, and it fluttered off twenty or thirty rods to the woods. I cannot but think that its instinct taught it to cling to the interrupted fern, since it might readily be mistaken for a mass of its fruit. Raised its old-haggish head. Unless it showed its head wide awake, it looked like a tender infant.