NATVRe'5 ••DIARY- FRANCIS' H -ALL£N GIFT OF SEELET W. MUDD and GEORGE I. COCHRAN MEYER ELSASSER DR. JOHN R. HAYNES WILLIAM L. HONNOLD JAMES R. MARTIN MRS. JOSEPH F. SARTORI to thf UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA . SOUTHERN BRANCH JOHN FISKE This book is DUE on the last date stamped below • RECTO LD-l RC , 'ffi. MOV1« 1975 10 /D Nature's Diary Compiled by Francis H. Allen " A mitutrtl of the natural ytar BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY (Cbe fiitcrsiDr Pre$0, 1898 Copyright,' 1897, BY HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. All rights reserved. x v A A -a PREFACE IN labeling scientific specimens, the first and most important item is " locality ; " and if this lit- tle book would make any pretentions to scientific methods, it must follow the rule. The first thing to be said, then, about these notes of Nature's is that they were made in the neighborhood of Bos- •'/ ton. But they are not local in any exclusive sense, and so I think they will interest observers in all parts of the Northeastern States and even outside of that region. I have tried to have each selection fit its day as exactly as possible, avoiding at the same time all generalities ; and I feel quite sure that the reader will find no glaring incongruities or anachronisms (if I may so use the word), though it is more than likely that the exact average is not always hit upon. Every selection has passed a rigid exam- ination upon two points, — scientific accuracy and poetic value, — so that neither requirement has been sacrificed to the other. On the right-hand pages appears a calendar of the arrival of birds and the first blooming of flow- iv PREFACE ers, with a few miscellaneous notes. The autumn dates for birds show the times of arrival of the more conspicuous migrants and winter visitors from the north. The dates given I believe to be very near the average ; but N ature is, within limits, so variable and uncertain in her goings in and com- ings out, that we cannot expect her to follow this schedule with any regularity. The bluebird may come on the twenty-second of February or not for a month later ; apple-trees may bloom on the tenth of May or wait until the twentieth. An early sea- son or a late season is a consequence of favorable or unfavorable weather, either here or in some other region upon which we are dependent. We must not take the poet too literally when we read, — " Ah ! well I mind the calendar, Faithful through a thousand years, Of the painted race of flowers, Exact to days, exact to hours, Counted on the spacious dial Yon broidered zodiac girds. I know the trusty almanac Of the punctual coming-back, On their due days, of the birds." These days and hours are not to be reckoned by our own Gregorian calendar; but if we count them on a more spacious dial, we shall find the almanac of the birds and the flowers as trusty as Emerson found it. PREFACE V I know very well that I have omitted many birds and flowers that will be looked for by some per- sons, and I can only try to disarm criticism by apologizing in advance and by saying, once for all, that Nature's Diary is not in any sense a complete record of her doings. For indispensable assistance in arranging the floral calendar, my thanks are due to the well- known botanists Walter Deane, Esq., Frederick Le Roy Sargent, Esq., and Henry A. Purdie, Esq. ; and I must also express my gratitude to William Brewster, Esq., and Henry M. Spelman, Esq., of Cambridge, Massachusetts, Professor Clarence Moores Weed of Durham, New Hampshire, Mr. and Mrs. White of North Con way, New Hampshire, and Robert Briggs Worthington, Esq., of Dedham, Massachusetts, for the use of the photographs from which the illustrations were made. It is, perhaps, hardly necessary to suggest that the blank space on the right-hand pages may very appropriately be used for a perennial register of the progress of the seasons. The preponderance of Thoreau in this little vol- ume is due to the simple fact that his books really contain more quotable paragraphs than all the others together, and this is largely owing to his wonderfully picturesque and epigrammatic style. F. H. A. LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS JUNE (See June 14) Frontispiece THE WINTER WOODS February 3 SCREECH OWL March 17 A BROOD OF WOODCOCK May 14 LINN^A June 23 CHIPMUNK August 23 FALLEN LEAVES October 24 POLYPODY November 25 NATURE'S DIARY Catch the pace of the seasons, have leisure to attend to every phenomenon of nature, and to entertain every thought that comes to you. Let your life be a leisurely progress through the realms of nature, even in guest-quarters. THOREAU: Winter. A book of the seasons, each page of which should be written in its own season and out of doors, or in its own locality, wherever it may be. THOREAU: Summer. I want to go soon and live away by the pond where I shall hear only the wind whispering among the reeds. It will be success if I shall have left myself behind. But my friends ask what I will do when I get there ! Will it not be employment enough to watch the pro- gress of the seasons ? THOREAU: Winter. JANUARY The chickadee is the bird of the wood the most unfailing. When in a windy or in any day you have penetrated some thick wood like this, you are pretty sure to hear its cheery note. At this season, it is almost its sole inhabitant. I see to- day one brown creeper busily inspecting the pitch pines. It begins at the base, and creeps rapidly upward by starts, adhering close to the bark, and shifting a little from side to side often till near the top, then suddenly darts off downward to the base of another tree, where it repeats the same course. THOREAU: Autumn. At no time of the year does the fellowship of the birds afford me keener enjoyment than in the dead of winter. In June one may see them every- where, and hear them at all hours ; a few more or a few less are nothing to make account of ; but in January the sight of a single brown creeper is sufficient to brighten the day, and the twittering of half a dozen goldfinches is like the music of angels. TOKREY: A Rambler's Lease. JANUARY I JANUARY The crow may not have the sweet voice wine1! the fox in his flattery attributed to him, but he has a good, strong, native speech nevertheless. How much character there is in it ! How much thrift and independence 1 ... Alert, social, repub- lican, always able to look out for himself, not afraid of the cold and the snow, fishing when flesh is scarce, and stealing when other resources fail, the crow is a character I would not willingly miss from the landscape. I love to see his track in the snow or the mud, and his graceful pedestrianism about the brown fields. BURROUGHS: Winter Sunshine. Ah, the pickerel of Walden ! When I see them lying on the ice, or in the well which the fisher- man cuts in the ice, making a little hole to admit the water, I am always surprised by their rare beauty, as if they were fabulous fishes, they are so foreign to the streets, even to the woods, foreign as Arabia to our Concord life. . . . They are not green like the pines, nor gray like the stones, nor blue like the sky; but they have, to my eyes, if possible, yet rarer colors, like flowers and precious stones, as if they were the pearls, the animalized nuclei or crystals of the Walden water. THOREAU: Walden. JANUARY 3 In the pine woods the wind was less violent, but the passing snow seemed like vibrating white lines rather than flakes. As I stood in the pines and looked northeast, every tree was black against a distance of on-coming white rage. As I looked southwest every tree was white, finely outlined in black, against a retreating mass of colorless motion. If I looked southeast the trees were black and white, and if northwest they were white and black, and whichever way I looked the air was surging on, laden with the bewildered and bewil- dering snow. BOLLES : Land of the Lingering Snow. The woods, which frost and November winds stripped of their leafy thatch, are roofed again, now with an arabesque of alabaster more delicate than the green canopy that summer unfolded, and all the floor is set in noiseless pavement, traced with a shifting pattern of blue shadows. In these silent aisles the echoes are smothered at their birth. . . . The sound of the axe-stroke flies no farther than the pungent fragrance of the smoke that drifts in a blue haze from the chopper's fire. The report of the gun awakes no answering report, and each mellow note of the hound comes separate to the ear, with no jangle of reverberations. ROBINSON: In New England Fields and Woods. JANUARY 5 JANUARY There is a low mist in the woods. It is a good day to study lichens. The view so confined, it compels your attention to near objects, and the white background reveals the disks of the lichens distinctly. They appear more loose, flowing, ex- panded, flattened out, the colors brighter for the damp. The round, greenish-yellow lichens on the white pines loom through the mist (or are seen dimly) like shields whose devices you would fain read. The trees appear all at once covered with the crop of lichens and mosses of all kinds. THOREAU : Winter. Entering the pine woods where I had previously seen quail, I found the trees in trouble. The great pines were loaded down with ice, and many a branch had broken and fallen under its weight. The surface of the snow was strewn with twigs and branches of every size. A strange roar of falling ice and twigs filled the woods, now and then empha- sized by the crash of some greater fall. I found the tracks of one quail and of a rabbit, made doubtless Saturday evening while the snow was still soft ; but otherwise the face of the snow told no tales. BOLLES : Land of the Lingering Snow. JANUARY 7 8 JANUARY 9 This poet, though he live apart, Moved by his hospitable heart, Sped, when I passed his sylvan fort, To do the honors of his court, As fits a feathered lord of land, Flew near, with soft wing grazed my hand, Hopped on the bough, then, darting low, Prints his small impress on the snow, Shows feats of his gymnastic play, Head downward, clinging to the spray. EMERSON : The Titmouse. 10 There is but little life and the objects are few, it is true. We are reduced to admire buds, even like the partridges, and bark, like the rabbits and mice, the great red and forward looking buds of the azalea, the plump red ones of the blueberry, and the fine sharp red ones of the panicled andromeda sleeping along its stem, the speckled black alder, the rapid growing dogwood, the pale brown and cracked blueberry, etc. Even a little shining bud which lies sleeping behind its twig, perhaps half concealed by ice, is object enough. THOREAU: Winter. JANUARY 9 10 JANUARY II The sunsets of winter are incomparably splendid ; aud when the ground is covered with snow, no brilliancy of tint expressible by words can come within an infinite distance of the effect. Our southern view at that time, with the clouds and atmospherical hues, is quite indescribable ; . . . the various distances of the hills which lie between us and the remote dome of Taconic are brought out with an accuracy unattainable in summer. The transparency of the air at this season has the effect of a telescope in bringing objects apparently near, while it leaves the scene all its breadth. HAWTHORNE: American Note-Books. 12 The solitary pine, unhindered, symmetrical, green to its lowermost twig, as it rises out of the meadow or stands a-tiptoe on the rocky ledge, is a thing of beauty, a pleasure to every eye. A pity and a shame that it should not be more common ! But the pine forest, dark, spacious, slumberous, musi- cal ! Here is something better than beauty, dearer than pleasure. When we enter this cathedral, un- less we enter it unworthily, we speak not of such things. Every tree may be imperfect, with half its branches dead for want of room or want of sun, but until the devotee turns critic — an easy step, alas, for half-hearted worshipers — we are conscious of no lack. TOKREY: The Foot-Path Way. JANUARY II 12 JANUARY 13 But few birds about. Apparently their gran- aries are locked up in ice, with which the grasses and buds are coated. Even far in the horizon the pine tops are turned to fir or spruce by the weight of the ice bending them down, so that they look like a spruce swamp. ... I see some oaks in the distance, which, from their branches being curved and arched downward and massed, are turned into perfect elms, which suggests that this is the pecu- liarity of the elm. Few if any other trees are thus wisp-like, the branches gracefully drooping. THOREAU: Winter. 14 Several times I heard crows, flying through the driving snow, calling to each other in its confusion. In the pines at the summit of the first high hill were two little brown creepers flying from trunk to trunk and exploring busily the bark on the sheltered side of the trees. When they left a tree the storm whirled them away like dry leaves, but they promptly headed toward the wind and sped back under the lee of some sheltering tree to its butt, the point where their explorations always begin. They kept track of each other by frequent attenuated squeaks. BOLLES: Land of the Lingering Snow. JANUARY 15 And when I returned new drifts would have formed, through which I floundered, where the busy northwest wind had been depositing the powdery snow round a sharp angle in the road, and not a rabbit's track, nor even the fine print, the small type, of a meadow mouse was to be seen. Yet I rarely failed to find, even in midwinter, some warm and springy swamp where the grass and the skunk-cabbage still put forth with peren- nial verdure, and some hardier bird occasionally awaited the return of spring. THOREAU : Walden. 16 No winter day, as it seems to me, was ever so fair as the winter night with the moon presiding. Not for the eye of the sun are the finer, subtler wonders of the snow ; these are reserved for the celestial wanderer " with white fire laden." So well pleased is she with the faithful coldness and purity of the snow that she is constantly visiting it with favors. Therefore are her nameless gem-bearing mountains and her treasure-houses laid under con- tribution for the adornment of her terrestrial love, in the folds of whose garments a myriad jewels sparkle. EDITH M. THOMAS : The Round Year. JANUARY 16 JANUARY 17 Going by the . . . oak at Clam-shell Hill bank, I heard a faint rippling note, and looking up saw about fifteen snow buntings sitting in the top of the oak, all with their breasts toward me. Sit- ting so still, and quite white seen against the white cloudy sky, they did not look like birds, and their boldness, allowing me to come quite near, enhanced this impression. ... It was a very spectral sight, and after I had watched them for several minutes I can hardly say that I was prepared to see them fly away like ordinary buntings when I advanced further. THOKEAU : Early Spring in Massachusetts. 18 The snow was lighter than chaff. It had been dried in the Arctic ovens to the last degree. The foot sped through it without hindrance. I fancied the grouse and quails quietly sitting down in the open places, and letting it drift over them. With head under wing, and wing snugly folded, they would be softly and tenderly buried in a few mo- ments. The mice and the squirrels were in their dens, but I fancied the fox asleep upon some rock or log, and allowing the flakes to cover him. The hare in her form, too, was being warmly sepulchred with the rest. I thought of the young cattle and the sheep huddled together on the lee side of a haystack in some remote field, all enveloped in mantles of white. BURROUGHS: Signs and Seasons. JANUARY 17 18 JANUARY 19 I see some tree sparrows feeding on the fine grass-seed above the snow. They are flitting along one at a time, commonly sunk in the snow, utter- ing occasionally a low, sweet warble, and seem- ingly as happy there, and with this wintry pros- pect before them for the night and several months to come, as any man by his fireside. One occasion- ally hops or flies toward another, and the latter suddenly jerks away from him. ... At length the whole ten have collected within a space a dozen feet square, but soon after, being alarmed, they utter a different and less musical chirp, and flit away into an apple-tree. THOREAU: Winter. 2O Adown the slopes there are tiny rivulets, which exist only for the winter. Bare, brown spaces of grass here and there, but still so infrequent as only to diversify the scene a little. In the woods, rocks emerging, and, where there is a slope immediately towards the lake, the snow is pretty much gone, and we see partridge-berries frozen, and outer shells of walnuts, and chestnut-burrs, heaped or scattered among the roots of the trees. The walnut-husks mark the place where the boys, after nutting, sat down to clear the walnuts of their outer shell. HAWTHORNE: American Note-Books. JANUARY 19 20 JANUARY 21 The tracks of partridges are more remarkable in this snow than usual, it is so light, being, at the same time, a foot deep. ... I see where many have dived into the snow, apparently last night, on the side of a shrub oak hollow. In four places they have passed quite underneath it for more than a foot ; in one place, eighteen inches. They appear to have dived or burrowed into it, then passed along a foot or more underneath, and squatted there, perhaps with their heads out. ... I scared one from its hole only half a rod in front of me, now at 11 A.M. THOEKAU: Winter. 22 Most of our birds are yet essentially wild, that is, little changed by civilization. . . . The pine gros- beaks will come in numbers upon your porch to get the black drupes of the honeysuckle or the woodbine, or within reach of your windows to get the berries of the mountain-ash, but they know you not ; they look at you as innocently and uncon- cernedly as at a bear or moose in their native north, and your house is no more to them than a ledge of rocks. BURROUGHS: Signs and Seasons. JANUARY 21 22 JANUARY 23 The value of the pitch pine in winter is that it holds the snow so finely. I see it now afar on the hillsides decking itself with it, its whited towers forming coverts where the rabbit and the gray squirrel lurk. It makes the most cheerful winter scenery, beheld from the window, you know so well the nature of the coverts and the sombre light it makes. The young oaks with their red leaves, cov- ering so many acres, are also an indispensable fea- ture of the winter landscape, and the limbs of oak woods where some of the trees have been cut off. THOREAU: Winter. 24 Through my north window, in the wintry weather, — My airy oriel on the river shore, — I watch the sea-fowl as they flock together Where late the boatman flashed his dripping oar. The gull, high floating, like a sloop unladen, Lets the loose water waft him as it will ; The duck, round-breasted as a rustic maiden, Paddles and plunges, busy, busy still. HOLMES: My Aviary. JANUARY 23 24 JANUARY 25 When I see a fox run across the pond on the snow, with the carelessness of freedom, or at in- tervals trace his course in the sunshine along the ridge of a hill, I give up to him sun and earth as to their true proprietor. He does not go in the sun, but it seems to follow him, and there is a visible sympathy between him and it. Sometimes, when the snow lies light, and but five or six inches deep, you may give chase and come up with one on foot. In such a case he will show a remarkable presence of mind, choosing only the safest direction, though he may lose ground by it. THOKEAU : Natural History of Massachusetts. The long trumpet-like bay, heard for a mile or more, — now faintly back to the deep recesses of the mountain, — now distinct, but still faint, as the hound comes over some prominent point and the wind favors, — anon entirely lost in the gully, — then breaking out again much nearer, and grow- ing more and more pronounced as the dog ap- proaches, till, when he comes around the brow of the mountain, directly above you, the barking is loud and sharp. On he goes along the northern spur, his voice rising and sinking as the wind and the lay of the ground modify it, till lost to hearing. BURROUGHS: Winter Sunshine. JANUARY 25 26 JANUARY 27 The sky was a cold grayish white ; the pines and cedars looked almost black. Against the sky the ice-covered, leafless trees were a darker gray than the clouds, but against the evergreens or in masses by themselves they were ashes-of-roses color and wonderfully soft in tone. Looking across a sloping pasture at a swamp filled with elms and willows, they seemed to be a mass of dark stems with their tops shrouded in pale smoke through which the faintest possible fire-glow permeated. I suppose the color came from the reddish bark of the twigs. BOLLES: Land of the Lingering Snow. 28 As I flounder along the Corner road against the root fence, a very large flock of snow buntings alight with a wheeling flight amid the weeds ris- ing above the snow ... a hundred or two of them. They run restlessly amid the weeds, so that I can hardly get sight of them through my glass. Then suddenly all arise and fly only two or three rods, alighting within three rods of me. They keep up a constant twittering. It is as if they were ready any instant for a longer flight, but their leader had not so ordered it. Suddenly away they sweep again, and I see them alight in a distant field where the weeds rise above the snow, but in a few minutes they have left that also, and gone farther north. THOREAC: Winter. JANUARY 27 28 JANUARY 29 The sharp-rayed track of the partridge adds an- other figure to this fantastic embroidery upon the winter snow. Her course Ls a clear, strong line, sometimes quite wayward, but generally very di- rect, steering for the densest, most impenetrable places, — leading you over logs and through brush, alert and expectant, till, suddenly, she bursts up a few yards from you, and goes humming through the trees, — the complete triumph of endurance and vigor. Hardy native bird, may your tracks never be fewer, or your visits to the birch-tree less frequent. BURROUGHS: Winter Sunshine. 30 Saw and heard cheep faintly one little tree spar- row, the neat chestnut-crowned and winged, and white-barred bird, so clean and tough, made to withstand the winter. This color reminds one of the upper side of the shrub-oak leaf. ... I love the few homely colors of Nature at this season, her strong, wholesome browns, her sober and pri- meval grays, her celestial blue, her vivacious green, her pure cold snowy-white. Thus Nature feeds her children cheaply with color. I have no doubt that it is an important relief to the eyes which have long rested on snow, to rest on brown oak leaves and the bark of trees. THOREATJ: Autumn. JANUARY 29 JANUARY 31 Winter, too, is, on the whole, the triumphant season of the moon, a moon devoid of sentiment, if you choose, but with the refreshment of a purer intellectual light, — the cooler orb of middle life. Who ever saw anything to match that gleam, rather divined than seen, which runs before her over the snow, a breath of light, as she rises on the infinite silence of winter night ? High in the heavens, also, she seems to bring out some intenser property of cold with her chilly polish. ... As you walk homeward, — for it is time that we should end our ramble, — you may perchance hear the most impressive sound in nature, unless it be the fall of a tree in the forest during the hush of sum- mer noon. It is the stifled shriek of the lake yon- der as the frost throttles it. LOWELL: A Good Word for Winter. JANUARY 31 FEBRUARY The scream of the jay is a true winter sound. It is wholly without sentiment, and in harmony with winter. — I stole up within five or six rods of a pitch pine behind which a downy woodpecker was pecking. From time to time he hopped round to the side towards me, and observed me without fear. They are very confident birds, not easily scared, but incline to keep the other side of the bough from you, perhaps. THOEEAU: Winter. It is a maze of twistings and turnings, but it is a tell-tale track nevertheless, for only the partridge can set such an exquisite pattern. If you follow it a bit, you will notice where it has disappeared in the snow, leaving a sort of blur at the end of this line so beautifully written. If the bird had mounted into the air for a flight, the sentence would have been cut short, but here is a bit of punctuation that is not found in the books. The partridge has started upon a burrowing expedi- tion, a subterranean journey, as it were, under the snow. SYLVESTER : Homestead Highways. c< u f} V o ^J ^7 9 FEBRUARY The snow has fallen so gently that it forms an upright wall on the slenderest twig. The agree- able maze which the branches make is more obvi- ous than ever, and every twig thus laden is as still as the hillside itself. . . . The effect of the snow is to press down the forest, confound it with the grasses, and create a new surface to the earth above, shutting us in with it, and we go along somewhat like moles through our galleries. The sight of the pure and trackless road up Brister's Hill, with branches and trees supporting snowy burdens bending over it on each side, would tempt us to begin life again. THOREAU: Winter. What a very gymnast is the typical chickadee ! As he twists himself on his perch, bringing his head under his feet, I am reminded of similar grotesque actions in the parrot. How tame and curious, hopping down through the branches, until just above one's head! There is a winnowing sound in the flight of the chickadee which recalls the rustling noise of the humming-bird's wings, or the night-moth hovering over flowers, in the far- away antipode of the season. Responsive to this sweetest note heard in all winterdom comes the terse staccato " yah, yah," of the fellowshiping nuthatches. EDITH M. THOMAS : From Winter Solstice to Vernal Equinox. FEBRUARY 3 FEBRUARY I frequently see three or four old white birches standing together on the edge of a pond or mea- dow,' and am struck by the pleasing manner in which they will commonly be grouped, how they spread so as to make room for each other, and make an agreeable impression upon the eye. THOKEAU: Winter. The tints of the sunset sky are never purer and more ethereal than in the coldest winter days. This evening, though the colors are not brilliant, the sky is crystalline, and the pale fawn-tinged clouds are very beautiful. THOKEAU: Winter. However, when you do get a crust that will bear, and know any brooklet that runs down a hillside, be sure to go and take a look at him, especially if your crust is due, as it commonly is, to a cold snap following eagerly on a thaw. You will never find him so cheerful. As he shrank away after the last thaw he built for himself the most exquisite caverns of ice to run through, if not " measureless to man " like those of Alph, the sacred river, yet perhaps more pleasing for their narrowness than those for their grandeur. LOWELL: A Good Word for Winter. FEBRUARY 5 FEBRUARY A little family of titmice gathered about me searching for their food both on the ground and on the trees with great industry and intentness, now and then pursuing each other. There were two nuthatches at least talking to each other. One hung with his head down on a large pitch pine pecking the bark for a long time, leaden blue above with a black cap and a white breast. . . . A downy woodpecker with the red spot on his hind head and his cassock open behind, showing his white robe, kept up an incessant loud tapping on another pitch pine. THOKEAU: Winter. 8 Judged by the eye alone, the fox is the lightest and most buoyant creature that runs. His soft wrapping of fur conceals the muscular play and effort that is so obvious in the hound that pursues him, and he comes bounding along precisely as if blown by a gentle wind. His massive tail is car- ried as if it floated upon the air by its own light- ness. BURROUGHS: Pepacton. The snow buntings and the tree sparrows are the true spirits of the snow-storm. They are the animated beings that ride upon it and have their life in it. THOREAU: Winter. FEBRUARY 7 8 FEBRUARY I hear a fine, busy twitter, and looking up, see a nuthatch hopping along and about a swamp white oak branch, inspecting every side of it, as read- ily hanging head downwards as standing upright, and then it utters a distinct quah, as if to attract a companion. Indeed, that other finer twitter seemed designed to keep some companion in tow, or else it was like a very busy man talking to him- self. The companion was a single chickadee, which lisped six or eight feet off. There were perhaps no other birds than these within a quarter of a mile. When the nuthatch' flitted to another tree two rods off, the chickadee unfailingly followed. THOREAU: Winter. 10 Summer has few finer pictures than this winter one of the farmer foddering his cattle from a stack upon the clean snow, — the movement, the sharply defined figures, the great green flakes of hay, the long file of patient cows, the advance just arriving and pressing eagerly for the choicest morsels, and the bounty and providence it suggests. Or the chopper in the woods, — the prostrate tree, the white new chips scattered about, his easy triumph over the cold, coat hanging to a limb, and the clear, sharp ring of his axe. The woods are rigid and tense, keyed up by the frost, and resound like a stringed instrument. BURROUGHS: Winter Sunshine. FEBRUARY 9 10 FEBRUARY II In the winter, warmth stands for all virtue, and we resort in thought to a trickling rill, with its bare stones shining in the sun, and to warm springs in the woods, with as much eagerness as rabbits and robins. . . . What fire could ever equal the sun- shine of a winter's day, when the meadow mice come out by the wall-sides, and the chickadee lisps in the defiles of the wood? The warmth comes directly from the sun, and is not radiated from the earth, as in summer ; and when we feel his beams on our backs as we are treading some snowy dell, we are grateful as for a special kindness, and bless the sun which has followed us into that by-place. THOKEAU: A Winter Walk. 12 DARWIN, 1809. Those little ruby-crowned lesser redpolls still about. They suddenly flash away from this side to that, in flocks, with a tumultuous note, half gurgle, half rattle, like nuts shaken in a bag, or a bushel of nutshells, soon returning to the tree they had forsaken on some alarm. They are oftenest seen on the white birch, apparently feeding on its seeds, scattering the scales about. THOREAU: Autumn. FEBRUARY n 12 FEBRUARY 13 Chickadees were everywhere, and very noisy. They worked quite as much on snow-covered twigs as on the sheltered side of branches. In the cedar swamp they popped in and out of snow caverns among the branches, often tipping over great piles of snow and dodging them with a jolly " chick-a- dee-dee-dee." BOLLES: Land of the Lingering Snow. There is no winter necessarily in the sky, though snow covers the earth. The sky is always ready to answer to our moods. We can see summer there or winter. THOKKAU: Winter. 14 The woods roar, the waters shine, and the hills look invitingly near. You do not miss the flowers and the songsters, or wish the trees or the fields any different, or the heavens any nearer. Every object pleases. A rail fence, running athwart the hills, now in sunshine and now in shadow, — how the eye lingers upon it! Or the straight, light- gray trunks of the trees, where the woods have re- cently been laid open by a road or a clearing, — how curious they look, and as if surprised in un- dress ! Next year they will begin to shoot out branches and make themselves a screen. BURROUGHS: Winter Sunshine. FEBRUARY 13 FEBRUARY 15 In February another track appears upon the snow, slender and delicate, about a third larger than that of the gray squirrel, indicating no haste or speed, but, on the contrary, denoting the most imperturbable ease and leisure, the footprints so close together that the trail appears like a chain of curiously carved links. Sir Mephitis mephitica, or, in plain English, the skunk, has woke up from his six weeks' nap, and corne out into society again. . . . There is no such word as hurry in his diction- ary, as you may see by his path upon the snow. BURROUGHS : Winter Sunshine. 16 The pond began to boom about an hour after sunrise, when it felt the influence of the sun's rays slanted upon it from over the hills ; it stretched itself and yawned like a waking man with a grad- ually increasing tumult, which was kept up three or four hours. It took a short siesta at noon, and boomed once more toward night, as the sun was withdrawing his influence. In the right stage of the weather a pond fires its evening gun with great regularity. THOREAU: Walden. FEBRUARY 15 16 FEBRUARY 17 I find that it is an excellent walk for variety and novelty and wildness to keep round the edge of the meadow. The ice not being strong enough to bear, and transparent as water, on the bare ground or snow just between the highest water mark and the present water line is a narrow, meandering walk rich in unexpected views and objects. The line of rubbish which marks the higher tides, with- ered flags and seeds and twigs and cranberries, is to my eyes a very agreeable and significant line which nature traces along the edge of the mea- dows. THOREAU: Winter. 18 Presently a fox barks away up next the moun- tain, and I imagine I can almost see him sitting there, in his furs, upon the illuminated surface, and looking down in my direction. As I listen, one answers him from behind the woods in the valley. What a wild winter sound, wild and weird, up among the ghostly hills ! Since the wolf has ceased to howl upon these mountains, and the panther to scream, there is nothing to be compared with it. So wild 1 I get up in the middle of the night to hear it. It is refreshing to the ear, and one delights to know that such wild creatures are among us. BURROUGHS: Winter Sunshine. FEBRUARY 17 FEBRUARY 19 See a large flock of snow buntings, the white birds of the winter, rejoicing in the snow. I stand near a flock in an open field. They are trotting about briskly over the snow, amid the weeds, ap- parently pig-weed and Roman wormwood, as if to keep their toes warm hopping up to the weeds. Then they suddenly take to wing again, and as they wheel about one, it is a very rich sight to see them dressed in black and white uniforms, alternate black and white, very distinct and singular. THOKEAU : Early Spring in Massachusetts. 2O If you are sick and despairing, go forth in win- ter and see the red alder catkins dangling at the extremity of the twigs all in the wintry air, like long, hard mulberries, promising a new spring and the fulfillment of all our hopes. We prize any ten- derness, any softening in the winter, catkins, birds' nests, insect life, etc. The most I get, perchance, is the sight of a mulberry-like red catkin, which I know has a dormant life in it seemingly greater than my own. THOBKAC: Winter. FEBRUARY 19 20 FEBRUARY 21 Entering the woods, the number and variety of the tracks contrast strongly with the rigid, frozen aspect of things. Warm jets of life still shoot and play amid this snowy desolation. . . . The mice tracks are very pretty, and look like a sort of fan- tastic stitching on the coverlid of the snow. One is curious to know what brings these tiny creatures from their retreats ; they do not seem to be in quest of food, but rather to be traveling about for pleasure or sociability, though always going post- haste, and linking stump with stump and tree with tree by fine, hurried strides. BURROUGHS: Winter Sunshine. 22 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL, 1819. Those trees and shrubs which retain their with- ered leaves through the winter, shrub oaks, and young white, red, and black oaks, the lower branches of larger trees of the last-mentioned species, horn- beams, young hickories, etc., seem to form an inter- mediate class between deciduous and evergreen trees. They may almost be called the ever-reds. Their leaves, which are falling all winter long, serve as a shelter to rabbits and partridges, and other winter birds and quadrupeds. Even the chickadees love to skulk amid them, and peep out from behind them. THOREAU: Autumn. FEBRUARY 21 22 FEBRUARY 23 Look up or down the open river channel now so smooth. Like a hibernating animal, it has ven- tured to come out to the mouth of its burrow. One way, perhaps, it is like melted silver alloyed with copper. It goes nibbling off the edge of the thick ice on each side. Here and there I see a musquash sitting in the sun on the edge of the ice, eating a clam, and the shells it has left are strewn along the edge. Ever. and anon he drops into the liquid mirror and soon reappears with another clam. THOKEAU : Early Spring in Massachusetts. 24 The sunshine, the bracing air, the swaying boughs of the pines and hemlocks beckoning at the woodside, and the firm smooth footing, irresis- tibly invite you forth. Your feet devour the way with crisp bites, and you think that nothing could be more pleasant to them till you are offered a few yards of turf, laid bare by winds and sun, and then you realize that nothing is quite so good as the old stand-by, a naked ground, and crave more of it, even as this is, and hunger for it with its later garnishing of grass and flowers. ROBINSON: In New England Fields and Woods. FEBRUARY 23 24 FEBRUARY 25 We pause and gaze into the Mill brook on the Turnpike bridge. I see a good deal of cress there on the bottom for a rod or two, the only green thing to be seen. ... Is not this the plant which most, or most conspicuously, preserves its green- ness in the winter ? ... It is as green as ever, and waving in the stream as in summer. THOEEAU: Winter. A chickadee, with its winter lisp, flits over. I think it is time to hear its phoebe note, and that instant it pipes it forth. THOKEAU: Early Spring in Massachusetts. 26 Now look down from your hillside across the valley. The trees are leafless, but this is the season, to study their anatomy, and did you ever notice be- fore how much color there is in the twigs of many of them ? LOWELL: A Good Word for Winter. This afternoon, as probably yesterday, it being warm and thawing, though fair, the snow is cov- ered with snow fleas. Especially they are sprinkled like pepper for half a mile in the tracks of a wood- chopper in deep snow. With the first thawing weather they come. THOREAU: Winter. FEBRUARY 25 26 FEBRUARY 27 I hear faintly the cawing of a crow far, far away, echoing from some unseen woodside, as if dead- ened by the spring-like vapor which the sun is drawing from the ground. It mingles with the slight murmur of the village, the sound of chil- dren at play, as one stream empties gently into another, and the wild and tame are one. What a delicious sound ! It is not merely crow calling to crow, for it speaks to me too. I am part of one great creature with him. If he has voice, I have ears. I can hear when he calls, and have engaged not to shoot or stone him, if he will caw to me each spring. THOREAU: Winter. 28 Scare up a rabbit on the hillside by these ponds, which was gnawing a smooth sumach. See also where they have gnawed the red maple, sweet fern, Populus grandidentata, white and other oaks (tak- ing off considerable twigs at four or five cuts), amelanchier, and sallow. But they seem to prefer the smooth sumach to any of them. With this variety of cheap diet they are not likely to starve. The rabbit, indeed, lives, but the sumach may be killed. I get a few drops of the sweet red-maple juice which has run down the main stem where a rabbit has nibbled a twig off close. THOBEAU: Early Spring in Massachusetts. FEBRUARY 27 28 FEBRUARY 29 I hear the well-known note and see a flock of Fringilla hiemalis,1 flitting in a lively manner about trees, weeds, walls, and ground by the road- side, showing their two white tail-feathers. They are more fearless than the song-sparrow. They attract notice by their numbers and incessant twittering in a social manner. THOREAU: Early Spring in Massachusetts. Twice this winter I have noticed a muskrat floating in a placid, smooth, open place in the river, when it was frozen for a mile each side, looking at first like a bit of stump or frozen mea- dow, but showing its whole upper outline from nose to end of tail, perfectly still till he observed me, then suddenly diving and steering under the ice toward some cabin's entrance or other retreat half- a-dozen or more rods off. THOREAU: Winter. 1 The slate-colored junco or snowbird, now called by scientists Junco hyemalis. — ED. FEBRUARY 29 MARCH I go listening, but in vain, for the warble of the 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. . . . Heard two hawks scream. There was something truly March-like in it, like a prolonged blast or whistling 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 choir, learned of the whistling March wind. THOEEAU: Early Spring in Massachusetts. The storm is over, and it is one of those beauti- ful winter mornings when a vapor is seen hanging in the air between the village and the woods. THOREAU: Winter. There are days when almost complete silence possesses the woods, yet listening intently one may hear the continual movement of -myriads of snow fleas pattering on the fallen leaves like the soft purr of such showers as one might imagine would fall in Lilliput. ROBINSON: In New England Fields and Woods. MARCH I MARCH In this clear air and bright sunlight, the ice-cov- ered trees have a new beauty, especially the birches along under the edge of Warren's wood on each side of the railroad, bent quite to the ground in every kind of curve. At a distance, as you are approaching them endwise, they look like the white tents of Indians under the edge of the wood. The birch is thus remarkable, perhaps, from the feathery form of the tree, whose numerous small branches sustain so great weight, bending it to the ground ; and, moreover, because, from the color of the bark, the core is less observable. THOREAU: Winter. Dry snow covered the ground. Along the stone walls it had drifted heavily, reaching in many places a depth of two feet. Walking in the ploughed fields was uncertain, the furrows being filled with snow and the ridges blown free from it. The brooks were noisy, but their music was muffled by decks of thin ice which partially cov- ered them. Great white air bubbles rolled along under these ice decks. Here and there watercress, buttercup leaves and long blades of grass could be seen pressed upward against the transparent ice by the pulsating current. In one pool in the pine woods the floor of the little basin was studded with scarlet partridge berries, surrounded by their rich green leaves. BOLLES: Land of the Lingering Snow. MARCH MARCH 5 I noticed a few chickadees there in the edge of the pines in the sun, lisping and twittering cheer- fully to one another with reference to me, I think, the cunning and innocent little birds. One a little farther off utters the phoebe note. There is a foot, more or less, of clear, open water at the edge here, and seeing this, one of these birds hops down, as if glad to find any open water at this season, and after prinking, it stands in the water on a stone, up to its belly, and dips its head, and flirts the water about vigorously, giving itself a good wash- ing. I had not expected this at this season. No fear that it will catch cold. THOREAU: Winter. 6 The sun, when he sets about destroying the ice, does not simply melt it from the surface, — that were a slow process ; but he sends his shafts into it and separates it into spikes and needles, — in short, makes kindling-wood of it, so as to consume it the quicker. BURROUGHS: Signs and Seasons. A soft rain began to fall, and it loosed the tongues of the birds. Chickadees called from tree to hedge. Golden-crested kinglets lisped to each other in the cedars. A dozen crows circled over the high pines, cawing discontentedly. BOLLES : Land of the Lingering Snow. MARCH 5 6 MARCH See two yellow-spotted tortoises in the ditch S. of Trillium wood. You saunter expectant in the mild air along the soft edge of a ditch filled in with melted snow, and paved with leaves in some sheltered place, yet perhaps with some ice at one end still, and are thrilled to see stirring mid the leaves at the bottom, sluggishly burying them- selves from your sight again, these brilliantly spot- ted creatures. There are commonly two, at least. The tortoise is stirring in the ditches again. In yourjlatest spring, they still look incredibly strange when first seen, and not like cohabitants and con- temporaries of yours. THOKEAU: Winter. 8 The birds in the stubble field proved to be tree- sparrows. They were feeding on the seeds of weeds found on patches of moist earth left bare by the wasting snow. Each bird was saying some- thing in a joyous recitative which he maintained continuously, regardless of the rippling mirth of his companions. I crept close to them and watched them through the embrasures of an old stone wall. Their chestnut caps, white wing-bars and long slender tails make them easy birds to recognize. As I rose they flew, nearly thirty strong, and van- ished in the mist. BOLLES: Land of the Lingering Snow. MARCH 7 MARCH The other evening, as I stood on the slope of a hill in the twilight, I heard a whistling of ap- proaching wings, and presently a woodcock flying low passed near me. I could see his form and his long curved wings dimly against the horizon ; his whistling slowly vanished in the gathering night, but his passage made something stir and respond within me. March was on the wing, she was abroad in the soft still twilight searching out the moist, springy places where the worms first come to the surface and where the grass first starts ; and her course was up the valley from the south. BURROUGHS: Riverby. IO I go along the river-side to see the now novel reflections. The invading waters have left a thou- sand little isles where willows and sweet gale and the meadow itself appears. I hear the phcebe note of the chickadee, one taking it up behind another, as in a catch, phe-bee phe-bee. THOREAU : Early Spring in Massachusetts. Just after sundown I see a large flock of wild geese in a perfect harrow cleaving their way toward the northeast, with Napoleonic tactics splitting the forces of winter. THOREAU: Early Spring in Massachusetts. MARCH 9 10 Bluebird. MARCH II The ice in the pond at length begins to be honey- combed, and I can set my heel in it as I walk. Fogs and rains and warmer suns are gradually melting the snow; the days have grown sensibly longer ; and I see how I shall get through the win- ter without adding to my woodpile, for large fires are no longer necessary. I am on the alert for the first signs of spring, to hear the chance note of some arriving bird, or the striped squirrel's chirp, for his stores must be now nearly exhausted, or see the woodchuck venture out of his winter quarters. THOKEAU: Walden. 12 As it grew darker, I was startled by the honking of geese flying low over the woods, like weary travelers getting in late from southern lakes, and indulging at last in unrestrained complaint and mutual consolation. Standing at my door, I could hear the rush of their wings ; when, driving to- ward my house, they suddenly spied my light, and with hushed clamor wheeled and settled in the pond. So I came in, and shut the door, and passed my first spring night in the woods. THOKEAU: Walden. MARCH II 12 Song Sparrow. MARCH 13 The water on the meadow this still bright morn- ing is smooth as in April. I am surprised to hear the strain of a song sparrow from the river-side, and as I cross from the causeway to the hill, think- ing of the bluebird, I that instant hear one's note from deep in the softened air. It is already 40°. By noon it is between 50° and 60°. As the day advances I hear more bluebirds, and see their azure flakes settling on the fenceposts. Their short rich warble curls through the air. Its grain now lies parallel to the bluebird's warble, like boards of the same lot. THOREAU: Early Spring in Massachusetts. 14 Above, the hen-hawk swims and swoops, Flung from the bright, blue sky ; Below, the robin hops, and whoops His piercing Indian cry. HOLMES: After a Lecture on Wordsworth. The sun and the south wind, which perhaps bears some faint breath of stolen fragrance from far-off violet banks, tempt forth the bees, but they find no flowers yet, not even a squirrelcup or wil- low catkin, and can only make the most of the fresh sawdust by the wood-pile and the sappy ends of maple logs. ROBINSON: In New England Fields and Woods. MARCH 13 14 Robin. MARCH 15 And yonder bluebird with the earth tinge on his breast and the sky tinge on his back, — did he come down out of heaven on that bright March morn- ing when he told us so softly and plaintively that, if we pleased, spring had come ? Indeed, there is nothing in the return of the birds more curious and suggestive than in the first appearance, or rumors of the appearance, of this little blue-coat. The bird at first seems a mere wandering voice in the air : one hears its call or carol on some bright March morning, but is uncertain of its source or direction. BURROUGHS: Wake-Robin. 16 At Hubbard's wall how handsome the willow catkins 1 Those wonderfully bright silvery but- tons so regularly disposed in oval schools in the air, or, if you please, along the seams which the twigs make, in all degrees of forwardness, from the faintest, tiniest speck of silver just peeping from beneath the black scales to lusty pussies which have thrown off their scaly coats, and show some redness at base or on close inspection. These fixed swarms of arctic buds spot the air very pret- tily along the hedges. They remind me somewhat by their brilliancy of the snowflakes, which are so bright by contrast at this season when the sun is high. THOBEAU: Early Spring in Massachusetts. MARCH 15 The Glaucous Willow begins to show its white " pussies." 16 MARCH 17 A day or two later I sat on a hillside in the woods late in the day amid the pines and hemlocks, and heard the soft, elusive spring call of the little owl — a curious musical undertone hardly separa- ble from the silence ; a bell, muffled in feathers, toll- ing in the twilight of the woods and discernible only to the most alert ear. But it was the voice of spring, the voice of the same impulse that sent the wood- cock winging his way through the dusk, that was just beginning to make the pussy-willows swell and the grass to freshen in the spring runs. BURROUGHS: Riverby. 18 I hear the song sparrow practicing his first mat- ins for the year. No wonder his song has been compared to the tinkling of bells ! A more vibrat- ing, resonant quality there is not in the whole choir of native-bird voices. His ditty consists of three short introductory notes (embodying the theme or motive, perhaps) ; these three notes trans- lating themselves, to my ear, in the syllables " sweet, sweet, sweet," with a drawing in of the breath each time, followed by a bewildering suc- cession of delicious tintinnabulations. EDITH M. THOMAS: The Round Year. MARCH 17 18 MARCH At the Hubbard Path a mink comes tetering along the ice by the side of the river. . . . He seems daintily lifting his feet with a jerk as if his toes were sore. They seem to go a-hunting at night along the edge of the river. Perhaps I notice them more at this season, when the shallow water freezes at night, and there is no vegetation along the shore to conceal them. THOREAU : Early Spring in Massachusetts. In two or three places I hear the ground-squir- rel's first chirrup or qui vive in the wall, like a bird or a cricket. THOREAU : Early Spring in Massachusetts. 20 I saw a whole flock of daring blackbirds careering above the gusty woods in the March gale. They seemed to be exercising their speed and agility in one of the heroic games of the air. When they reached a goal, or station in the top of some high tree, they disposed themselves about the branches like so many weather-vanes, all facing in the same direction, and all indicating the south-southwest. This was practically " trimming to the wind." EDITH M. THOMAS: The Round Year. Almost every bush has its song sparrow this morning, and their tinkling strains are heard on all sides. THOREAU: Early Spring in Massachusetts. MARCH 19 20 Red-winged Blackbird ; Fox Sparrow. MARCH 21 Ah, there is the note of the first flicker, — a pro- longed, monotonous wick-wick-wick-wick-wick-wick, etc., or, if you please, quick-quick-quick, heard far over and through the dry leaves. But how that single sound peoples and enriches all the woods and fields ! They are no longer the same woods and fields that they were. This note really quick- ens what was dead. It seems to put life into the withered grass and leaves and bare twigs, and henceforth the days shall not be as they have been. THOKEAU: Early Spring in Massachusetts. 22 Why chidest thou the tardy Spring ? The hardy bunting does not chide ; The blackbirds make the maples ring With social cheer and jubilee ; The redwing flutes his o-ka-lee, The robins know the melting snow. EMERSON: May-Day. If you scan the horizon at this season you are very likely to detect a flock of dark ducks moving with rapid wing athwart the sky, or see the undu- lating line of migrating geese. THOKEAU : Early Spring in Massachusetts. MARCH 21 Rusty Blackbird 22 MARCH 23 Round to the white bridge, where the red-maple buds are already much expanded, foretelling sum- mer, though our eyes see only winter as yet. As I sit under their boughs looking into the sky, I sud- denly see the myriad black dots of the expanded buds against the sky. Their sap is flowing. The elm buds, too, I find are expanded, though on earth are no signs of spring. THORBAU : Early Spring in Massachusetts. I hear the pleasant phoebe note of the chickadee. It is, methinks, more like a wilderness note than any other I have heard yet. THOREAU: Early Spring in Massachusetts. 24 I hear the bluebird, the song sparrow, and the robin, and the note of the lark leaks up through the meadows, as if its bill had been thawed by the warm sun. THOREAU: Early Spring in Massachusetts. The woodchuck and the chipmunk have got on top of the world again. You hear the half queru- lous, half chuckling whistle of the one, the full- mouthed persistent cluck of the other, voicing rec- ognition of the season. ROBINSON: In New England Fields and Woods. MARCH 23 24 Meadowlark. MARCH 25 The tree sparrow is perhaps the sweetest and most melodious warbler at present and for some days. It is peculiar, too, for singing in concert along the hedge-rows, much like a canary, es- pecially in the mornings, very clear, sweet, melo- dious notes, between a twitter and a warble, of which it is hard to catch the strain, for you com- monly hear many at once. THOEEAU: Early Spring in Massachusetts. The bluebird's warble comes feeble and frozen to my ear. THOEEAU: Early Spring in Massachusetts. 26 The ducks alight at this season in the still water, in company with the gulls, which do not fail to improve an east wind to visit our meadows, and swim about by twos and threes, pluming them- selves, and diving to peck at the root of the lily, and the cranberries which the frost has not loos- ened. The first flock of geese is seen beating to north, in long harrows and waving lines ; the jin- gle of the song sparrow salutes us from the shrubs and fences; the plaintive note of the lark comes clear and sweet from the meadow ; and the blue- bird, like an azure ray, glances past us in our walk. THOBEAC: Natural History of Massachusetts. MARCH 25 Skunk Cabbage. MARCH 27 I see a woodchuck out on the calm side of Lee's Hill (Nawshawtuck). He has pushed away the withered leaves which filled his hole, and come forth, and left his tracks on those slight patches of the recent snow which are left about his hole. THOREAU: Early Spring in Massachusetts. The marsh hawk sailing low over the meadow is already seeking the first slimy life that awakes. The sinking sound of melting snow is heard in all dells, and the ice dissolves apace in the ponds. THOKEAU: Walden. 28 Occasionally, of a bright, warm, still day in March, such as we have had the present season, the little flying spider is abroad. It is the most deli- cate of all March tokens, but very suggestive. Its long, waving threads of gossamer, invisible except when the sunlight falls upon them at a particular angle, stream out here and there upon the air, a filament of life, reaching and reaching as if to catch and detain the most subtle of the skyey in- fluences. BURROUGHS: Riverby. MARCH 27 28 MARCH 29 Princes and magistrates are often styled serene, but what is their turbid serenity to that ethereal serenity which the bluebird embodies. His most serene Birdship ! His soft warble melts in the ear as the snow is melting in the valleys around. The bluebird comes, and with his warble drills the ice, and sets free the rivers and ponds and frozen ground. As the sand flows down the slopes a little way, assuming the forms of foliage when the frost comes out of the ground, so this little rill of mel- ody flows a short way down the concave of the sky. THOREAU : Early Spring in Massachusetts. March water is usually clean, sweet water ; every brook is a trout-brook, a mountain brook ; the cold and the snow have supplied the condition of a high latitude; no stagnation, no corruption, comes downstream now as on a summer freshet. Winter comes down, liquid and repentant. Indeed, it is more than water that runs then : it is frost sub- dued ; it is spring triumphant. No obsolete water- courses now. The larger creeks seek out their abandoned beds, return to the haunts of their youth, and linger fondly there. The muskrat is adrift, but not homeless ; his range is vastly ex- tended, and he evidently rejoices in full streams. BURROUGHS: Signs and Seasons. MARCH 29 30 Phoebe. MARCH 31 The little brown brooks, — how swift and full they ran! One fancied something gleeful and hilarious in them. And the large creeks, — how steadily they rolled on, trailing their ample skirts along the edges of the fields and marshes, and leaving ragged patches of water here and there 1 Many a gentle slope spread, as it were, a turfy apron in which reposed a little pool or lakelet. Many a stream sent little detachments across lots, the sparkling water seeming to trip lightly over the unbroken turf. Here and there an oak or an elm stood knee-deep in a clear pool, as if rising from its bath. It gives one a fresh, genial feeling to see such a bountiful supply of pure, running water. One's desires and affinities go out toward the full streams. How many a parched place they reach and lap in one's memory! How many a vision of naked pebbles and sun-baked banks they cover and blot out I BURROUGHS: Signs and Seasons. MARCH 31 Cowbird APRIL Saw a pigeon woodpecker flash away, showing the rich golden underside of its glancing wings and the large whitish spot on its back, and pres- ently I heard its familiar, long-repeated, loud note, almost as familiar as that of a barn-door fowl, which it somewhat resembles. The robins, too, now toward sunset, perched on the old apple-trees in TarbePs orchard, twirl forth their evening lays unweariedly. . . . To-night, for the first time, I hear the hylas in full blast. THOREAU : Early Spring in Massachusetts. How still the morning is ! It is at such times that we discover what music there is in the souls of the little slate-colored snowbirds. How they squeal, and chatter, and chirp, and trill, always in scattered troops of fifty or a hundred, filling the air with a fine sibilant chorus ! That joyous and childlike " chew," " chew," " chew " is very expres- sive. Through this medley of finer songs and calls, there is shot, from time to time, the clear, strong note of the meadowlark. It comes from some field or tree farther away, and cleaves the air like an arrow. BURROUGHS: Pcpacton. APRIL I Hylas (H.pickeringii) begin peeping. APRIL 3 JOHN BURROUGHS, 1837. Was it a squirrel's pettish bark, Or clarionet of jay ? or hark Where yon wedged line the Nestor leads, Steering north with raucous cry Through tracts and provinces of sky, Every night alighting down In new landscapes of romance, Where darkling feed the clamorous clans By lonely lakes to men unknown. EMERSON: May-Day. 4 Going down town this morning, I am surprised by the rich strain of the purple finch from the elms. Three or four have arrived and lodged against the elms of our street, which runs east and west across their course, and they are now min- gling their loud, rich strain with that of the tree sparrows, robins, bluebirds, etc. The hearing of this note implies some improvement in the acous- tics of the air. It reminds me of that genial state of the air when the elms are in bloom. They sit still over the street, and make a business of war- bling. They advertise one, surely, of some addi- tional warmth and serenity. THOREAU: Early Spring in Massachusetts. APRIL 3 4 Purple Finch. APRIL 5 Now when the leaves get to be dry and rustle under your feet, the peculiar dry note, wurrk wurrk wur r r k wurk, of the wood-frog is heard faintly by ears on the alert, borne up from some unseen pool in a woodland hollow which is open to the influences of the sun. It is a singular sound for awakening nature to make, associated with the first warmer days when you sit in some sheltered place in the woods amid the dried leaves. THOKEAU : Early Spring in Massachusetts. 6 First notice the ring of the toad as I am cross- ing the common in front of the meeting-house. There is a cool and breezy south wind, and the ring of the first toad leaks into the general stream of sound unnoticed by most, as the mill brook empties into the river, and the voyager cannot tell if he is above or below its mouth. ... It is a sound from amid the waves of the aerial sea, that breaks on our ears with the surf of the air, — a sound that is almost breathed with the wind, taken into the lungs instead of being heard by the ears. It comes from far over and through the troughs of the aerial sea, like a petrel ; and who can guess by what pool the singer sits ? THORKAU : May Days APRIL 5 Wood-frogs begin clucking. 6 Common toads begin their spring trilL APRIL A large company of fox-colored sparrows in Heywood's maple swamp close by. I heard their loud, sweet, canary-like whistle thirty or forty rods off, sounding richer than anything else yet ; some on the bushes, singing twee twee twa two, two. ter tweer tweer twa. This is the scheme of it only, there being no dental grit. They were shy, flitting before me, and I heard a slight susurrus where many were busily scratching amid the leaves in the swamp, without seeing Lthem, and also saw many indistinctly. THOKEAU: Early Spring in Massachusetts. 8 All along on the south side of this hill, on the edge of the meadow, the air resounds with the hum of honey-bees, attracted by the flower of the skunk-cabbage. I first heard the fine, peculiarly sharp hum of the honey-bee before I thought of them. Some hummed hollowly within the spathe, perchance to give notice to their fellows that the plant was occupied, for they repeatedly looked in and backed out on finding another. . . . Some of these spathes are now quite large and twisted up like cows' horns, not curved over, as usual. Commonly they make a pretty little crypt or shrine for the flower. Lucky that this flower does not flavor their honey. THOREAU: Early Spring in Massachusetts. APRIL Tree Swallow. American Elm. 8 Vesper Sparrow. APRIL The robin is the singer at present, such is its power and universality, being heard both in garden and wood. Morning and evening he does not fail, perched on some elm or the like, and in rainy days it is one long morning or evening. The song sparrow is still more universal, but not so powerful. The lark, too, is equally constant morning and evening, but confined to certain localities, as is the blackbird to some extent. The bluebird with feebler, but not less sweet warbling, helps fill the air, and the phoebe does her part. THOREAU: Early Spring in Massachusetts. 10 The fish hawk, too, is occasionally seen at this season sailing majestically over the water, and he who has once observed it will not soon forget the majesty of its flight. It sails the air like a ship of the line, worthy to struggle with the elements, falling back from time to time like a ship on its beam ends, and holding its talons up as if ready for the arrows, in the attitude of the national bird. It is a great presence, as of the master of river and forest. Its eye would not quail before the owner of the soil, but make him feel like an intruder on its domains. And then its retreat, sailing so stead- ily away, is a kind of advance. THOREAU: Natural History of Massachusetts. APRIL 9 10 Red Maple. APRIL II The woods ring with the cheerful jingle of the Fringilla hiemalis [the slate-colored junco or snow- bird, now called by ornithologists Junco hyemalis. — ED.]. This is a very trig and compact little bird, and appears to be in good condition. The straight edge of slate on their breasts contrasts remarkably with the white from beneath. The short, light-colored bill is also very conspicuous amid the dark slate, and when they fly from you, the two white feathers in their tails are very distinct at a good distance. They are very lively, pursuing each other from bush to bush. THOREAU: Early Spring in Massachusetts. 12 At Hayden's I hear hylas on two keys or notes. Heard one after the other; the sounds might be mistaken for the varied note of one. The little croakers, too, are very lively there. I get close to them, and witness a great commotion, they half hopping and half swimming about with their heads out, apparently in pursuit of each other, perhaps thirty or forty within a few square yards, and fif- teen or twenty within one yard. . . . As I ap- proach nearer, they disperse and bury themselves in the grass at the bottom, only one or two remain- ing outstretched upon the surface ; and at another step, these, too, conceal themselves. THOREAU: Early Spring in Massachusetts. APRIL II 12 Pine Warbler. APRIL 13 That long, clear, cool note, like the arc described by a bright new sickle, — that 's the meadowlark 1 I know well the springy pasture where he hunts his breakfast, the wind-crisped pools where he sometimes dips his bill. EDITH M. THOMAS: The Round Year. In my walks in April, I am on the lookout for watercresses. It is a plant that has the pungent April flavor. In many parts of the country the watercress seems to have become completely nat- uralized, and is essentially a wild plant. BURROUGHS: Signs and Seasons. 14 The painted wood drake swims above the sub- merged tree roots ; a pair of dusky ducks splash to flight, with a raucous clamor, out of a sedgy cove at your approach ; the thronging blackbirds shower liquid melody and hail of discord from the purple- budded maples above you. All around, from the drift of floating and stranded water weeds, arises the dry, crackling croak of frogs, and from sunny pools the vibrant trill of toads. EOBINSON: In New England Fields and Woods. APRIL Swamp Sparrow. Ruby-crowned Kinglet. APRIL 15 But who ever dreamed of calling the chipping sparrow a fine singer ? And yet, who that knows it does not love his earnest, long-drawn trill, dry and tuneless as it is ? I can speak for one, at all events ; and he always has an ear open for it by the middle of April. It is the voice of a friend, — a friend so true and gentle and confiding that we do not care to ask whether his voice be smooth and his speech eloquent. TOKKEY: Birds in the Bush. 16 There are many things left for May, but nothing fairer, if as fair, as the first flower, the hepatica. I find I have never admired this little firstling half enough. When at the maturity of its charms, it is certainly the gem of the woods. What an individ- uality it has I No two clusters alike ; all shades and sizes ; some are snow-white, some pale pink, with just a tinge of violet, some deep purple, others the purest blue, others blue touched with lilac. A solitary blue-purple one, fully expanded and ris- ing over the brown leaves or the green moss, its cluster of minute anthers showing like a group of pale stars on its little firmament, is enough to ar- rest and hold the dullest eye. BURROUGHS: Signs and Seasons. APRIL 15 Chipping Sparrow ; Field Sparrow. Trailing Arbutus. 16 Yellow Palm Warbler. Hepatica. APRIL 17 As I go down the street just after sunset, I hear many snipe to-night. At this hour, that is, in the twilight, they make a hovering sound high in the air over the villages, and the inhabitants do not know what to refer it to. It is very easily imitated by a sort of shuddering with the breath. . . . Perhaps no one dreamed of snipe an hour ago, and the air seemed empty of such as they ; but as soon as the dusk begins, so that a bird's flight is con- cealed, you hear this peculiar, spirit-suggesting sound, now far, now near, heard through and above the evening din of the village. THOREAU : Early Spring in Massachusetts. 18 I hear a robin singing in the woods south of Hosmer's, just before sunset. It is a sound asso- ciated with New England village life. It brings to my thoughts summer evenings when the children are playing in the yards before the doors, and their parents, conversing, sit at the open windows. It foretells all this now, before those summer hours are come. As I come over the turnpike, the song sparrow's jingle comes up from every part of the meadow, as native as the tinkling rills or the blossoms of the spiraea. Its cheep is like the sound of opening buds. THOREAU: Early Spring in Massachusetts. APRIL 17 Hermit Thrush. 18 APRIL 19 After crossing the arrow-head fields, we see a woodchuck run along and climb to the top of a wall and sit erect there, — our first. It is almost exactly the color of the ground, the wall, and the bare brown twigs altogether. When in the Miles swamp field we see two, one chasing the other, com- ing very fast down the lilac-field hill, straight to- ward us, while we squat still in the middle of the field. The foremost is a small gray or slaty-col- ored one ; the other, two or three times as heavy, and a warm tawny, decidedly yellowish in the sun, a very large and fat one, pursuing the first. THOREAU: May Days. 20 By the river I see distinctly redwings and hear their conqueree. They are not associated with grackles. They are an age before their cousins, have attained to clearness and liquidity, they are officers, epauletted. The others are rank and file. I distinguish one even by its flight, hovering slowly from treetop to treetop, as if ready to utter its liquid notes. Their whistle is very clear and sharp, while that of the grackle is ragged and split. THOBEAU: Early Spring in Massachusetts. APRIL Savanna Sparrow. 2O Dandelion. APRIL 21 High in the air white-bellied swallows reveled in the sunlight. The sweet-breathed west wind bore to us the kindred songs of the purple finch and the vesper sparrow, the plaint of the meadow- lark, the drumming of the downy woodpecker, and the cawing of the crow. In a pine grove near by, the pine-creeping warbler and the chipping spar- row contrasted their monotonous repetitions of a single note, the one giving a smooth, well-rounded trill, the other a sharper, more pointed one. BOLLES: Land of the Lingering Snow. 22 Wilson says that the only note of the rusty grackle is a cluck, though he is told that at Hud- son's Bay at the breeding time they sing with a fine note. Here they utter not only a cluck, but a fine shrill whistle. They cover the top of a tree now, and their concert is of this character. They all seem laboring together to get out a clear strain, as it were wetting their whistles against their arrival at Hudson's Bay. They begin, as it were, by disgorging or spitting it out like so much tow, from a full throat, and conclude with a clear, fine, shrill, ear-piercing whistle. THOKEAU: Early Spring in Massachusetts. APRIL 21 Plantain-leaved Everlasting. 22 Houstonia (H. caerulea). APRIL 23 The grass is greening here and there on the moist slopes and by the spring runs ; the first fur- row has been struck by the farmer ; the liver-leaf is in the height of its beauty, and the bright con- stellations of the bloodroot shine out here and there ; one has had his first taste and his second taste of the spring and of the woods, and his tongue is sharpened rather than cloyed. Now he will take the most delicious and satisfying draught of all, the very essence and soul of the early season, of the tender brooding days, with all their prophecies and awakenings, in the handful of trailing arbutus which he gathers in his walk. BURROUGHS: Riverby. 24 See a little blue butterfly fluttering about on the dry brown leaves in a warm place by the swamp side, making a pleasant contrast. From time to time have seen the large Vanessa antiopa resting on the black willows, like a leaf still adhering. As I sit by the swamp side this warm summery after- noon I hear the crows cawing hoarsely, and from time to time see one flying toward the top of a tall white pine. At length I distinguish a hen-hawk perched on the top. The crow repeatedly stoops toward him, now from this side, now from that, passing near his head each time, but he pays not the least attention to it. THOREAU: Mav Da vs. APRIL 23 Marsh Marigold, 24 Myrtk Warbler. APRIL 25 I wandered lonely where the pine-trees made Against the bitter East their barricade, And, guided by its sweet Perfume, I found, within a narrow dell, The trailing spring flower tinted like a shell Amid dry leaves and mosses at my feet. WHITTIEK: The Trailing Arbutus. The gray branches of the oaks, which have lost still more of their leaves, seen against the pines when the sun is rising and falling on them, how rich and interesting ! Hear the faint, swelling, far-off beat of a partridge. THOREAU: Early Spring in Massachusetts. 26 See the old barn on the meadow slope ; the green seems to have oozed out from it, and to have flowed slowly down the hill ; at a little distance it is lost in the sere stubble. One can see where every spring lies buried about the fields ; its in- fluence is felt at the surface, and the turf is early quickened there. Where the cattle have loved to lie and ruminate in the warm summer twilight, there the April sunshine loves to linger too, till the sod thrills to new life. BURROUGHS: Signs and Seasons. APRIL 25 Solitary Vireo. Wood Anemone ; Bloodroot. 26 Purple Martin ; Barn Swallow ; Black and White Warbler. Common CinquefoiL APRIL 27 Dear common flower, that grow'st beside the way, Fringing the dusty road with harmless gold, First pledge of blithesome May, Which children pluck, and, full of pride uphold, High-hearted buccaneers, o'erjoyed that they An Eldorado in the grass have found, Which not the rich earth's ample round May match in wealth, thou art more dear to me Than all the prouder summer-blooms may be. LOWELL: To the Dandelion. 28 There is a brief period in our spring when I like more than at any other time to drive along the country roads, or even to be shot along by steam and have the landscape presented to me like a map. It is at that period, usually late in April, when we behold the first quickening of the earth. The waters have subsided, the roads have become dry, the sunshine has grown strong and its warmth has penetrated the sod ; there is a stir of preparation about the farm and all through the country. One does not care to see things very closely ; his inter- est in nature is not special but general. The earth is coming to life again. BURROUGHS: Signs and Seasons. APRIL 27 White-throated Sparrow ; Towhec. Arrow-leaved Violet 28 Brown Thrasher. Early Saxifrage ; Dog-tooth Violet APRIL 29 It is only for a brief period that the blossoms of our sugar maple are sweet-scented ; the perfume seems to become stale after a few days : but pass un- der this tree just at the right moment, say at night- fall on the first or second day of its perfect inflores- cence, and the air is loaded with its sweetness ; its perfumed breath falls upon you as its cool shadow does a few weeks later. BURROUGHS: Pepacton. The chipping sparrow, with its ashy white breast, white streak over eye, and undivided chestnut crown, holds up its head and pours forth its che che che che che che. THOREAU : Early Spring in Massachusetts. 30 A few days earlier, grays, browns, and delicate yellows had prevailed. These were forgotten, swept away by a flood of green and crimson. The green of the meadows, roadsides, and upland hay- fields was so vivid that all underlying tints were obliterated. The willows, which for weeks had been the most conspicuous color-spots in every view, had developed leaves strong enough in color to cancel the golden and coppery tones of their stems and merge them in the greens of grassland and meadow. The maples from gray and mist-like softness had with their red blossoms come forward as the most pronounced color-masses in the land- scape. BOLLES : Land of the Lingering Snow. APRIL 29 Wild Strawberry (blooms). 30 Chimney Swift. Common Blue Violet ; Sweet White Violet. MAY The chewink is a shy bird also, but not stealthy. It is very inquisitive, and sets up a great scratch- ing among the leaves, apparently to attract your attention. The male is perhaps the most conspicu- ously marked of all the ground-birds except the bobolink, being black above, bay on the sides, and white beneath. The bay is in compliment to the leaves he is forever scratching among, — they have rustled against his breast and sides so long that these parts have taken their color; but whence come the white and black ? BURROUGHS : Birds and Poets. Crossing the first Conantum field I perceive a peculiar fragrance in the air (not the meadow fra- grance), like that of vernal flowers or of expanding buds. The ground is covered with the mouse-ear in full bloom, and it may be that in part. It is a temperate southwest breeze, and this is a scent of willows (flowers and leaflets), bluets, violets, shad-bush, mouse-ear, etc., combined, or perhaps the last chiefly. At any rate, it is very perceptible. The air is more genial, laden with the fragrance of spring flowers. I, sailing on the spring ocean, get- ting in from my winter voyage, begin to smell the land. THOREAU : May Days. MAY I Rue Anemone. Least Flycatcher. Sugar Maple ; Garden Cherry MAY Again and again the sounds fell on my ear, and as often I endeavored to obtain a view of the singer ; but he was in the thick of the upper branches, and I looked for him in vain. How de- licious the music was ! a perfect lullaby, drowsy and restful ; like the benediction of the wood on the spirit of a tired city-dweller. I blessed the un- known songster in return ; and even now I have a feeling that the peculiar enjoyment which the song of the black-throated green warbler never fails to afford me may perhaps be due in some measure to its association with that twilight hour. TOBREY: Birds in the Bush. JOHN JAMES AUDUBON, 1780; THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY, 1825. Near at hand, upon the topmost spray of a birch, sings the brown thrasher — or red mavis, as some love to call him — all the morning, glad of your society, that would find out another farmer's field if yours were not here. While you are planting the seed, he cries, — " Drop it, drop it, — cover it up, cover it up, — pull it up, pull it up, pull it up." . . . You may wonder what his rigmarole, his amateur Paganini performances on one string or on twenty, have to do with your planting, and yet prefer it to leached ashes or plaster. THOREAU: Walden. MAY Cliff Swallow ; Bank Swallow; Black-throated Gre«n Warbler. Columbine j Bellwort ( l/vutaria seisifolia). 4 Yellow Warbler ; House Wren MAY Who has seen the partridge drum? It is the next thing to catching a weasel asleep, though by much caution and tact it may be done. He does not hug the log, but stands very erect, expands his ruff, gives two introductory blows, pauses half a second, and then resumes, striking faster and faster till the sound becomes a continuous, un- broken whir, the whole lasting less than half a minute. The tips of his wings barely brush the log, so that the sound is produced rather by the force of the blows upon the air and upon his own body as in flying. BURROUGHS : Wake-Robin. 6 Coming to a drier and less mossy place in the woods, I am amused with the golden - crowned thrush, — which, however, is no thrush at all, but a warbler. He walks on the ground ahead of me with such an easy gliding motion, and with such an unconscious, preoccupied air, jerking his head like a hen or a partridge, now hurrying, now slackening his pace, that I pause to observe him. I sit down, he pauses to observe me, and extends his pretty ramblings on all sides, apparently very much engrossed with his own affairs, but never losing sight of me. But few of the birds are walkers, most being hoppers, like the robin. BURROUGHS: Wake-Robin. MAY Kingbird. Shadbush. 6 Rose-breasted Grosbeak ; Oven-bird. MAY A peetweet and its mate. The river seems really inhabited when the peetweet is back. This bird does not return to our stream until the weather is decidedly pleasant and warm. He is perched on the accustomed rock. His note peoples the river like the prattle of children once more in the yard of a house that has stood empty. . . . I am surprised by the tender yellowish green of the aspen leaves, just expanded suddenly, even like a fire, seen in the sun agaiust the dark brown twigs of the wood, though these leaflets are yet but thinly dispersed. It is very enlivening. THOREAU : May Days. 'Nuff sed, June's bridesman, poet o' the year, Gladness on wings, the bobolink, is here ; Half-hid in tip-top apple-blooms he swings, Or climbs aginst the breeze with quiverin' wings, Or, givin' way to 't in a mock despair, Runs down, a brook o' laughter, thru the air. LOWELL: The Biglow Papers. The swallows dive and chatter about the barn, or squeak and build beneath the eaves ; the par- tridge drums in the fresh sprouting woods ; the long, tender note of the meadowlark comes up from the meadow ; and at sunset, from every marsh and pond come the ten thousand voices of the hylas. BURROUGHS: Wake-Robin. MAY 7 Warbling Vireo ; Nashville Warbler ; Chestnut-Sided Warbler ; Maryland Yellow-throat ; Catbird. 8 Bobolink; Yellow-throated Vireo ; Northern Parula Warbler ; Redstart. Bird-foot Violet. MAY And hark ! and hark ! the woodland rings ; There thrilled the thrush's soul ; And look ! that flash of flamy wings, — The fire-plumed oriole ! HOLMES: After a Lecture on Wordsworth. The first whip-poor-will startles me ; I hear three. Summer is coming apace. Within three or four days the birds have come so fast I can hardly keep the run of them, — much faster than the flowers. THOKEAU: May Dajrs. IO Early in May, the oaks, hickories, maples, and other trees, just putting out amidst the pine woods around the pond, imparted a brightness like sun- shine to the landscape, especially in cloudy days, as if the sun were breaking through the mists and shining faintly on the hillsides here and there. THOEEAU: Walden. Whist ! There goes an oriole, a gorgeous crea- ture, flashing from one elm to another, and piping in his happiest manner as he flies. TORKEY: The Foot-Path Way. MAY 9 Baltimore Oriole ; Prairie Warbler. 10 Jack-in-the- Pulpit MAY II The wood thrush launches forth his evening strains from the midst of the pines. I admire the moderation of this master. There is nothing tumultuous in his song. He launches forth one strain of pure, unmatchable melody, and then he pauses and gives the hearer and himself time to digest this, and then another and another at suit- able intervals. Men talk of the rich song of other birds, the thrasher, mockingbird, nightingale. But I doubt, I doubt. They know not what they say. There is as great an interval between the thrasher and the wood thrush as between Thomson's " Seasons" and Homer. THOREAU: Summer. 12 One sometimes seems to discover a familiar wild flower anew by coming upon it in some peculiar and striking situation. Our columbine is at all times and in all places one of the most exquisitely beauti- ful of flowers ; yet one spring day, when I saw it growing out of a small seam on the face of a great lichen-covered wall of rock, where no soil or mould was visible, — a jet of foliage and color shooting out of a black line on the face of a perpendicular mountain wall and rising up like a tiny fountain, its drops turning to flame-colored jewels that hung and danced in the air against the gray rocky sur- face, — its beauty became something magical and audacious. BURROUGHS: Riverby. MAY II White-eyed Vireo ; Wood Thrush ; Wilson's Thrush. 12 Red-eyed Vireo ; Golden-winged Warbler ; Black-throated Blue Warbler. Downy Yellow Violet MAY 13 I hear the song of the veery down there under the willows. It is a weird, ventriloquial song. The bird seems making its gypsy music to itself, not to the world. . . . The song of the veery has in it the tinkling of bells, the jangle of the tam- borine. It recalls to me the gypsy chorus in the " Bohemian Girl," and when I hear it as evening draws on, I can picture light feet tripping over the damp grass, and in the shadows made by moving of branches and ferns I can see dark forms moving back and forth in the windings of the dance. BOLLES: Land of the Lingering Snow. 14 ROWLAND EVANS ROBINSON, 1833. Thither too the woodcock led her brood, to probe the mud for worms, flying but a foot above them down the bank, while they ran in a troop beneath ; but at last, spying me, she would leave her young and circle round and round me, nearer and nearer till within four or five feet, pretending broken wings and legs, to attract my attention, and get off her young, who would already have taken up their march, with faint wiry peep, single file through the swamp, as she directed. Or I heard the peep of the young when I could not see the parent bird. THOBEAU: Walden. MAY 13 Scarlet Tanager. Apple. 14 Magnolia Warbler. Bulbous Buttercup. MAY 15 The flowers of the apple are perhaps the most beautiful of any tree's, so copious and so delicious to both sight and scent. The walker is frequently tempted to turn and linger near some more than usually handsome one, whose blossoms are two thirds expanded. How superior it is in these respects to the pear, whose blossoms are neither colored nor fragrant ! THOREAU: Wild Apples. The feeble, sharp song of the black-poll is a sin- gular affair ; short and slight as it is, it embraces a perfect crescendo and a perfect decrescendo. TOKREY : The Foot-Path Way. 16 A female sparrow hawk darted from her nest in the deep hollow of an inaccessible limb, and flew with marvelous grace into the open, wheeled, and dropped upon the outstretched finger of one of the tallest trees of this tall grove. Her mate joined her and perched for a second beside her, while a queer whining chatter came from them. Their coloring is as beautiful as that of the fox sparrow, and if they cannot revive the fainting heart by song, they can give the eye joy by their speed, their perfect grace of flight, and the beauty of their outlines. BOLLES: Land of the Lingering Snow. MAY 15 Yellow-billed Cuckoo; Ruby-throated Hummingbird; Black- poll Warbler. Male toads begin squawking. 16 Short-billed Marsh Wren ; Long-billed Marsh Wren. Nodding Trillium. MAY 17 I know of nothing in vegetable nature that seems so really to be born as the ferns. They emerge from the ground rolled up, with a rudi- mentary and " touch-me-not " look, and appear to need a maternal tongue to lick them into shape. The sun plays the wet nurse to them, and very soon they are out of that uncanny covering in which they come swathed, and take their places with other green things. BURROUGHS: Signs and Seasons. And, hark, the cuckoo weatherwise, Still hiding farther onward, wooes you. LOWELL: The Nightingale in the Study. 18 Twice have the crow blackbirds attempted a set- tlement in my pines, and twice have the robins, who claim a right of preemption, so successfully played the part of border-ruffians as to drive them away, — to my great regret, for they are the best substitute we have for rooks. At Shady Hill (now, alas ! empty of its so long loved household) they build by hundreds, and nothing can be more cheery than their creaking clatter (like a convention of old-fashioned tavern-signs) as they gather at even- ing to debate in mass meeting their windy politics, or to gossip at their tent-doors over the events of the day. LOWELL: My Garden Acquaintance. MAY 17 Black-billed Cuckoo. Rhodora. Treetoads begin to trilL 18 Indigo Bunting. MAY 19 I must not forget to mention that delicate and lovely flower of May, the fringed polygala. It is rather a shy flower, and is not found in every wood. One day we went up and down through the woods looking for it, — woods of mingled oak, chestnut, pine, and hemlock, — and were about giving it up when suddenly we came upon a gay company of them beside an old wood-road. It was as if a flock of small rose-purple butterflies had alighted there on the ground before us. The whole plant has a singularly fresh and tender aspect. Its foliage is of a slightly purple tinge, and of very delicate texture. BURROUGHS: Riverby. 2O In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes, I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods, Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook, To please the desert and the sluggish brook. The purple petals, fallen in the pool, Made the black water'with their beauty gay ; Here might the red-bird come his plumes to cool, And court the flower that cheapens his array. Rhodora ! if the sages ask thee why This charm is wasted on the earth and sky, Tell them, dear, that if eyes were made for seeing, Then Beauty is its own excuse for being. EMERSON: The Rhodora. MAY 19 Wood Pcwee. Fringed Polygala ; Purple Azalea. 2O Flowering Dogwood; Star-flower; Stemless Lady's-Slipper. MAY 21 I hear the note of a bobolink concealed in the top of an apple-tree behind me. ... He is just touching the strings of his theorbo, his glassichord, his water organ, and one or two notes globe them- selves and fall in liquid bubbles from his tuning throat. It is as if he touched his harp within a vase of liquid melody, and when he lifted it out the notes fell like bubbles from the trembling strings. Methinks they are the most liquidly sweet and melodious sounds I ever heard. . . . Oh, never advance farther in your art ; never let us hear your full strain, sir ! But away he launches, and the meadow is all bespattered with melody. THOKEAU: Summer. 22 Hear a red squirrel chirrup at me by the hem- locks. . . . He makes so many queer sounds, and so different from one another, that you would think they came from half a dozen creatures. I hear now two sounds from him of a very distinct character, a low or base internal, worming, screwing kind of sound (very like that, by the way, which an anx- ious partridge mother makes), and at the same time a very sharp and shrill bark, clear, and on a very high key, totally distinct from the last, while his tail is nourishing incessantly. You might say that he successfully accomplished the difficult feat of singing and whistling at the same time. THOKEAU: Early Spring in Massachusetts. MAY 21 Barberry ; Robin's Plantain ; Dwarf Solomon's Seal 22 Wild Cranesbill ; Choke Cherry. MAY 23 LINNAEUS, 1707. The sumach (Rhus glabra) grew luxuriantly about the house, pushing up through the embank- ment which I had made, and growing five or six feet the first season. Its broad pinnate tropical leaf was pleasant though strange to look on. The large buds, suddenly pushing out late in the spring from dry sticks which had seemed to be dead, de- veloped themselves as by magic into graceful green and tender boughs, an inch in diameter. THOBEAC: Walden. 24 Then, as it grew dark, it grew silent, — except for the hylas, — till suddenly a field sparrow gave out his sweet strain once. After that all was quiet for another interval, till a thrasher from the hill- side began to sing. He ceased, and once more there was stillness. All at once the tanager broke forth in a strangely excited way, blurting out his phrase two or three times and subsiding as ab- ruptly as he had commenced. Some crisis in his love-making, I imagined. Now the last oven-bird launched into the air and let fall a little shower of melody, and a whip-poor-will took up his chant afar off. TOBREY: Birds in the Bush. MAY 23 MAY 25 RALPH WALDO EMERSON, 1803. There were two hen-hawks that soared and cir- cled for our entertainment when we were in the woods on this plain, crossing each other's orbits from time to time, alternating like the squirrels in their cylinder, till, alarmed by our imitation of a hawk's shrill cry, they gradually inflated them- selves, made themselves more aerial, and rose higher and higher into the heavens, and were at length lost to sight; yet all the while earnestly looking, scanning the surface of the earth for a stray mouse or rabbit. THOREAU : May Days. 26 The woods and fields next the Cliffs now ring with the silver jingle of the field sparrow, the medley of the brown thrasher, the honest qui vive of the chewink, or his jingle from the top of a low copse tree, while his mate scratches in the dry leaves beneath. The black and white creeper is hopping along the oak boughs, head downward, pausing from time to time to utter its note, like a fine, delicate saw sharpening, and ever and anon rises, clear over all, the smooth rich melody of the wood thrush. THOREAU: May Days. The note of the wood thrush answers to some cool, unexhausted morning vigor in the hearer. THOREAU: Summer. MAY 25 Cow-lily; Golden Ragwort; Scarlet Painted-Cup; Blue-eyed Grass ; Star Grass. 26 Red Clover ; Daisy. MAY 27 I was amused with the behavior of two red squir- rels, as I approached the hemlocks. . . . For four or five minutes at least they kept up an incessant chirruping or squeaking bark, vibrating their tails and their whole bodies, and frequently 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, i. e., with a yet sharper exclamation, as if frightened by their own motions, their whole bodies quiver- ing, their heads and great eyes on the qui vive. THOKEAU: Early Spring in Massachusetts. 28 Louis AGASSIZ, 1807. Our Arethusa is one of the prettiest of the or- chids, and has been pursued through many a marsh and quaking bog by her lovers. She is a bright pink-purple flower an inch or more long, with the odor of sweet violets. The sepals and petals rise up and arch over the column, which we may call the heart of the flower, as if shielding it. BURROUGHS: Riverby. As I come over the hill, I hear the wood thrush singing his evening lay. This is the only bird whose note affects me like music, affects the flow and tenor of my thought, my fancy, and imagina- tion. It lifts and exhilarates me. THOREAU: Summer. MAY 27 Pitcher-plant. Bullfrogs begin to trumpet. 28 Arethusa. MAY 29 He is so harmless to man, that, were it not for the old, unreasoning antipathy, our hands would not be raised against him ; and, if he were not a snake, we should call him beautiful in his stripes of black and gold, and in graceful motion — a mo- tion that charms us in the undulation of waves, in their nickering reflections of sunlight on rushy margins and wooded shores, in the winding of a brook through a meadow, in the flutter of a pen- nant and the flaunting of a banner, the ripple of wind-swept meadow and grain field, and the sway of leafy boughs. ROBINSON: In New England Fields and Woods. 30 A serene evening, the sun going down behind clouds. A few white or slightly shaded piles of clouds floating in the eastern sky, but a broad, clear, mellow cope left for the moon to rise into. An evening for poets to describe. As I proceed along the back road I hear the lark still singing in the meadow, and the bobolink, the golden robin on the elms, and the swallows twittering about the barns. All Nature is in an expectant attitude. THOREAU: Summer. All that was ripest and fairest in the wilderness and the wild man is preserved and transmitted to us in the strain of the wood thrush. THOKEAU: Summer. MAY 29 Bunchberry; Water Arum. MAY 31 Within little more than a fortnight the woods, from bare twigs, have become a sea of verdure, and young shoots have contended with one another in the race. The leaves are unfurled all over the country. Shade is produced, the birds are con- cealed, their economies go forward uninterruptedly, and a covert is afforded to animals generally. But thousands of worms and insects are preying on the leaves while they are young and tender. Myriads of little parasols are suddenly spread all the coun- try over to shield the earth and the roots of the trees from the parching heat, and they begin to flutter and to rustle in the breeze. THOKBAU: Summer. MAY 31 JUNE The air has now begun to be filled with a bluish haze. These virgin shades of the year, when every- thing is tender, fresh, and green, how full of prom- ise ! — promising bowers of shade in which heroes may repose themselves. I would fain be present at the birth of shadow. It takes place with the first expansion of the leaves. . . . The black willows are already beautiful, and the hemlocks with their bead-work of new green. Are these not kingbird- days, — these clearer first June days, full of light, when this aerial, twittering bird nutters from wil- low to willow, and swings on the twigs, showing his white-edged tail ? THOREAU: Summer. The blue-eyed grass is one of the most beauti- ful of flowers. It might have been famous from Proserpine down. It will bear to be praised by poets. THOREAU: Summer. A few fireflies in the meadow. Do they shine, though invisibly, by day? Is their candle lighted by day ? It is not nightfall till the whip-poor-wills begin to sing. ... I heard a partridge drumming to-night as late as nine o'clock. What a singularly space-penetrating and filling sound! Why am I never nearer to its source ? THOREAU: Summer. JUNE I White Clover ; Alsike Clover. 2 Tall Buttercup. JUNE This morning I hear the note of young bluebirds in the air, which have recently taken wing, and the old birds keep up such a warbling and twitter- ing as remind me of spring. THOREAU: Summer. The oven-bird's nest in Laurel Glen is near the edge of an open pine wood under a fallen pine twig and a heap of dry oak leaves. Within these on the ground is the nest, with a dome-like top and an arched entrance of the whole height and width on one side. Lined within with dry pine needles. THOREAU: Summer. The delicate maiden-hair fern forms a cup or dish, very delicate and graceful. Beautiful, too, its glossy black stem and its wave-edged, fruited leaflets. I hear the feeble, plaintive note of young blue- birds, just trying their wings or getting used to them. Young robins peep. THOREAU: Summer. I have stood under a tree in the woods half a day at a time, during a heavy rain in the summer, and yet employed myself happily and profitably there prying with microscopic eye into the crevices of the bark or the leaves of the fungi at my feet. THOREAU: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. JUNE 3 4 Blue Flag. JUNE 5 I am as white as a miller — a rye-miller, at least — with the lint from the young leaves and twigs. The tufts of pinks on the side of the peak by the pond grow raying out from a centre, some- what like a cyme, on the warm, dry side hill, — some a lighter, some a richer and darker shade of pink. With what a variety of colors we are enter- tained ! Yet most colors are rare or in small doses, presented to us as a condiment or spice ; much of green, blue, black, and white, but of yellow and the different shades of red, far less. The eyes feast on the colors of flowers as on tidbits. THOKEAU: Summer. 6 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, cold wind would blacken and tear them now. They remind me of the frail- est 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. THOEEAU: Summer. JUNE 5 Wild Strawberries ripen. JUNE A redwing's nest, four eggs, low in a tuft of sedge in an open meadow. What Champollion can translate the hieroglyphics on these eggs ? It is always writing of the same character, though much diversified. While the bird picks up the material and lays this egg, who determines the style of the marking ? When you approach, away dashes the dark mother, betraying her nest, and then chatters her anxiety from a neighboring bush, where she is soon joined by the red-shouldered male, who comes scolding over your head, chatter- ing and uttering a sharp " phe phee-e." THOREAU: Summer. 8 . . . The painted cup is in its prime. It red- dens the meadow, Painted Cup Meadow. It is a splendid show of brilliant scarlet, the color of the cardinal flower and surpassing it in mass and pro- fusion. They first appear on the side of the hill, on dryer ground, half a dozen inches high, and the color is most striking then, when it is most rare and precious ; but they now cover the meadow mingled with buttercups, etc., and many are more than eight inches high. I do not like the name. It does not remind me of a cup, rather of a flame when it first appears. It might be called flame flower, or scarlet tip. THOREAU: Summer. JUNE 7 Sheep Laurel JUNE How full is 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 [peeping hy- las — ED.] 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 or stake driver, whenever we lie to, as if he had taken the job of extending all the fences up the river, to keep the cows from straying. 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. THOKEAU: Summer. IO Instead of the white lily, which requires mud, or the sweet flag, here grows the blue flag in the water, thinly about the shore. The color of the flower harmonizes singularly with the water. With our boat's prow to the shore, we sat half an hour this evening, listening to the bull-frogs. What imperturbable fellows I One sits perfectly still behind some blades of grass while the dog is chasing others within two feet. . . . We see here and there light-colored, greenish, or white spots on the bottom, where a fish — a bream, per- haps— has picked away all the dead wood and leaves for her nest over a space of eighteen inches or more. THOKEAU: Summer. JUNE 9 10 Common Yarrow. JUNE ii The pincushion galls on young white oaks are now among the most beautiful objects in the woods, — coarse, woolly, white, spotted with bright red or crimson on the exposed side. It is remark- able that a mere gall, which at first we are in- clined to regard as something abnormal, should be made so beautiful, as if it were the flower of the tree ; that a disease, an excrescence, should prove, perchance, the greatest beauty, as the tear of the pearl ; beautiful scarlet sins they may be. Through our temptations, aye, and our falls, our virtues appear. THOKEAU: Summer. 12 The lupine is now in its glory. ... I am quite ex- cited by this prospect of blue flowers in clumps, with narrow intervals, such a profusion of the heavenly, the Elysian color, as if these were the Elysian Fields. . . . That is the value of the lu- pine. The earth is blued with it. Yet a third of a mile distant I do not detect their color on the hillside. Perchance because it is the color of the air. It is not distinct enough. You may have passed along here a fortnight ago, and the hillside was comparatively barren, but now you come, and these glorious redeemers appear to have flashed out here all at once. THOREAU: Summer. JUNE II 12 JUNE 13 The wild strawberry, like the wild apple, is spicy and high-flavored, but, unlike the apple, it is also mild and delicious. It has the true rustic sweet- ness and piquancy. What it lacks in size, when compared with the garden berry, it makes up in intensity. It is never dropsical or overgrown, but firm-fleshed and hardy. Its great enemies are the plow, gypsum, and the horserake. It dis- likes a limestone soil, but seems to prefer the de- tritus of the stratified rock. Where the sugar maple abounds, I have always found plenty of wild strawberries. BURROUGHS : Locusts and Wild Honey. 14 The verdure, both of trees and grass, is now in its prime, the leaves elastic, all life. The grass- fields are plenteously bestrewn with white-weed, large spaces looking as white as a sheet of snow, at a distance, yet with an indescribable warmer tinge than snow, — living white, intermixed with living green. The hills and hollows beyond the Cold Spring copiously shaded, principally with oaks of good growth, and some walnut-trees, with the rich sun brightening in the midst of the open spaces, and mellowing and fading into the shade, — and single trees, with their cool spot of shade, in the waste of sun : quite a picture of beauty, gently picturesque. HAWTHORNE : American Note-Books. JUNE 13 JUNE 15 The grass is waving, and, the trees having leaved out, their boughs feel the effect of the breeze. Thus new life and motion is imparted to the trees. The season of waving boughs, and the lighter under-sides of the new leaves are exposed. This is the first half of June. Already the grass is not so fresh and liquid velvety a green, having much of it blossomed, and some even gone to seed, and it is mixed with reddish ferns and other plants ; but the general leanness, shadiness, and waving of grass and boughs characterize the season. The wind is not quite agreeable, because it prevents your hearing the birds sing. THOREAU: Summer. 16 The beauty and fragrance of the wild rose are wholly agreeable and wholesome, and wear well. I do not wonder much that men have given the preference to this family of flowers notwithstand- ing their thorns. It is hardy and more complete in its parts than most flowers, its color, buds, fra- grance, leaves, the whole bush, frequently its stem in particular, and finally its red or scarlet hips. THOREAU: Summer. There is something in the music of the cow-bell sweeter and more nutritious than the milk which the farmers drink. THOREAU: Summer. JUNE 15 Mountain Laurel ; Wild Rose (various species). 16 JUNE 17 The fog condenses into fountains and streams of music, as in the strain of the bobolink which I hear, and runs off so. The music of the birds is the tinkling of the rills that flow from it. I can- not see twenty rods. . . . There is everywhere dew on the cobwebs, little gossamer veils or scarfs as big as your hand dropped from the shoulders of fairies that danced on the grass the past night. ... I think it was this thin vapor that produced a kind of mirage when I looked over the meadow from the railroad last night toward Trillium wood, giving to the level meadow a certain liquid, sea-like look. THOKEAU: Summer. 18 Going up Pine Hill, disturbed a partridge and her brood. She ran in dishabille directly to me, within four feet, while her young, not larger than chickens just hatched, dispersed, flying along a foot or two from the ground, just over the bushes, for a rod or more. The mother kept close at hand to attract my attention, and mewed and clucked, and made a noise as when a hawk is in sight. She stepped about and held her head above the bushes, and clucked just like a hen. What a remarkable instinct, that which keeps the young so silent, and prevents their peeping and betraying themselves 1 This wild bird will run almost any risk to save her young. THORKAU: Summer. JUNE 17 Pogonia (P. ophioglossoides). 18 Common Self-huL JUNE 19 In the sproutland beyond the red huckleberry, an indigo-bird, which chirps about me, as if it had a nest there. This is a splendid and marked bird, high-colored as is the tanager, looking strange in this latitude. Glowing indigo. It flits from the top of one bush to another, chirping as if anxious. Wilson says it sings, not like most other birds, in the morning and evening chiefly, but also in the middle of the day. In this I notice it is like the tanager, the other fiery-plumaged bird. They seem to love the heat. It probably had its nest in one of these bushes. THOKEAU: Summer. 2O Instinctively our feet turned up the path to the oven-bird's nest, so narrow that we brushed a shower from every bush. There he was, singing at that moment. " Teacher ! teacher ! teacher ! " he called, with head thrown up and wings drooped. And then while we looked up he left his perch, and passed up between the branches out of our sight, his sweet ecstatic love-song floating down to de- light our souls. OLIVE THORNE MILLER: Little Brothers of the Air. Again I scent the white lily, and a season I had waited for has arrived. How indispensable all these experiences to make up the summer ! THOKEAU: Summer. JUNE 19 White Azalea. 2O Water-lily. JUNE 21 Exquisitely beautiful, and unlike anything we have, is the first white lily just expanded in some shallow lagoon where the water is leaving it, per- fectly fresh and pure before the insects have dis- covered it. How admirable its purity! How innocently sweet its fragrance ! How significant that the rich black mud of our dead stream pro- duces the water lily ! Out of that fertile slime springs this spotless purity. It is remarkable that those flowers which are most emblematic of purity should grow in the mud. THOREAU: Summer. 22 Or sometimes I watched a pair of hen - hawks circling high in the sky, alternately soaring and descending, approaching and leaving one another, as if they were the embodiment of my own thoughts. THOREAU: Walden. How beautiful the solid cylinders of the lambkill now just before sunset, small ten-sided rosy-crim- son basins, about two inches above the recurved, drooping, dry capsules of last year, and sometimes those of the year before, two inches lower. THOREAU: Summer. JUNE 21 Four-leaved Loosestrife ; Spreading Dogbane, 22 JUNE 23 He saw beneath dim aisles, in odorous beds, The slight Linnaea hang its twin-born heads, And blessed the monument of the man of flowers, Which breathes his sweet fame through the north- ern bowers. EMERSON: Woodnotes. Of all bird voices, none are more sweet and cheerful to my ear than those of swallows, in the dim, sun-streaked interior of a lofty barn ; they address the heart with even a closer sympathy than robin redbreast. HAWTHORNE: Mosses from an 01