Green Lichens 2

• Language: unknown
• Subjects: Fair Haven; Cape Eagle; gyrfalcon
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20320970

Accompanying Journal Entry: "9 A.M. To Fair Haven Pond. A clear and a pleasanter and warmer day than we have had for a long time. The snow begins (at noon) to soften somewhat in the road. For two or three weeks, successive light and dry snows have fallen on the old crust and been drifting about on it, leaving it at last three quarters bare and forming drifts against the fences, etc., or here and there low, slaty, fractured ones in mid-field, or pure white hard-packed ones. These drifts on the crust are commonly quite low flat. But yesterdayís snow turning to rain, which froze as it fell, there is now a glaze on the trees, giving them a hoary look, icicles like rakesí teeth on the rails, and a thin crust over all the snow. At this hour the crust sparkles with a myriad brilliant points or mirrors, one to every six inches at least. This crust is cracking like ice into irregular figures a foot or two square. Perhaps the snow has settled considerably, for the track in the road is the highest part. Some heard a loud cracking in the ground or ice last night. I cut through, five or six rods from the east shore of Fair Haven, and find seven inches of snow, nine inches of snow ice and eight of water ice, -- seventeen of both. The water rises to within half an inch of the top of the ice. Isaac Garfield has cut a dozen holes on the west side. The ice there averages nineteen inches in thickness. Half the holes are five or six rods from the shore. And the rest nine or ten, the water from three to seven feet deep. In some places more than half the whole depth is ice. The thinnest ice is 17 inches; the thickest, 20+.1 The inner row invariably the thickest. The water rises above the ice in some cases. Edward and Isaac Garfield were fishing there, and Puffer came along, and afterward Lewis Miner with his gun. He cannot get near the partridges on account of the cracklings of the crust. I saw the last two approaching with my glass. The fishermen agree in saying that the pickerel have generally been eating, and are full, when they bite. Puffer thinks they eat a good deal, but seldom. Some think it best to cut the holes the day before, because the noise frightens them; and the crackling of the crust to-day was thought to frighten them. E. Garfield says that his Uncle Daniel was once scaling a pickerel, when he pricked his finger against the horn of a pout which the pickerel had swallowed. He himself killed a pickerel with a paddle, in the act of swallowing a large perch. Puffer had taken a striped snake out of one. They send to Lowell for their bait, and fishermen send thither from far and wide, so that there is not a sufficient supply for them. I. Garfield once caught an eel there with his pickerel bait, through the ice; also speared a trout that weighed three and a half pounds, he says, off Well Meadow. E. Garfield says that he has just turning into the pond from up-stream when he heard a loud sound and saw and caught those two great mud turtles. He let the boat drift down upon them. One had got the other by the neck, and their shells were thumping together and their tails sticking up. He caught one in each hand suddenly, and succeeded in getting them into the boat only by turning them over, since they resisted with their claws against the side; then stood on them turned over, paddled to nearest shore, pulled his boat up with his heel, and, taking a tail in each hand, walked backward through the meadow in water a foot deep, dragging them; then carried one a few rods, left him a returned for the other forty-seven pounds, together ninety. Puffer said that he never two together so heavy. I. Garfield said that he had seen one that weighed sixty-three pounds. All referred to the time when (about fifteen years ago; one said the year of the Bunker Hill Monument celebration) some forty were found dead on the meadows between there and Sudbury. It was about the end of March, and Puffer inferred that they had come out thus early from the river, and, the water going down, the ice had settled on them and killed them; but the Garfields thought that the ice, which tore up the meadows very much that year, exposed them and so froze. I think the last most likely. Puffer searches for them in May under the cranberry vines with a spear, and calls one of the small kinds the ìgrass tortoise. E. Garfield says that he saw the other day where a fox had caught in the snow three partridges and eaten two. He himself had last winter caught two, on the hillside south of Fair Haven, with his hands. They flew before him and dived into the snow, which was about a foot deep, going twice their length into it. He thrust his hand in and caught them. Puffer said that his companion one night speared a partridge on the alders on the south side of the pond. E. Garfield says there were many quails here last fall, but that they are suffering now. One night as he was spearing on Conantís cranberry meadow, just north the pond, his dog caught a sheldrake in the water by the shore. Some days ago he saw what he thought a hawk, as white as snow, fly over the pond, but it may have been a white owl (which last he never saw(was it a gyrfalcon?)). He sometimes sees a hen-hawk in the winter, but never a partridge or other small hawks at this season. Speaks again of that large speckled hawk he killed once, which some called a Cape eagle. Had a hum-birdís nest behind their house last summer, and was amused to see the bird drive off other birds; would pursue a robin and alight on his back; let none come near. I. Garfield saw oneís nest on a horizontal branch of a white pine near the Charles Miles house, about seven feet from ground. E. Garfield spoke of the wrenís nest as not uncommon, hung in the grass of the meadows, and how swiftly and easily the bird would through a winrow of hay. Puffer saw a couple of foxes cross the pond a few days ago. The wheelwright in the Corner saw four at once, about the same time. They think that most squirrel-tracks now are of the gray ones; that they do not lay up anything. Their tracks are much larger than those of the red. Puffer says that five gray squirrels came out of one of their leafy nests in a middle-sized white pine, after it was cut down, behind the Harrington house the other day, and, a day or two after, three out of another. He says that they, too, use bark in making their nests, as well [as] leaves, -- the inner bark of old chestnut rails, which looks like seaweed. E. Garfield says the chip squirrels come out this month. Puffer say a star-nosed mole yesterday in the road. Its track was [ ] dog-like. Coming home at twelve, the ice is fast melting on the trees, and I see in the drops the colors of all the gems. The snow is soft, and the eaves begin to run as not for many weeks. Thermometer at 3:30 P.M., 31o. Puffer once found the nest of what he calls the deer mouse (probably jumping) in pile of wood at what is now R. Riceís place in Sudbury, and the old one carried off nine young clinging to her teats. These men do not chop now; they saw, because the snow is so deep and the crust cuts their legs. Mr. Prichard tells me that he remembers a six weeks of more uninterruptedly severe cold than we have just [had], and that was in í31, ending the middle of January. The eaves on the south side of his house did not once run during that period, but they have run or dripped a trifle on several days during the past six weeks. Puffer says that he and Daniel (?) Haynes set lines once when there was good skating in all the bays, from the long causeway in Sudbury down to the railroad bridge, but caught only two or three perch."