Eel Pot Creel

• Language: unknown
• Subjects: Arctic; Buttons; Jingle
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20321041

Accompanying Journal Entry: "A.M. -- By river. 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 hedgerows, much like a canary, especially in the mornings. Very clear, sweet, melodious notes, between a twitter and a warble, of which it is hard to catch the strain, for you commonly hear many at once. The note of the F. hyemalis, or chill-lill, is a jingle, with also a shorter and dired crackling or shuffling chip as it flits by. I hear now, at 7 A.M., from the hill across the water, probably the note of a woodpecker, I know not what species; not that very gnah gnai, which I have not heard this year. Now first I hear a very short robinís song. P.M. -- To Clematis Brook via Leeís with C. We cross the Depot Field, which is fast becoming dry and hard. At Hubbardís wall, how handsome the willow catkins! Those wonderful bright silvery buttons, so regularly disposed in oval schools in the air, or, if you please, along the seams which their 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 on a close inspection. These fixed swarms of arctic buds spot the air very prettily along the hedges. They remind me somewhat by their brilliancy of the snow-flecks which are so bright by contrast at this season when the sun is high. Is not this, perhaps, the earliest, most obvious, awakening of vegetable life? (They are grayish and not nearly so silvery a week or ten days later, when more expanded, showing the dark scales.) Farmer told me this morning that he found a baywingís egg yesterday, dropping a footpath! I have not seen that bird yet. In low grounds we feel from time to time the icy crust in the soil sink beneath us, but it is so dry that we need no rubbers now. A small ant fallen on water and swimming. A small brown grasshopper jumps into a brook at our ...