Jan. 16, 1860. P. M. Down Boston road around Quail Hill.
Very warm. —45 degrees at 2 P.M. There is a tender crust on the snow, and the sun is brightly reflected from it. Looking toward Billerica from the cross-road near White's, the young oaks on the top of a hill in the horizon are very red, perhaps seven or eight miles off and directly opposite to the sun, far more red, no doubt, than they would appear near at hand, really bright red; but nowhere else that I perceive. It is an aerial effect, depending on their distance and elevation and being opposite to the sun, and also contrasted with the snowy ground.
Looking from Smith's Hill on the Turnpike, the hills eight or ten miles west are white, but the mountains thirty miles off are blue, though both may be equally white at the same distance.
I see a flock of tree sparrows busily picking something from the surface of the snow amid some bushes. I watch one attentively, and find that it is feeding on the very fine brown chaffy-looking seed of the panicled andromeda. It understands how to get its dinner, to make the plant give down, perfectly. It flies up and alights on one of the dense brown panicles of the hard berries, and gives it a vigorous shaking and beating with its claws and bill, sending down a shower of the fine chaffy-looking seed on to the snow beneath.
-H.D.T.
Jan. 16., 2021.
Very warm. —50 degrees at 2:30 p.m. under cloudy skies with patches of blue.
After a very heavy rain that lasted from the early hours of the night until 2 p.m, I set out into a very soggy landscape. Rather than walking from downtown down Lexington Road (a.k.a. Boston Road in Thoreau's time), I start at Merriam's Corner tracing my route, away from car traffic, along the National Park's Minuteman Trail through the massive fields of what were referred to as the Bedford Levels during Thoreau's time. While I scan the horizon to the northeast toward Billerica on-route, it is at the at the historic Samuel Brooks house by the corner of Lexington and Brooks Roads where I find my view: a far-off horizon of grayish trees with a hint of red, set miles way.
Up Brooks Road, I find a nice circular woods trail around the crest of Smith Hill behind several residences (Quail Hill lies inaccessible further south on the other side of Route 2). In a wooded area dominated by white pines, I spot a red-tailed hawk fly off, and soon after a small flock of birds (probably black-eyed juncos) spooked by my presence. It is with great suddenness though, when walking under a big oak that two large black turkey vultures fly off to a nearby tree to watch my next move. We watch each other for some time until one vulture returns to the oak, possibly to protect its nest. Rounding the bend up the hill, I encounter a rafter of five turkeys, and later at the crest of the hill, two white-tailed deer, which bolt off.
Finding my way to the clearing near the Turnpike, like Thoreau I gaze westward and take in a view above the highway, noting Concord steeple tops (one the gold dome of First Parish Church) and distant bluish hills, which are sequentially lighter in color the further the distance away.
On my return, I walk along Lexington Road and in fields on its south side. It is then that I am alerted to a large flock of sparrows, whose calls I can hear from far away as I approach. The house sparrows are nesting in an enormous, 15-foot high rhododendron tree sitting in front the First Root Farm barn. Alerted to my presence, some birds fly away to alight in a nearby lesser burdock shrub, easy to recognize by the sticky seed pod burs that so often cling to our clothes. Whether the contents of these seed pods serve as a food source though I do not know.
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