Journal of a Sabbatical

April 16, 2000

the sound of yellow

Today's Bird Sightings:
Watchemoket Cove
5 red breasted mergansers
2 domestic geese
74 mute swans
hordes of ring bill gulls
hordes of herring gulls
4 Canada geese
2 lesser yellowlegs
2 mallards
Blithewold
12 American robins
1 double crested cormorant
1 common grackle
3 redwing blackbirds
1 cardinal
2 black capped chickadees
1 American crow
2 herring gulls
Colt State Park
2 brant
many many herring gulls
24 American robins

by Henry D. Thoreau in Concord in the 1850's
snipe
robin
blackbird
song sparrow
sharp-shinned hawk
pigeon
common merganser
goldeneye
black duck
Canada goose
osprey
field sparrow
pine warbler
grass-bird(maybe vesper sparrow???)

Today's Reading: Cat on the Scent by Rita Mae Brown, April 16 from Thoreau's journals for 1855-1861 from the Thoreau Home Page, Natural History of the Birds of Eastern and Central North America by Edward Forbush

Today's Starting Pitcher:
Ramón Martinez

Daffodils in bloom carpet the ground beneath the trees. Acres of daffodils. At least four kinds: yellow, yellow with orange faces, white, white with orange faces. The spring explosion of yellow paints Blithewold with a broad brush. Even under the slate gray sky the yellow comes through brilliantly. A break in the clouds puts the spotlight on a clump of daffodils surrounding a cedar tree, lighting them up as if from the inside as visitors stare in awe or reverence or maybe just disbelief that an overcast day can have such beauty in it.

The bay, the ponds, the marshy places, and the puddles in the middle of the trails are all flat calm reflecting the sky, the budding trees, and the cherry blossoms. The faint yellow of the willow trees and the faint pink of the maple trees seems to get brighter and more vivid as the sky darkens. The only movement troubling the flat water of the puddles is a black-capped chickadee enthusiastically bathing in the middle of the path from the Japanese garden to the edge of the bay. Every once in awhile a water strider faintly dimples the water in the garden ponds ever so slightly. The bay stays flat. No boat wakes, no ripples from diving ducks. The bay is a giant mirror that changes color with the sky.

Layers of sound blanket the whole place, concentrated by the heavy sky. Spring peepers and wood frogs sent up a loud chorus, audible throughout the whole of Blithewold. On top of that sound layer the robins, chickadees, and grackles provided melody accented with herring gulls mewing faintly in the distance and sometimes even the honking of Canada geese. Add in the murmur of voices admiring the cherry blossoms or the daffodils and the joyous shouts of children spotting the water striders, and you get quite a soundscape. It's the appropriate sound track for the return of yellow to the landscape. It's the sound of yellow.

Words from Thoreau's journal, which have totally stumped me today: quivet, cincindelae. From context quivet seems to be some kind of a sound and cincindelae seems to be some kind of flying insect. None of the usual sources (dictionary, botanical concordance, field guides, search engines) yield any clues.