Journal of a Sabbatical

April 17, 2000

something or other

Today's Bird Sightings:
by me, at my house
crows mobbing a red tailed hawk
common grackle
house sparrow
northern mockingbird

No starlings in evidence today. Have they moved someplace else?

by Henry D. Thoreau in Concord in the 1850's
field sparrow
common grackle
tree sparrow
Canada geese
chipping sparrow (he calls it chip-bird)
redwinged blackbird
common loon (h)
black duck
kingfisher
robin
phoebe(h)
partridge(h)
American bittern (he calls it stake-driver)
purple martin
flicker(h)

Today's Reading: Cat on the Scent by Rita Mae Brown - finished it. Thoreau's Country by David R. Foster, Thoreau Home Page

Today's Starting Pitcher:
Jeff Fassero

Thoreau decoder ring entries:

chip-bird

chipping sparrow

F. juncorum

field sparrow

stake-driver

American bittern

Still no luck with quivet or cincin... whatever it was...

No reader responses yet on other common names for the northern flicker. Maybe Forbush was exaggerating that there are 125 names. Feel free to email me with other names from your bioregion, hometown, country, whatever.

OK, so I've always thought - if I thought about it at all - that the Gold Rush only affected California. I never gave any thought whatsoever to what the impact might have been on the places those gold diggers left. But, interestingly enough, the California Gold Rush is at least partly responsible for the reforestation of Massachusetts. Who knew?

Apparently it wasn't that farming got harder or the soil less fertile or that kind of thing that drove the farmers off their land. It was powerful social forces drawing them toward cities where they could get jobs and to California where they could strike gold and get rich. According to Foster's Thoreau's Country, and according to Thoreau's journals around that time, California was right up there with the cities as the place for a new life. Farmers leave for California or the cities. Farms revert to nature. Trees grow. Voila! Massachusetts is reforested.