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Thoreau on Birds: Notes on New England Birds from the Journals of Henry David Thoreau
Contains detailed observations and decriptions of bird behavior along with personal reflections and anecdotes by the author
332 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1910
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About the author
Henry David Thoreau
2,398 books6,724 followersHenry David Thoreau (born David Henry Thoreau) was an American author, naturalist, transcendentalist, tax resister, development critic, philosopher, and abolitionist who is best known for Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay, Civil Disobedience, an argument for individual resistance to civil government in moral opposition to an unjust state.
Thoreau's books, articles, essays, journals, and poetry total over 20 volumes. Among his lasting contributions were his writings on natural history and philosophy, where he anticipated the methods and findings of ecology and environmental history, two sources of modern day environmentalism.
In 1817, Henry David Thoreau was born in Massachusetts. He graduated from Harvard University in 1837, taught briefly, then turned to writing and lecturing. Becoming a Transcendentalist and good friend of Emerson, Thoreau lived the life of simplicity he advocated in his writings. His two-year experience in a hut in Walden, on land owned by Emerson, resulted in the classic, Walden: Life in the Woods (1854). During his sojourn there, Thoreau refused to pay a poll tax in protest of slavery and the Mexican war, for which he was jailed overnight. His activist convictions were expressed in the groundbreaking On the Duty of Civil Disobedience (1849). In a diary he noted his disapproval of attempts to convert the Algonquins "from their own superstitions to new ones." In a journal he noted dryly that it is appropriate for a church to be the ugliest building in a village, "because it is the one in which human nature stoops to the lowest and is the most disgraced." (Cited by James A. Haught in 2000 Years of Disbelief.) When Parker Pillsbury sought to talk about religion with Thoreau as he was dying from tuberculosis, Thoreau replied: "One world at a time."
Thoreau's philosophy of nonviolent resistance influenced the political thoughts and actions of such later figures as Leo Tolstoy, Mohandas K. Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. D. 1862.
More: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/tho...
http://thoreau.eserver.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Da...
http://transcendentalism-legacy.tamu....
http://www.biography.com/people/henry...
Thoreau's books, articles, essays, journals, and poetry total over 20 volumes. Among his lasting contributions were his writings on natural history and philosophy, where he anticipated the methods and findings of ecology and environmental history, two sources of modern day environmentalism.
In 1817, Henry David Thoreau was born in Massachusetts. He graduated from Harvard University in 1837, taught briefly, then turned to writing and lecturing. Becoming a Transcendentalist and good friend of Emerson, Thoreau lived the life of simplicity he advocated in his writings. His two-year experience in a hut in Walden, on land owned by Emerson, resulted in the classic, Walden: Life in the Woods (1854). During his sojourn there, Thoreau refused to pay a poll tax in protest of slavery and the Mexican war, for which he was jailed overnight. His activist convictions were expressed in the groundbreaking On the Duty of Civil Disobedience (1849). In a diary he noted his disapproval of attempts to convert the Algonquins "from their own superstitions to new ones." In a journal he noted dryly that it is appropriate for a church to be the ugliest building in a village, "because it is the one in which human nature stoops to the lowest and is the most disgraced." (Cited by James A. Haught in 2000 Years of Disbelief.) When Parker Pillsbury sought to talk about religion with Thoreau as he was dying from tuberculosis, Thoreau replied: "One world at a time."
Thoreau's philosophy of nonviolent resistance influenced the political thoughts and actions of such later figures as Leo Tolstoy, Mohandas K. Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. D. 1862.
More: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/tho...
http://thoreau.eserver.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Da...
http://transcendentalism-legacy.tamu....
http://www.biography.com/people/henry...
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October 17, 2019
This may be the only birdbook clearly better than my own Birdtalk. Almost any page here rewards like Gilbert White, or the Bible. Partly, Thoreau has great eyesight, hearing a hawk scream issuing “from his split and curved bill. I see his open bill the while against the sky”(182) Further, he is a hearty physical specimen, running down a Woodchuck, crawling through woods to observe Sheldrakes / Mergansers, climbing trees to a hole to look for a nest, such as the salmon-colored Screech Owl. A great measurer, perhaps too great, “crawling on our bellies until at last we found ourselves within seven or eight rods—I measured afterward” (p. 27. Journals 15iv1855). Too great a measurer, since he died from a cold and pneumonia caught from counting the rings on a tree.
Jays and hawks’ “shrill scream, that of the owls, and wolves are all related.” “The circling hawk steers himself through the air like a skater, without a visible motion…A large hawk, circling over a pine wood below me, and screaming…to discover his prey…Travelling by ever widening circles. What a symbol of thoughts, now soaring, now descending…It flies not directly whither it is bound, but advances by circles, like a courtier of the skies…Circling and ever circling, you cannot divine which way it will incline, till perchance it dives down straight as an arrow to its mark.” (Dec 20, 1851)
He continues by comparing the flight to sailing, since the yacht “America” had just won the cup race around the Isle of Wight. Near me are built the Herreshoff winners of multiple America’s Cup races, and I have my own car-top trimaran, so Thoreau’s sailing metaphors delight, “Without ‘Heave-yo’ it trims its sail. It goes about without the creaking of a block. That America yacht of the air…takes in and shakes out its reefs without a flutter.” Then ends with a literary allusion to Milton’s “Lycidas,” “ever to fresh woods and pastures new”(181).
Highly recommend checking xeno-canto for the sound of the Stake-driver, American Bittern,"like a man pumping up water" for his cattle. "I went in search of this bird, but after traveling a third of a mile, it did not sound much nearer...When I got within half a dozen rods of the brook, it ceased. I suppose that I scared it. As before I was further off than I thought, so now I was nearer than I thought. It is not easy to understand how so small a creature can make so loud a sound by merely sucking in or throwing out water with pump-like lungs"(70).
Emerson wrote a great poem on a chickadee which saved his life, walking in winter woods when a storm arose far from home, until the "Titmouse" (yes, a Chickadee is a Titmouse species) showed such courage, undaunted, that it bucked up his courage. Emerson's concluding verses compare the Chickadee's half note followed by two lower quarter notes, "Dee-dih-dee": to Caesar's Veni Vidi Vici.
Thoreau says "The chickadee sings as if at home. Theirs is an honest, homely, heartfelt melody. Shall not the voice of a man express as much content as the note of a bird?" Simeon Cheney in the 19C disagrees on "homely," calling the Chickadee the most musical singer, since "He understands the value of a halfnote"(quoted in my Birdtalk, 35). Thoreau continues, "The chickadee is the bird of the wood the most unfailing. When, in a windy day you have penetrated some thick wood like this, you are pretty sure to hear its cheery note therein. At this season [Dec.] it is almost their sole inhabitant"(422). Thoreau may have been aware of Emerson's feeling saved by the bird's cheer and bravery; he also describes a small nesting hole, about an inch in diameter, six feet up in a birch tree.
Thoreau heard many different sparrows, “ a fine concert of little songsters along the edge of the meadow…watched and listened for more than half an hour…[among several species] I think these are the tree sparrow. also, mixed with them, and puzzling me to distinguish for a long time, were many of the fox-colored sparrows mentioned above…a size larger than the others; the spot on the breast very marked…The rich strain of the fox-colored sparrow, as I think it is, added much to the quire. I kept off a hawk by my presence.”(361).
Jerome Kern's inspiration for I’ve told Every Little Star--the Melospiza melodia, the Song Sparrow, very common down here near Cape Cod, where I think Kern heard it. I've often imitated it in my Birdtalk-talks. Dee..dee…dee (down a third) dididi dahh. “Increasingly rapid, damped ping-pong-ball rhythm after its three piping call-notes” (Birdtalk p.37) The damped rhythm increases in a mathematical e function. In Fall, the Song Sparrow does a rising variant.
Arriving home from bridge up in Padanarum, in a grey Columbus Day, I hear frog-like clucking, which HDT notes as warning signs from Sheldrakes / Mergansers. Next day in sun I see the Blue Jay’s ‘gaudy blue pinions.” I yield to HDT as observer and writer, both.
Jays and hawks’ “shrill scream, that of the owls, and wolves are all related.” “The circling hawk steers himself through the air like a skater, without a visible motion…A large hawk, circling over a pine wood below me, and screaming…to discover his prey…Travelling by ever widening circles. What a symbol of thoughts, now soaring, now descending…It flies not directly whither it is bound, but advances by circles, like a courtier of the skies…Circling and ever circling, you cannot divine which way it will incline, till perchance it dives down straight as an arrow to its mark.” (Dec 20, 1851)
He continues by comparing the flight to sailing, since the yacht “America” had just won the cup race around the Isle of Wight. Near me are built the Herreshoff winners of multiple America’s Cup races, and I have my own car-top trimaran, so Thoreau’s sailing metaphors delight, “Without ‘Heave-yo’ it trims its sail. It goes about without the creaking of a block. That America yacht of the air…takes in and shakes out its reefs without a flutter.” Then ends with a literary allusion to Milton’s “Lycidas,” “ever to fresh woods and pastures new”(181).
Highly recommend checking xeno-canto for the sound of the Stake-driver, American Bittern,"like a man pumping up water" for his cattle. "I went in search of this bird, but after traveling a third of a mile, it did not sound much nearer...When I got within half a dozen rods of the brook, it ceased. I suppose that I scared it. As before I was further off than I thought, so now I was nearer than I thought. It is not easy to understand how so small a creature can make so loud a sound by merely sucking in or throwing out water with pump-like lungs"(70).
Emerson wrote a great poem on a chickadee which saved his life, walking in winter woods when a storm arose far from home, until the "Titmouse" (yes, a Chickadee is a Titmouse species) showed such courage, undaunted, that it bucked up his courage. Emerson's concluding verses compare the Chickadee's half note followed by two lower quarter notes, "Dee-dih-dee": to Caesar's Veni Vidi Vici.
Thoreau says "The chickadee sings as if at home. Theirs is an honest, homely, heartfelt melody. Shall not the voice of a man express as much content as the note of a bird?" Simeon Cheney in the 19C disagrees on "homely," calling the Chickadee the most musical singer, since "He understands the value of a halfnote"(quoted in my Birdtalk, 35). Thoreau continues, "The chickadee is the bird of the wood the most unfailing. When, in a windy day you have penetrated some thick wood like this, you are pretty sure to hear its cheery note therein. At this season [Dec.] it is almost their sole inhabitant"(422). Thoreau may have been aware of Emerson's feeling saved by the bird's cheer and bravery; he also describes a small nesting hole, about an inch in diameter, six feet up in a birch tree.
Thoreau heard many different sparrows, “ a fine concert of little songsters along the edge of the meadow…watched and listened for more than half an hour…[among several species] I think these are the tree sparrow. also, mixed with them, and puzzling me to distinguish for a long time, were many of the fox-colored sparrows mentioned above…a size larger than the others; the spot on the breast very marked…The rich strain of the fox-colored sparrow, as I think it is, added much to the quire. I kept off a hawk by my presence.”(361).
Jerome Kern's inspiration for I’ve told Every Little Star--the Melospiza melodia, the Song Sparrow, very common down here near Cape Cod, where I think Kern heard it. I've often imitated it in my Birdtalk-talks. Dee..dee…dee (down a third) dididi dahh. “Increasingly rapid, damped ping-pong-ball rhythm after its three piping call-notes” (Birdtalk p.37) The damped rhythm increases in a mathematical e function. In Fall, the Song Sparrow does a rising variant.
Arriving home from bridge up in Padanarum, in a grey Columbus Day, I hear frog-like clucking, which HDT notes as warning signs from Sheldrakes / Mergansers. Next day in sun I see the Blue Jay’s ‘gaudy blue pinions.” I yield to HDT as observer and writer, both.
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