Thoreau
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Mole Cricket
Jumpin’ creepers! A mole cricket: the European Mole Cricket Gryllotalpa gryllotalpa? iNaturalist seems to think so. Found on the NY/CT border recently. There is a Northern Mole Cricket (Neocurtilla hexadactyla) found in Massachusetts and, belying its name, further south, but there are no Westchester Co. iNaturalist reports for it. Is this the song that Henry David Thoreau referred…
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201 Years Young
Happy birthday, Henry David Thoreau! Here are some delicate yet immensely strong lacewing eggs suspended from swamp milkweed bespangled with aphids. A perfect posy for you! Now, it’s hard not to feel despair as kleptocratic-fundamentalist fascism runs rampant over the land. But don’t let the bastards get you down. They’re counting on our acquiescence and…
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Hickory
“Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been, I have great faith in a seed. Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.” ~ Henry David Thoreau Even as we discover invertebrates almost daily, we’re losing them. A lament. There…
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Counter Friction
“Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine,” H.D. Thoreau wrote in “Civil Disobedience.” Or at least gum it up a bit with your sabots, right? Of course, we’re all deeply imbedded, imbricated, enveloped in a befouling system. But we do have some choices, don’t we? Nobody makes you order from Amazon.…
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Inexhaustible Thoreau
Forty-seven manuscript volumes, seven thousand pages, two million words: the journals of Henry David Thoreau have been edited, extracted, and analyzed over and over again. Beginning with himself, since he used his journals for notes and drafts of articles, books, and speeches. It was his practice to write every day (life, of course, made exceptions);…
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Sweet Bees
Sweat bees in the family Halictidae are attracted to the salt in sweat. This little one would not be put off from my arm. Blown and shook off, it returned several times. I have no problem offering up extruded salts, but I was slathered in sunscreen, and that can’t be good for anything, even when…
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Mouse of Walden
“Someone memorialized Thoreau’s small friend by drawing a mouse on the the back of his door,” writes Laura Dassow Walls in her magnificent new biography. In honor of the Thoreau bicentennial and the mouse at Walden Pond, I asked my friend Marion to draw one on the door to my apartment. Meanwhile, in Antarctica: Larsen…
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HDT200
Born two hundred years ago today, David Henry Thoreau entered the world some 182 years after Concord was settled by English colonialists. What a half-way point for America! Concord’s establishment was, by the way, half a dozen years after the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony: the Puritans were reluctant to move inland. At first.…
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Birthday Boy
Tomorrow is Henry David Thoreau’s 200th birthday. This was his journal entry of March 23, 1856: “I spend a considerable portion of my time observing the habits of the wild animals, my brute neighbors. By their various movements and migrations they fetch the year about to me. Very significant are the flight of geese and…
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A Week on the Thoreauvian Rivers
“The Indian pipe is still pushing up,” noted Henry David Thoreau in his journal on August 23, 1858. The ghost plant, indian pipe, Emily Dickinson’s favorite flower: Monotropa uniflora emerging. Often mistaken for fungi, this is actually a heterotrophic flowering plant. There are several thousand species of such non-photosynthesizing plants in the world. Most of…
Backyard and Beyond 