The Spring of the Year

I took down, recently, from the shelves of a great public library, the four volumes of Agassiz’s “Contributions to the Natural History of the United States.” I doubt if anybody...

There was a swish of wings, a flash of gray, a cry of pain; a squawking, cowering, scattering flock of hens; a weakly fluttering pullet; and yonder, swinging upward into the sky...

Beyond the meadow, perhaps half a mile from my window, stands an old apple tree, the last of an ancient line that once marked the boundary between the “upper” and the “lower” pa...

There were chipmunks everywhere. The stone walls squeaked with them. At every turn, from early spring to early autumn, a chipmunk was scurrying away from me. Chipmunks were comm...

“You have taken a handful of my wooded acres,” says Nature to me, “and if you have not improved them, you at least have changed them greatly. But they are mine still. Be friendl...

The real watcher in the woods usually goes off by himself. He hates to have anybody along; for Anybody wants to be moving all the time, and Anybody wants to be talking all the t...

No, I do not believe that any one of you ever went into a swamp to find a turkey buzzard’s nest. Still, if you had been born on the edge of a great swamp, as I was, and if the g...

If you had wings, why of course you would wear feathers instead of clothes, and you might be a crow! And then of course you would steal corn, and run the risk of getting three o...

The frogs! You can have no spring until you hear the frogs. The first shrill notes, heard before the ice is fairly out of the marshes, will be the waking call of the hylas, the...

This title is Kipling’s; the observations that follow are mine; but the real spring running is yours and mine and Kipling’s and Mowgli the wolf-child’s, whose running Kipling ha...

Who is your spring messenger? Is it bird or flower or beast that brings your spring? What sight or sound or smell spells S-P-R-I-N-G to you, in big, joyous letters?

I do not know where to begin--there are so many interesting things to do this spring! But, while we ought to be interested in all of the out-of-doors, it is very necessary to se...

Out of the multitude of sights, which twelve sights this spring shall I urge you to see? Why the twelve, of course, that I always look for most eagerly. And the first of these,...

Put the question to your scholars individually: Who is _your_ messenger of spring? Make the reading of this book not an end in itself, but only a means toward getting the pupils...

I called this chapter when I first wrote it “The Friendship of Nature”--a much used title, but entirely suggestive of the thought and the lesson in the story here. This was firs...

In “Winter” I put a chapter called “The Missing Tooth,” showing the dark and bitter side of the life of the wild things; here I have taken that thought as most people think of i...

In this story I have tried to settle the difficult question of debit and credit between me and the out-of-doors. Shall we exterminate the red squirrels, the hawks, owls, etc., i...

You will try to get three suggestions out of this chapter for your pupils: First, that an old tree with holes may prove to be the most _fruitful_ and interesting tree in the nei...

Read Kipling’s story in “The Second Jungle Book” called “The Spring Running.” Both Jungle Books ought to be in your school library. Spring is felt on the ocean as well as over t...

If you have read through “The Fall of the Year” and “Winter” and to this chapter in “The Spring of the Year,” you will know that the upshot of these thrice thirteen readings has...

I might have used a star, or the sun, or the sea to teach the lesson involved here, instead of the crow and his three broken feathers. But these three feathers will do for your...

See the suggestions for the corresponding chapter in “The Fall of the Year,” the first volume in this series. Lest you may not have that book at hand, let me repeat here the gis...

The picture of the young buzzard is as true as a photograph; the bumped-up drawing of the old bird looks precisely as she did atop her dead tree, watching my approach. This vult...

The point of the story is the enthusiasm of the naturalists for their work--work that to the uncaring and unknowing seemed not even worth while. But all who do great things do t...

Do not stop doing or seeing or hearing when you have done, seen, and heard the few things suggested in this chapter and in chapters IV and X; for these are only suggestions, and...