30 December 1850 – 31 December 1850

In R. Gordon Cumming’s “Hunter’s Life in South Africa,” I find an account of the honey-bird, which will lead a person to a wild bees’ nest and, having got its share of the spoil, will sometimes lead to a second and third. (Vol. I, page 49.) He saw dry sheep’s dung burning, and after eighteen months it was burning still. One heap was said to have burned seven years. Remarkable for burning slowly. (Page 62.) He came across a Boer who manufactured ashes by burning a particular bush and sold it to the richer Boers. (Page 71.) He says that the oryx or gemsbok, a kind of antelope, never tastes water. Lives on the deserts. (Page 94.) The Bushmen conceal water in ostrich eggs at regular intervals across the desert, and so perform long journeys over them safely. (Page 101.) The hatching of ostrich eggs not left to heat of sun. (Page 105.) The natives empty them by a small aperture at one end, fill with water, and cork up the hole with grass. (Page 106.) The Hottentots devoured the marrow of a koodoo raw as a matter of course. The Bechuanas use “the assagai,” “a sort of light spear or javelin” with a shaft six feet long, which they will send through a man’s body at a hundred yards. (Page 201.) The Bakatlas smelt and work in iron quite well; make spears, battle-axes, knives, needles, etc., etc. (Page 207.) The skin of the eland just killed, like that of most other antelopes, emits the most delicious perfume of trees and grass. (Page 218.) When waiting by night for elephants to approach a fountain, he “heard a low rumbling noise ..., caused (as the Bechuanas affirmed) by the bowels of the elephants which were approaching the fountain.” (Page 261.) “A child can put a hundred of them [elephants] to flight by passing at a quarter of a mile to windward.” (Page 263.) It is incredible how many “goodly” trees an elephant will destroy, sometimes wantonly. (265.) An elephant’s friend will protect its wounded companion at the risk of its own life. (268.) The rhinoceros-birds stick their bills in the ear of the rhinoceros and wake him up when the hunter is approaching. They live on ticks and other parasitic insects on his body. He perfectly understands their warning. He has chased a rhinoceros many miles on horseback and fired many shots before he fell, and all the while the birds remained by him, perched on his back and sides, and as each bullet struck him they ascended about six feet into the air, uttering a cry of alarm, and then resumed their position. Sometimes they were swept off his back by branches of trees. When the rhinoceros was shot at midnight, they have remained by his body thinking him asleep, and on the hunter’s approaching in the morning have tried to wake him up. (Page 293.) The Bechuanas make a pipe in a few moments by kneading moistened earth with their knuckles on a twig, until a hole is established, then one end of the aperture is enlarged with their fingers for a bowl. (Page 306.)

I observe that in the cut by Walden Pond the sand and stones fall from the overhanging bank and rest on the snow below; and thus, perchance, the stratum deposited by the side of the road in the winter can permanently be distinguished from the summer one by some faint seam, to be referred to the peculiar conditions under which it was deposited. The pond has been frozen over since I was there last. Certain meadows, as Heywood’s, contain warmer water than others and are slow to freeze. I do not remember to have crossed this with impunity in all places. The brook that issues from it is still open completely, though the thermometer was down to eight below zero this morning. The blue jays evidently notify each other of the presence of an intruder, and will sometimes make a great chattering about it, and so communicate the alarm to other birds and to beasts.