6 June 1853 – 12 June 1853

Wednesday. P. M.— To Well Meadow. Nest of a Maryland yellow-throat by Utricularia Pool in a tuft of sedge ; made of dry sedge, grass, and a few dry leaves ; about four small eggs, a deli- cate white with reddish-brown spots on larger end ; the nest well concealed. At the last small pond near Well Meadow, a frog, apparently a small bullfrog, on the shore enveloped by a swarm of small, almost invisible insects, some resting on him, attracted per- haps by the slime which shone on him. He appeared to endure the persecution like a philosopher. Utricu- laria vulgaris out, how long? As I stood by this pond, I heard a hawk scream, and, looking up, saw a pretty. large one circling not far off and incessantly screaming, as I at first sup- posed to scare and so discover its prey, but its scream- ing was so incessant and it circled from time to time so near me, as I moved southward, that I began to think it had a nest near by and was angry at my in- trusion into its domains. As I moved, the bird still followed and screamed, coming sometimes quite near or within gunshot, then circling far off or high into the sky. At length, as I was looking up at it, thinking it the only living creature within view, I was singularly startled to behold, as my eye by chance penetrated deeper into the blue, — the abyss of blue above, which I had taken for a solitude, —its mate silently soar- ing at an immense height and seemingly indifferent to me. We are surprised to discover that there can be an eye on us on that side, and so little suspected, that the heavens are full of eyes, though they look so blue and spotless. Then I knew it was the female that circled and screamed below. At last the latter rose gradually to meet her mate, and they circled together there, as if they could not possibly feel any anxiety on my account. When I drew nearer to the tall trees where I suspected the nest to be, the female descended again, swept by screaming still nearer to me just over the tree-tops, and finally, while I was looking for the orchis in the swamp, alighted on a white pine twenty or thirty rods off. (The great fringed orchis just open.) At length I detected the nest about eighty feet from the ground, in a very large white pine by the edge of the swamp. It was about three feet in diameter, of dry sticks, and a young hawk, apparently as big as its mother, stood on the edge of the nest looking down at me, and only moving its head when I moved. In its imperfect plumage and by the slow motion of its head it reminded me strongly of a vulture, so large and gaunt. It appeared a tawny brown on its neck and breast, and dark brown or blackish on wings. The mother was light beneath, and apparently lighter still on rump. The Pyrola chlorantha, —if the style can be said to be “scarcely exserted,’”” — under Cliffs, a day or more. ‘The Aralia hispida at the foot of the rocks higher up, earlier than elsewhere. White pine in flower, — all the female flowers on the very tops of the trees, a small crimson cone upright on the ends of its peduncles, while the last year’s, now three or four inches long and green, are curved downward like scythes. Best seen looking down on the tops of lower pines from the top of a higher one. Apparently just beginning.

Friday. P. M.—To Annursnack. By way of the linnza, which I find is not yet out. That thick pine wood is full of birds. Saw a large moth or butterfly exactly like a decayed withered leaf, — a rotten yellowish or buff. The small-leaved pyrola will open in a day or two. Two or three ripe straw- berries on the south slope of a dry hill. I was think- ing that they had set, when, seeking a more favorable slope, I found ripe fruit. The painted-cup is in its prime. It reddens the meadow, — Painted-Cup Meadow. It is a splendid show of brilliant scarlet, the color of the cardinal- flower, and surpassing it in mass and profusion. ‘They first appear on the side of the hill in drier ground, half a dozen inches high, and their color is most striking then, when it is most rare and precious; but they now cover the meadow, mingled with buttercups, etc., and many are more than eighteen inches high. I do not like the name; it does not remind me of a cup, rather of a flame, when it first appears. It might be called — flame-flower, or scarlet-tip. Here is a large meadow full of it, and yet very few in the town have ever seen it. It is startling to see a leaf thus brilliantly painted, as if its tip were dipped into some scarlet tincture, surpassing most flowers in intensity of color. Seen from Annursnack the woods now appear full- leafed, smooth green, no longer hoary, and the pines a dark mulberry, not green. But you are still covered with lint as you go through the copses. Summer be- gins when the hhoariness disappears from the forest as you look down on it, and gives place thus to smooth green, full and. universal. Butter-and-eggs just out. A small thorn with deep cut-lobed leaves, no flower, on this hill. May be a variety of the scarlet? White cedar now out of bloom. Is that rank grass by the Red Bridge, already between three and four feet high, wild oats? The song of the robin and the chirp (? ) of the chip- bird now begin prominently to usher in and to con- clude the day. The robin’s song seems not so loud as in the early spring, perhaps because there are so many other sounds at present.

4.30 a. M. — To Nawshawtuct by boat. A prevalent fog, though not quite so thick as the last described. It is a little more local, for it is so thin southwest of this hill that I can see the earth through it, but as thick as before northeast. Yet here and there deep valleys are excavated in it, as painters imagine the Red Sea for the passage of Pharaoh’s host, wherein trees and houses appear as it were at the bottom of the sea. What is peculiar about it is that it is the tops of the trees which you see first and most distinctly, before you see their trunks or where they stand on earth. Far in the northeast there is, as before, appar- ently a tremendous surf breaking on a distant shoal. It is either a real shoal, 7. e. a hill over which the fog breaks, or the effect of the sun’s rays on it. I was amused by the account which Mary, the Irish girl who left us the other day, gave of her ex- petience sate —— , the milkman’s, in the north part of the town. She said that twenty-two lodged in the house the first night, including two pig men, that Mr. kept ten men, had six children and a deaf wife, and one of the men had his wife with him, who helped sew, beside taking care of her own child. Also all the cooking and washing for his father and mother, who live in another house and whom he is bound to carry through, is done in his house, and she, Mary, was the only girl they hired; and the workmen were called up at four by an alarm clock which was set a quarter of an hour ahead of the clock down- stairs, — and that more than as much ahead of the town clock, — and she was on her feet from that hour till nine at night. Each man had two pairs of over- alls in the wash, and the cans to be scalded were count- less. Having got through washing the breakfast dishes ' by a quarter before twelve, Sunday noon, by ’s time, she left, no more to return. He had told her that the work was easy, that girls had lived with him to recover their health, and then went away to be married. He is regarded as one of the most enterprising and thrifty farmers in the county, and takes the premiums of the Agricultural Society. He probably exacts too much of his hands. The steam of the engine streaming far behind is regularly divided, as if it were the vertebree of a ser- pent, probably by the strokes of the piston. ‘The red- dish seeds or glumes of grasses cover my boots now in the dewy or foggy morning. The diervilla out ap- parently yesterday. “The first white lily bud. White clover is abundant and very sweet on the common, filling the air, but not yet elsewhere as last year. 8 a. M.— To Orchis Swamp; Well Meadow. Hear a goldfinch; this the second or third only that Ihave heard. Whiteweed now whitens the fields. There are many star flowers. I remember the anemone, es- pecially the rue anemone, which is not yet all gone, lasting longer than the true one above all the trien- talis, and of late the yellow Bethlehem-star, and per- haps others. I have come with a spy-glass to look at the hawks. They have detected me and are already screaming over my head more than half a mile from the nest. I find no difficulty in looking at the young hawk (there ap- pears to be one only, standing on the edge of the nest), resting the glass in the crotch of a young oak. I can see every wink and the color of its iris. It watches me more steadily than I it, now looking straight down at me with both eyes and outstretched neck, now turning its head and looking with one eye. How its eye and its whole head express anger! Its anger is more in its eye than in its beak. It is quite hoary over the eye and on the chin. ‘The mother meanwhile is incessantly circling about and above its charge and me, farther or nearer, sometimes withdrawing a quarter of a mile, but occa- sionally coming to alight for a moment almost within gunshot, on the top of a tall white pine; but I hardly bring my glass fairly to bear on her, and get sight of her angry eye through the pine-needles, before she circles away again. Thus for an hour that I lay there, screaming every minute or oftener with open bill. Now and then pursued by a kingbird or a blackbird, who appear merely to annoy it by dashing down at its back. Meanwhile the male is soaring, apparently quite undis- turbed, at a great height above, evidently not hunting, but amusing or recreating himself in the thinner and cooler air, as if pleased with his own circles, like a geometer, and enjoying the sublime scene. I doubt if he has his eye fixed on any prey, or the earth. He probably descends to hunt. Got two or three handfuls of strawberries on Fair Haven. They are already drying up. The huckleberry bedbug-smelling bug is on them. It is natural that the first fruit which the earth bears should emit and be as it were an embodiment of that vernal fragrance with which the air has teemed. Strawberries are its manna, found ere long where that fragrance has filled the air. Little natural beds or patches on the sides of dry hills, where the fruit sometimes reddens the ground. But it soon dries up, unless there is a great deal of rain. Well, are not the juices of early fruit distilled from the air? Prunella out. The meadows are now yellow with the golden senecio, a more orange yellow, mingled with the light glossy yellow of the buttercup. The green fruit of the sweet-fern now. The Juniperus repens appears, though now dry and effete, to have blossomed recently. | The tall white Erigeron annuus (?), for this is the only one described as white tinged with purple, just out.' The bullfrogs are in full blast to-night. I do not hear a toad from my window; only the crickets be- side. The toads I have but rarely heard of late.? So there is an evening for the toads and another for the bullfrogs.

Friday. Another great fog this morning. Haying commencing in front yards. P. M. — To Mason’s pasture in Carlisle.

Saturday. Another fog this morning. The mosquitoes first troubled me a little last night. On the river at dusk I hear the toads still, with the bullfrogs. The black willow, having shed its fuzzy seeds and expanded its foliage, now begins to be hand- some, so light and graceful. The upland fields are already less green where the June-grass is ripening its seeds. They are greenest when only the blade is seen. In the sorrel-fields, also, what lately was the ruddy, rosy cheek of health, now that the sorrel is ripening and dying, has become the tanned and imbrowned cheek of manhood. Probably blackbirds were never less numerous along our river than in these years. They do not depend on the clearing of the woods and the cultivation of or- chards, etc. Streams and meadows, in which they delight, always existed. Most of the towns, soon after they were settled, were obliged to set a price upon their heads. In 1672, according to the town records of Concord, instruction was given to the selectmen, “That incorigment be given for the destroying of blackbirds and jaies.”” (Shattuck, page 45.) Murder will out. I find, in the dry excrement of a fox left on a rock, the vertebree and talons of a par- tridge (?) which he has consumed. They are mémoires pour servir. I remember Helen’s telling me that John Marston of Taunton told her that he was on board a vessel dur- ing the Revolution, which met another vessel, —and, as I think, one hailed the other,—and a French name being given could not be understood, whereupon a sailor, probably aboard his vessel, ran out on the bowsprit and shouted ‘La Sensible,” * and that sail- ors name was Thoreau. My father tells me that, when the war came on, my grandfather, being thrown out of business and being a young man, went a-pri- vateering. I find from his Diary that John Adams set sail from Port Louis at L’Orient in the French frigate Sensible, Captain Chavagnes, June 17th, 1779, the Bonhomme Richard, Captain Jones, and four other vessels being in company at first, and the Sensible arrived at Boston the 2d of August. On 1 'The vessel in which John Adams was being brought back from or carried out to France. My father has an idea that he stood on the wharf and cried this to the bystanders. the 13th of November following, he set out for France again in the same frigate from Boston, and he says that a few days before the 24th, being at the last date “on the Grand Bank of Newfoundland,” “we spoke an American privateer, the General Lincoln, Captain Barnes.” If the above-mentioned incident occurred at sea, it was probably on this occasion.

Sunday. P. M.— To Bear Hill. Maple-leaved viburnum well out at Laurel Glen, probably 9th.1 The laurel probably by day after to- morrow. ‘The note of the wood thrush answers to some cool unexhausted morning vigor in the hearer. The leaf of the rattlesnake-plantain now surprises the walker amid the dry leaves on cool hillsides in the woods; of very simple form, but richly veined with longitudinal and transverse white veins. It looks like art. Crows, like hawks, betray the neighborhood of their nests by harsh scolding at the intruder while they circle over the top of the wood. The red-eyed vireo is the bird most commonly heard in the woods. The wood thrush and the cuckoo also are heard now at noon. The round-leaved cornel fully out on Heywood Peak, but not in the woods. Did I mention that the sawed stump of the chestnut made a seat within the bower formed by its sprouts ? Going up Pine Hill, disturbed a partridge and her brood. She ran in deshabille directly to me, within four feet, while her young, not larger than a chicken just hatched, dispersed, flying along a foot or two from the ground, just over the bushes, for a rod or two. The mother kept close at hand to attract my attention, and mewed and clucked and made a noise as when a hawk is in sight. She stepped about and held her head above the bushes and clucked just like a hen. What a remarkable instinct that which keeps the young so silent and prevents their peeping and betraying themselves! The wild bird will run almost any risk to save her young. ‘The young, I believe, make a fine sound at first in dispersing, something like a cherry-bird. I find beechnuts already about fully grown for size, where a tree overhangs Baker’s hillside, and there are old nuts on the ground. Were they sound? This tree must have blossomed early, then. A light-green excrescence three inches in diameter on a panicled andromeda. The lint still comes off the bushes on to my clothes. The hedyotis long leaved out; only two or three plants to be found; probably some days. Visited the great orchis which I am waiting to have open completely. It is emphatically a flower (within gunshot of the hawk’s nest); its great spike, six inches by two, of delicate pale-purple flowers, which begin to expand at bottom, rises above and contrasts with the green leaves of the hellebore and skunk-cabbage and ferns (by which its own leaves are concealed) in the cool shade of an alder swamp. It is the more in- teresting for its rarity and the secluded situations in which it grows, owing to which it is seldom seen, not thrusting itself on the observation of men. It is a pale purple, as if from growing in the shade. It is not remarkable in its stalk and leaves, which indeed are commonly concealed by other plants. Norway cinquefoil. A wild moss rose in Arethusa Meadow, where are arethusas lingering still. The sidesaddle-flowers are partly turned up now and make a great show, with their broad red petals flapping like saddle ears (?). The tree-climbing ivy. Was it out as early as the other? Apparently so. I forgot to’say that I visited my hawk’s nest, and the young hawk was perched now four or five feet above the nest, still in the shade. It will soon fly. Now, then, in secluded pine woods, the young hawks sit high on the edges of their nests or on the twigs near by in the shade, waiting for their pinions to grow, while their parents bring to them their prey. Their silence also is remarkable, not to betray themselves, nor will the old bird go to the nest while you are in sight. She pursues me half a mile when I withdraw. The buds of young white oaks which have been frost-bitten are just pushing forth again. Are these such as were intended for next year at the base of the leaf-stalk ?