To Dugan Desert.

June 25.

I see a female marsh hawk, beating along a wall, suddenly give chase to a small bird, dashing to right and left twenty feet high about a pine.

There are no turtle-tracks now on the desert, but I see many crow-tracks there, and where they have pecked or scratched in the sand in many places, possibly smelling the eggs!?

Also the track of a fox over the sand, and find his excrement buried in the sand, and the crows have dabbled in the sand over it. It is full of fur as usual. What an unfailing supply of small game it secures that its excrement should be so generally of fur!

As near as I can make out with my glass, I see and hear the parti-colored warbler at Ledum Swamp on the larches and pines. A bluish back, yellow breast with a reddish crescent above, and white belly, and a continuous screeping note to the end.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 25, 1860

Crow-tracks where they have pecked or scratched in the sand in many places, possibly smelling the turtle eggs. See June 10, 1858 ("I found an E. insculpta on its back with its head and feet drawn in and motionless, and what looked like the track of a crow on the sand. Undoubtedly the bird which I saw had been pecking at it, and perhaps they get many of the eggs."); December 30, 1860 ("I see a little snap-turtle on its back on the ice --shell, legs, and tail perfect, but head pulled off, and most of the inwards with it. . . I see two crows on the next swamp white oak westward, and I can scarcely doubt that they did it.")

Fox excrement buried in the sand, full of fur as usual. See February 26, 1855 ("Examine with glass some fox-dung from a tussock of grass amid the ice on the meadow. It appears to be composed two thirds of clay, and the rest a slate-colored fur and coarser white hairs, black-tipped . . . mingled with small bones. A mass as long as one’s finger."); May 20, 1858 ("There were half a dozen holes or more, and what with the skulls and feathers and skin and bones about, I was reminded of Golgotha."); September 23, 1860 ("I see on the top of the Cliffs to-day the dung of a fox, consisting of fur, with part of the jaw and one of the long rodent teeth of a woodchuck in it, and the rest of it huckleberry seeds with some whole berries")

I see and hear the parti-colored warbler at Ledum Swamp . See June 22, 1856 ("The woods still resound with the note of my tweezer-bird, or Sylvia Americana."); May 4, 1858 ("I heard the tweezer note, or screeper note, of the particolored warbler, bluish above, yellow or orange throat and breast, white vent, and white on wings, neck above yellowish, going restlessly over the trees — maples, etc. — by the swamp, in creeper fashion.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the parti-colored warbler (Sylvia Americana)

July 25. See A Book of the Seasons,, by Henry Thoreau, June 25

A Book of the Seasons,by Henry Thoreau

"A book, each page written in its own season,

out-of-doors, in its own locality.”

~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx © 2009-2021