To Well Meadow

July 1.

While reclining on the sedge at end of town-bound path, I see a warbler deliberately investigating the smooth sumachs and their old berrybunches, in various positions. It is a slaty blue above, with a bright-yellow front-head and much yellow on the wings, a very distinct black throat, triangularwise, with a broad black line through the eyes, a forked tail dark beneath; belly white or whitish.

It is undoubtedly the golden-winged warbler, which I think must be breeding here.


I see young partridges not bigger than robins fly three or four rods, not squatting fast, now.

Returning over the causeway, the light of the sun was reflected from the awns of a grain-field by Abiel Wheeler's house so brightly and in such a solid mass as to at first impress you as if it were whiter than the densest whiteweed thereabouts, but in fact it was not white, but a very bright sunny gleam from the waving phalanx of awns, more calculated to reflect the light than any object in the landscape.

H. D. Thoreau , Journal, July 1, 1860

Golden-winged warbler. See July 24, 1860 ("The carpenter working for Edward Hoar in Lincoln caught, two or three clays ago, an exhausted or half-furnished golden-winged warbler alive in their yard. It was within half a mile that I saw one a few weeks ago. It is a sufficiently well-marked bird, by the large yellow spot on the wing (the greater coverts), yellow front and crown, and the very distinct black throat and, I should say, upper breast, above which white divided by a broad black line through the eye. Above blue-gray, with much yellowish-green dusting or reflection, i.e. edging, to the feathers.”); May 6, 1855 (“ Bright-yellow head and shoulders and beneath, and dark legs and bill catching insects along base of pitch pine plumes, some, what creeper-like; very active and restless, darting from tree to tree; darts at and drives off a chickadee. I find I have thus described its colors last year at various times, viz.: black throat, this often with dark and light beneath; again, black streak from eyes, slate-colored back (?), forked tail, white beneath (?)”)

I see young partridges not bigger than robins .See June 26, 1857 ("See a pack of partridges as big as robins at least.”);July 5, 1856 ("Young partridges (with the old bird), as big as robins, make haste into the woods from off the railroad.") See also A Book of Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,the Partridge