A singular place for a bird to begin its life

June 17.

Friday. Another breezy night and no fog this morning. 

The pogonias, adder's-tongue arethusas, I see nowadays, getting to be numerous, are far too pale to compete with the A. bulbosa, and then their snake-like odor is much against them.

The dense fields of blue-eyed grass now blue the meadows, as if, in this fair season of the year, the clouds that envelop the earth were dispersing, and blue patches began to appear, answering to the blue sky. The eyes pass from these blue patches into the surrounding green as from the patches of clear sky into the clouds. 

If a man walks in the woods for love of them and  see his fellows with impartial eye afar, for half his days, he is esteemed a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods, he is esteemed industrious and enterprising-making earth bald before its time.

 Amelanchier berries begin to be red  and softer and eatable, though not ripe . 

P. M. To Walden . 

I did not mention yesterday the great devil's-needle with his humped back, which hovered over the boat and, though headed across its course, and not appearing to fly in the direction in which the boat was moving, yet preserved his relation to the boat perfectly. What steamer can reverse its paddle-wheels as he can? 

A remarkably strong south wind this afternoon, and cool. The greenness about the edge of Walden is very striking when seen from the Peak nowadays. Is it in the fall?

One of the nighthawk's eggs is hatched. The young is unlike any that I have seen, exactly like a pinch of rabbit's fur or down of that color dropped on the ground, not two inches long, with a dimpling or geometrical or somewhat regular arrangement of minute feathers in the middle, destined to become the wings and tail. Yet even it half opens its eye, and peeps if I mistake not. 

Was ever bird more completely protected, both by the color of its eggs and of its own body that sits on them, and of the young bird just hatched? Accordingly the eggs and young are rarely discovered. There is one egg still, and by the side of it this little pinch of down, flattened out and not observed at first, and a foot down the hill has rolled a half of the egg it came out of. 

It seems a singular place for a bird to begin its life, -to come out of its egg, - this little pinch of down, - and lie still on the exact spot where the egg lay, on a flat exposed shelf on the side of a bare hill, with nothing but the whole heavens, the broad universe above, to brood it when its mother was away.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 17. 1853

One of the nighthawk's eggs is hatched. See  June 1, 1853 ("Walking up this side-hill, I disturb a nighthawk eight or ten feet from me, which goes down the hill, half fluttering, half hopping, as far as I can see. . . .Without moving, I look about and see its two eggs on the bare ground”); June 7, 1853 ("Visit my nighthawk on her nest.”) A Book of Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,, the Nighthawk