Visit my nighthawk on her nest

June 7. 

Visit my nighthawk on her nest. Can hardly believe my eyes when I stand within seven feet and behold her sitting on her eggs, her head to me. She looks so Saturnian, so one with the earth, so sphinxlike, a relic of the reign of Saturn which Jupiter did not destroy, a riddle that might well cause a man to go dash his head against a stone. 

It is not an actual living creature, far less a winged creature of the air, but a figure in stone or bronze, a fanciful production of art, like the gryphon or phoenix. In fact, with its breast toward me, and owing to its color or size no bill perceptible, it looks like the end of a brand, such as are common in a clearing, its breast mottled or alternately waved with dark brown and gray, its flat, grayish, weather-beaten crown, its eyes nearly closed, purposely, lest those bright beads should betray it, with the stony cunning of the sphinx. A fanciful work in bronze to ornament a mantel. 

It is enough to fill one with awe. The sight of this creature sitting on its eggs impresses me with the venerableness of the globe. There is nothing novel about it. All the while, this seemingly sleeping bronze sphinx, as motionless as the earth, watches me with intense anxiety through those narrow slits in its eyelids. 

Another step, and it flutters down the hill close to the ground, with a wabbling motion, as if touching the ground now with the tip of one wing, now with the other, so ten rods to the water, skims close over a few rods, then rises and soars in the air above me.

Wonderful creature, which sits motionless on its eggs on the barest, most exposed hills, through pelting storms of rain or hail, as if it were a rock or a part of the earth itself, the outside of the globe, with its eyes shut and its wings folded, and, after the two days' storm, when you think it has become a fit symbol of the rheumatism, it suddenly rises into the air a bird, one of the most aerial, supple, and graceful of creatures, without stiffness in its wings or joints!

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 7, 1853


Visit my nighthawk on her nest. 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") See also A Book of Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,, the Nighthawk

June 7. See A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, June 7

Wonderful creature

sitting sphinxlike on its eggs –

so one with the earth.

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