Birding up Assabet to Yellow Rocket Shore.

August 22.

Monday. P. M. — A still afternoon with a prospect of a shower in the west. 

The immediate edge of the river is for the most part respected by the mowers, and many wild plants there escape from year to year, being too coarse for hay.  

I hear the muttering of thunder and the first drops dimple the river.

I hear but few notes of birds these days; no singing, but merely a few hurried notes or screams or twittering or peeping. I will enumerate such as I hear or see this still louring and showery afternoon. 

• A hurried anxious note from a robin. Heard perhaps half a dozen afterward. They flit now, accompanied by their young. 
• A sharp, loud che-wink from a ground-robin. 
• A goldfinch twitters over; several more heard afterward. 
• A blue jay screams, and one or two fly over, showing to advantage their handsome forms, especially their regular tails, wedge-formed. 
• Surprised to hear a very faint bobolink in the air; the link, link, once or twice later. 
• A yellow-bird flew over the river. 
• Swallows twittering, but flying high, — the chimney swallows and what I take to be the bank ditto.
• Scared up a green bittern from an oak by the riverside. 
• Hear a peawai whose note is more like singing — as if it were still incubating — than any other. 
• Some of the warble of the golden robin. 
• A kingfisher, with his white collar, darted across the river and alighted on an oak. 
• A peetweet flew along the shore and uttered its peculiar note. Their wings appear double as they fly by you, while their bill is cumberously carried pointing downward in front. 
• The chipping of a song sparrow occasionally heard amid the bushes. 
• A single duck scared up. 
• The scream of young marsh hawks sounds like some notes of the jay. 
• And two nighthawks flying high over the river. 
• At twilight many bats after the showers. 

These birds were heard or seen in the course of three or four hours on the river, but there were not sounds enough to disturb the general stillness.

H.D. Thoreau, Journal,  August 22, 1853

I hear the muttering of thunder and the first drops dimple the river. See August 9, 1851 ("As I am going to the pond to bathe, I see a black cloud in the northern horizon and hear the muttering of thunder, and make haste")

I hear but few notes of birds these days; no singing. See August 20, 1854 ("When the red-eye ceases generally, then I think is a crisis, — the woodland quire is dissolved. That, if I remember, was about a fortnight ago. The concert is over."); August 21, 1852 ("There are as few or fewer birds heard than flowers seen.”).

I hear muttering

of thunder and the first drops 

dimple the river.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau

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

out-of-doors, in its own locality."