5 A.M. — To Island.
Finger-cold and windy.
A crow’s nest near the top of a pitch pine about twenty feet high, just completed, betrayed by the birds’ cawing and alarm. As on the 5th, one came and sat on a bare oak within forty feet, cawed, reconnoitred; and then both flew off to a distance, while I discovered and climbed to the nest within a dozen rods. One comes near to spy you first.
P. M. — To Lee’s Cliff 'via Hubbard’s Bath.
Climbed to two crows’ nests, - or maybe one of them a squirrel’s, - in Hubbard’s Grove. Do they not sometimes use a squirrel’s nest for a foundation? A ruby-crested wren is apparently attracted and eyes me. It is wrenching and fatiguing, as well as dirty, only dead twigs and stubs, to hold by. You must proceed with great deliberation and see well where you put your hands and your feet.
Scare up two gray squirrels in the Holden wood, which run glibly up the tallest trees on the opposite side to me, and leap across from the extremity of the branches to the next trees, and so on very fast ahead of me. Remembering—aye, aching with— my experience in climbing trees this afternoon and morning, I can not but admire their exploits. To see them travelling with so much swiftness and ease that road over which I climbed a few feet with such painful exertion!
A partridge flies up from within three or four feet of me with a loud whir, and betrays one cream-colored egg in a little hollow amid the leaves.
Climb a hemlock to a very large and complete, probably gray squirrel’s, nest, eighteen inches in diameter, - a foundation of twigs, on which a body of leaves and some bark fibres, lined with the last, and the whole covered with many fresh green hemlock twigs one foot or more long with the leaves on, -which had been gnawed off, - and many strewed the ground beneath, having fallen off. Entrance one side.
A short distance beyond this and the hawk’s-nest pine, I observe a middling-sized red oak standing a little aslant on the side-hill over the swamp, with a pretty large hole in one side about fifteen feet from the ground, where apparently a limb on which a felled tree lodged had been cut some years before and so broke out a cavity. I think that such a hole was too good a one not to be improved by some inhabitant of the wood.
I tap on it and put my ear to the trunk, but I hear nothing. Then I conclude to look into it. So I shin up, and when I reach up one hand to the hole to pull myself up by it, the thought passes through my mind perhaps something may take hold my fingers, but nothing does.
The first limb is nearly opposite to the hole, and, resting on this, I look in, and, to my great surprise, there squats, filling the hole, which was about six inches deep and five to six wide, a salmon-brown bird not so big as a partridge, seemingly asleep within three inches of the top and close to my face. It was a minute or two before I made it out to be an owl.
In the meanwhile, the crows are making a great cawing amid and over the pine-tops beyond the swamp, and at intervals I hear the scream of a hawk, probably the surviving male hen-hawk, whom they were pestering (unless they had discovered the male screech owl), and a part of them came cawing about me.
This is a very fit place for hawks and owls to dwell in, — the thick woods just over a white spruce swamp, in which the glaucous kalmia grows; the gray squirrels, partridges, hawks, and owls, all together.
Returning by owl’s nest, about one hour before sunset, I climb up and look in again. The owl is gone, but there are four nearly round dirty brownish white eggs, quite warm, on nothing but the bits of rotten wood which made the bottom of the hole. Perhaps she heard me coming, and so left the nest.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, May 7, 1855
A ruby-crested wren is apparently attracted. See note to April 20, 1859 ("My ruby-crowned or crested wren”).
This is a very fit place for hawks and owls to dwell in. . . ; the gray squirrels, partridges, hawks, and owls, all together. See May 12, 1855 ("there deep in the woods ... where the partridge and the red-tailed hawk and the screech owl sit on their nests.”)
A white spruce swamp in which the glaucous kalmia grows. See January 9, 1855 ("Make a splendid discovery this afternoon. Walking through Holden’s white spruce swamp, I see peeping above the snow-crust some slender delicate evergreen shoots ..., the Kalmia glauca var. rosmarinifolia.")
The Kalmia glauca var. rosmarinifolia is known as rosemary-leaf laurel or alpine bog laurel (Andromeda Polifolia) H. Peter Loewer, Thoreau's Garden: Native Plants for the American Landscape 32-33
A salmon-brown bird not so big as a partridge, seemingly asleep within three inches of the top and close to my face. . . . there are four nearly round dirty brownish white eggs, quite warm, See May 12, 1855 ("One of the three remaining eggs was hatched, and a little downy white young one, two or three times as long as an egg, lay helpless between the two remaining eggs .. . .,Wilson says of his red owl (Strix asio) , — with which this apparently corresponds , and not with the mottled, though my egg is not "pure white,” – that “the young are at first covered with a whitish down.")
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