The young owls are gone.

June 10.

P. M. -- To owl’s nest.

A remarkably strong wind from the southwest all day, racking the trees very much and filling the air with dust. I do not remember such violent and incessant gusts at this season.

Many eggs, if not young, must have been shaken out of birds’ nests, for I hear of some fallen. 

It is almost impossible to hear birds— or to keep your hat on. The waves are like those of March. 

That common grass (June-grass), which was in blossom a fortnight since, and still on our bank, began a week ago to turn white here and there, killed by worms. 

Veronica scutellata, apparently a day or two. Iris versicolor, also a day or two. A red maple leaf with those crimson spots. Clintonia, apparently four or five days (not out at Hubbard’s Close the 4th). 

A catbird’s nest of usual construction, one egg, two feet high on a swamp-pink; an old nest of same near by on same. 

Some Viola cucullata are now nine inches high, and leaves nearly two inches wide. Archangelica staminiferous umbellets, say yesterday, but some, apparently only pistilliferous ones, look some days at least older; seed-vessel pretty large. 

Oven bird or
Golden crowned thrush

Oven-bird’s nest with four eggs two thirds hatched, under dry leaves, composed of pine-needles and dry leaves and a hair or two for lining, about six feet south west of a white oak which is six rods southwest of the hawk pine. 

The young owls are gone. 

The Kalmia glauca is done before the lambkill is begun here; apparently was done some days ago. A very few rhodoras linger. 

Nest of the Muscicapa Cooperi, or pe pe, on a white spruce in the Holden Swamp, about fifteen feet high, on a small branch near the top, of a few twigs and pine-needles, and an abundance of usnea mainly composing and lining and overflowing from it, very open beneath and carelessly built, with a small concavity; with three eggs pretty fresh, but apparently all told, cream-color before blowing, with a circle of brown spots about larger end. 

The female looked darker beneath than a kingbird and uttered that clear plaintive till tilt, like a robin somewhat, sitting on a spruce. 

C. finds an egg to-day, somewhat like a song sparrow’s, but a little longer and slenderer, or with less difference between the ends in form, and more finely and regularly spotted all over with pale brown. -It was in a pensile nest of grape-vine bark, on the low branch of a maple. Probably a cowbird’s; fresh-laid. 

He has found in nests of grass in thick bushes near river what he thought red-wing’s eggs, but they are pale-blue with large black blotches — one with a very I large black spot on one side. Can they be bobolinks? or what?  Probably red-wings.

My partridge still sits on seven eggs. 

The black spruce which I plucked on the 2d expanded a loose, rather light brown cone on the 5th, say. Can that be the pistillate flower? The white spruce cones are now a rich dark purple, more than a half inch long. 

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 10, 1855

Nest of the Muscicapa Cooperi, or pe pe, on a white spruce in the Holden Swamp .See May 15, 1855 ("I hear from the top of a pitch pine in the swamp that loud, clear, familiar whistle . . . I saw it dart out once, catch an insect, and return to its perch muscicapa-like..”).June 5, 1856 ("The Muscicapa Cooperi sings pe pe pe’, sitting on the top of a pine.”); June 8, 1856 ("At Cedar Swamp, saw the pe-pe catching flies like a wood pewee, darting from its perch on a dead cedar twig from time to time and returning to it.“); . June 20, 1858 ("I wade about Holden Swamp, looking for birds’ nests. The spruce there are too thin-foliaged for nests, though I hear a pepe expressing anxiety") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Olive-sided flycatcher or pe-pe

Oven-bird’s nest with four eggs. . . See Early June, 1850;  (". Who taught the oven-bird to conceal her nest ? It is on the ground, yet out of sight.Only the escape of the bird betrays it.")June 1, 1853 ("Eggs in oven- bird's nest.”); June 18, 1854 (Observe in two places golden-crowned thrushes, near whose nests I must have been, hopping on the lower branches and in the underwood, — a somewhat sparrow-like bird, with its golden-brown crest and white circle about eye, carrying the tail somewhat like a wren, and inclined to run along the branches.”); July 3, 1853 ("The oven-bird's nest in Laurel Glen is near the edge of an open pine wood, under a fallen pine twig and a heap of dry oak leaves. Within these, on the ground, is the nest, with a dome-like top and an arched entrance of the whole height and width on one side. Lined within with dry pine-needles.”) See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Oven-bird


My partridge still sits on seven eggs. See May 26, 1855 ("The partridge which on the 12th had left three cold eggs covered up with oak leaves is now sitting on eight.") See also  A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, the Partridge

June 10. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, June 10

A strong wind all day

impossible to hear birds

or keep your hat on.

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 ©  2009-2024