A red-eyed vireo nest.

July 21.

July 21, 2015
9:05 PM

A red-eyed vireo nest on a red maple on Island Neck, on meadow-edge, ten feet from ground; one egg half hatched and one cowbird’s egg, nearly fresh, a trifle larger. The first white (the minute brown dots washing off), sparsely black-dotted at the large end. Have them.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 21, 1855

A red-eyed vireo nest on a red maple. See January 13, 1856 ("What a wonderful genius it is that leads the vireo to select the tough fibres of the inner bark, instead of the more brittle grasses, for its basket, the elastic pine-needles and the twigs, curved as they dried to give it form, and, as I suppose, the silk of cocoons, etc., etc., to bind it together with!”); February 24, 1858 ("What art in the red-eye to make these two adjacent maple twigs serve for the rim of its pensile basket, inweaving them! Surely it finds a place for itself in nature between the two twigs of a maple.");  May 27, 1854 ("I find the pensile nest of a red-eye between a fork of a shrub chestnut near the path. It is made, thus far, of bark and different woolly and silky materials.”); June 12, 1855 ("In the thick swamp behind the hill I look at the vireo’s nest which C. found on the 10th, within reach on a red maple forked twig, eight feet from ground. He took one cowbird’s egg from it, and I now take the other, which he left. There is no vireo’s egg"); June 18, 1858 (“To Walden to see a bird's nest, a red-eye's, in a small white pine; nest not so high as my head; still laying ”)  See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, The Red-eyed Vireo