The tautog or blackfish, Tautoga onitis, for dinner

September 29.

Go to Daniel Ricketson’s, New Bedford.

September 29, 2015

At Natural History Library saw Dr. Cabot, who says that he has heard either the hermit, or else the olivaceous, thrush sing,—very like a wood thrush, but softer. Is sure that the hermit thrush sometimes breeds hereabouts.

Get out at Tarkiln Hill, or Head of the River Station, three miles this side of New Bedford. Recognized an old Dutch barn. 

R.’s sons Arthur and Walton were just returning from tautog-fishing in Buzzard’s Bay, and I tasted one at supper. Singularly curved from snout to tail.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 29, 1855

Go to Daniel Ricketson’s, New Bedford. Thoreau wrote to Blake: "I have just got a letter from Ricketson, urging me to come to New Bedford, which possibly I may do. He says I can wear my old clothes there." Letters to Blake, September 26, 1855. See also , e.g. December 26, 1854 ("I walk in the woods with R. It is wonderfully warm and pleasant, and the cockerels crow just as in a spring day at home. I feel the winter breaking up in me; if I were home I would try to write poetry."); June 23,, 1856 ("To New Bedford with Ricketson . . .Bay-wings sang morning and evening about R.’s house,")

At Natural History Library . . . HDT needed brushing up on his thrushes, See May 22, 1852 ("On my way to Plymouth, looked at Audubon in the State-House. The female (and male?) wood thrush spotted the whole length of belly; the hermit thrush not so.”); See also May 7, 1852 ("A wood [sic] thrush which. . .betrayed himself by moving, like a large sparrow with ruffled feathers, and quirking his tail like a pewee, on a low branch.”); April 18, 1854 (Was surprised to see a wagtail thrush, the golden-crowned, at the Assabet Spring, which inquisitively followed me along the shore over the snow, hopping quite near. I should say this was the golden-crowned thrush without doubt, though I saw none of the gold, if this and several more which I saw had not kept close to the water. May possibly be the aquaticus. Have a jerk of the forked tail”); April 21, 1855 ("At Cliffs, I hear at a distance a wood [sic] thrush. It affects us as a part of our unfallen selve..”); May 4, 1855 ("Several larger thrushes on low limbs and on ground, with a dark eye (not the white around it of the wood thrush) and, I think, the nankeen spot on the secondaries. A hermit thrush?); Compare April 24, 1856 ("Returning, in the low wood just this side the first Second Division Brook, near the meadow, see a brown bird flit, and behold my hermit thrush, with one companion, flitting silently through the birches. I saw the fox-color on his tail-coverts, as well as the brown streaks on the breast. Both kept up a constant jerking of the tail as they sat on their perches.")

Rickertson and New Bedford... See Mapping Thoreau Country