Sunrise. —A heavy lodging snow, almost rain, has been falling—how long? —coming from the eastward.
The weather comparatively warm, but windy. It will probably turn to rain. Say four or five inches deep. It sticks to the sides of the houses.
Take to pieces a pensile nest which I found the 11th on the south shore of Walden on an oak sapling (red or black), about fifteen feet from the ground.
Though small, it measures three inches by three in the extreme, and was hung between two horizontal twigs or in a fork forming about a right angle, the third side being regularly rounded without any very stiff material. The twigs extended two or three inches beyond the nest. The bulk of it is composed of fine shreds or fibres, pretty long (say three to six inches), of apparently inner oak (?) bark, judging from some scraps of the epidermis adhering. It looks at first sight like sedge or grass.
The bottom, which I accidentally broke off and disturbed the arrangement of, was composed of this about the same size and form, rough with little leaf-stalks or feet (probably hemlock), and also strips and curls of paper birch epidermis, and some hornet or other wasp nest used like the last. I mention the most abundant material first. Probably the needles and twigs were used on account of their curved form and elasticity, to give shape to the bottom.
The sides, which were not so thick, were composed of bark shreds, paper birch, and hornet-nest (the two latter chiefly outside, probably to bind and conceal and keep out the wind), agglutinated together. But most pains was taken with the thin edge and for three quarters of an inch down, where, beside the bark-fibres, birch paper, and hornets’ nest, some silky reddish-brown and also white fibre was used to bind all with, almost spun into threads and passed over the twigs and agglutinated to them, or over the bark edge.
The shreds of birch paper were smaller there, and the hornets’ nest looked as if it had been reduced to a pulp by the bird and spread very thinly here and there over all, mixed with the brown silk. This last looked like cow’s hair, but as I found a piece of a small brown cocoon, though a little paler, I suspect it was from that. The white may have been from a cocoon, or else vegetable silk.
Probably a vireo’s nest, maybe red-eye’s.
In Nature nothing is wasted. Every decayed leaf and twig and fibre is only the better fitted to serve in some other department, and all at last are gathered in her compost-heap. 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!
I suspect that extensive use is made of these abandoned cocoons by the birds, and they, if anybody, know where to find them.
There were at least seven materials used in constructing this nest, and the bird visited as many distinct localities many times, always with the purpose or design to find some particular one of these materials, as much as if it had said to itself, “Now I will go and get some old hornets’ nest from one of those that I saw last fall down in the maple swamp—perhaps thrust my bill into them—or some silk from those cocoons I saw this morning.”
It turns to rain before noon, four or five inches of very moist snow or sleet having fallen.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 13, 1856
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 © 2009-2022
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