A small pewee nest on apple in Miles’s meadow.

June 12. 

P. M. — To Conantum on foot. 

Sophia has sent me, in a letter from Worcester, part of an orchis in bloom, apparently Platanthera Hookeri (?), or smaller round-leafed orchis, from the Hermitage Wood, so called, northeast of the town; but the two leaves are elliptical.

Utricularia vulgaris was abundantly out yesterday in Everett’s Pool; how long? 

Sidesaddle flower numerously out now. 

Apparently a small pewee nest on apple in Miles’s meadow. Bird on, and not to be frightened off, though I throw sticks and climb the tree to near her.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 12, 1856

Sidesaddle flower numerously out now:  Sarracenia purpurea, also known as the purple pitcher plant or northern pitcher plant, the only pitcher plant native to New England.  See  June 12, 1852 ("The petals of the sidesaddle-flower, fully expanded, hang down. How complex it is, what with flowers and leaves! It is a wholesome and interesting plant to me, the leaf especially."); June 12, 1853 ('The sidesaddle-flowers are partly turned up now and make a great show, with their broad red petals flapping like saddle ears (?)" See also February 13, 1858 ("Cafferty's Swamp. . . . How often vegetation is either yellow or red! as the buds of the swamp-pink, the leaves of the pitcher-plant, etc., etc., and to-day I notice yellow-green recent shoots of high blueberry."); May 28, 1853 (“The sidesaddle-flower conspicuous, but no pollen yet.”); May 30, 1852 ("The sidesaddle-flowers . . . are just beginning to blossom. The last are quite showy flowers when the wind turns them so as to show their under sides."); June 2, 1853 ("Side saddle-flower -- purple petals now begin to hang down.”); June 8, 1854("Sidesaddle, apparently to-morrow (?)."); June 8, 1858 ("The sidesaddle-flower is out, — how long? "); June 9, 1855 ("Sidesaddle, apparently a day or two; petals hang down.”); June 10, 1854 ("Sidesaddle generally out; petals hang down, apparently a day or two. It is a conspicuous flower."); August 18, 1854 ("We can walk across the Great Meadows now in any direction. They are quite dry. Even the pitcher-plant leaves are empty. "); August 21, 1854 ("In Hubbard's meadow, between the two woods, I can not find a pitcher-plant with any water in it."); August 22, 1854 ("I find at length a pitcher-plant with a spoonful of water in it. It must be last night's dew."); September 11, 1851("We have had no rain for a week, and yet the pitcher-plants have water in them. Are they ever quite dry? Are they not replenished by the dews always, and, being shaded by the grass, saved from evaporation?"); September 27, 1851 ("I never found a pitcher-plant without an insect in it. The bristles about the nose of the pitcher all point inward, and insects which enter or fall in appear for this reason unable to get out again."); September 28, 1851 ("This swamp contains beautiful specimens of the sidesaddle-flower (Sarracenia purpurea), better called pitcher-plant.");November 11, 1858 (“In the meadows the pitcher-plants are bright-red. ); November 16, 1852 ("At Holden's Spruce Swamp. The water is frozen in the pitcher-plant leaf."); December 31, 1859 ("The sidesaddle-flower, where it shows its head above the snow, now gray and leathery, dry, is covered beneath its cap with pretty large close-set light-brown seeds."); February 11, 1858 ("The water in the pitcher-plant leaves is frozen, but I see none burst. They are very tightly filled and smooth, apparently stretched.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Purple Pitcher Plant

Apparently a small pewee nest on apple. . . . See April 30, 1856 (I hear the small pewee’s tche-vet’ repeatedly); June 9, 1855 ("The nest probably of the small pewee — looking from the ground like a yellowbird’s, showing reddish wool of ferns —against a white birch, on a small twig, eighteen feet from ground. Four little eggs, all pale cream-color before blowing, white after - fresh.”); June 21, 1855 (" On an apple at R.W.E.’s a small pewee’s nest, on a horizontal branch, seven feet high, almost wholly of hair, cotton without, not incurved at edge; four eggs, pale cream-color.”)

The “Small Pewee” is listed as Muscicapa acadia in Report on the Fishes, Reptiles and Birds of Massachusetts 295 (1839), also in Thompson, Natural History of Vermont, part I, 76 (1842). Probably what Thoreau calls the "small pewee” is what we now know as the Least Flycatcher (Empidonax minimus). It nests in open woods, aspen groves orchards and shade trees. Its sound, che bek, seems closer to Thoreau’s chevet, tche-vet. And it arrives in Massachusetts the last week in April and in Vermont the first week of May. See A Book of the Seasons,by Henry Thoreau, the "Small Pewee”