Great cumuli are slowly drifting in the intensely blue sky, with glowing white borders.

June 11. 
P. M. —To Flint’s Pond. 

The locust in graveyard shows but few blossoms yet. 

It is very hot this afternoon, and that peculiar stillness of summer noons now reigns in the woods.

I observe and appreciate the shade, as it were the shadow of each particular leaf on the ground. I think that this peculiar darkness of the shade, or of the foliage as seen between you and the sky, is not accounted for merely by saying that we have not yet got accustomed to clothed trees, but the leaves are rapidly acquiring a darker green, are more and more opaque, and, besides, the sky is lit with the intensest light. It reminds me of the thunder-cloud and the dark eyelash of summer. 

Great cumuli are slowly drifting in the intensely blue sky, with glowing white borders. 

The red-eye sings incessant, and the more indolent yellow-throat vireo, and the creeper, and perhaps the redstart? or else it is the parti-colored warbler. 

I perceive that scent from the young sweet-fern shoots and withered blossoms which made the first settlers of Concord to faint on their journey. 

Saw yesterday a great yellow butterfly with black marks. 

See under an apple tree, at entrance of Goose Pond Path from Walden road, a great fungus with hollow white stem, eight or nine inches high, whose black funereal top has melted this morning, leaving a black centre with thin white scales on it. 

All the cistuses are shut now that I see, and also the veiny-leaved hieracium with one leaf on its stem, not long open. 

I notice no white lily pads near the bathing-rock in Flint’s Pond. See a bream’s nest two and a quarter feet diameter, laboriously scooped out, and the surrounding bottom for a diameter of eight feet (! !) comparatively white and clean, while all beyond is mud and leaves, etc., and a very large green and cupreous bream with a centre, while half a dozen shiners are hovering about, apparently watching a chance to steal the spawn. 

A partridge with young in the Saw Mill Brook path. Could hardly tell what kind of creature it was at first, it made such a noise and fluttering amid the weeds and bushes. Finally ran offwith its body flat and wings somewhat spread. 

Utricularia vulgaris very abundant in Everett’s Pool. 

A beautiful grass-green snake about fifteen inches long, light beneath, with a yellow space under the eyes along the edge of the upper jaw. 

The Rubus triflorus apparently out of bloom at Saw Mill, before the high blackberry has begun. 

Rice tells me he found a turtle dove’s nest on an apple tree near his farm in Sudbury two years ago, with white eggs; so thin a bottom you could see the eggs through.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 11, 1856

The red-eye sings incessant. See June 11, 1852 ("The red-eye sings now in the woods, perhaps more than any other bird. “);  June 12, 1853 ("The red-eyed vireo is the bird most commonly heard in the woods.”)  See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, The Red-eyed Vireo

The more indolent yellow-throat vireo . . See May 19, 1856 ("a yellow-throated vireo, . . . singing indolently, ullia — eelya, and sometimes varied to eelyee.”)

Saw yesterday a great yellow butterfly with black marks. See June 3, 1859 ("A large yellow butterfly . . . three and a half to four inches in expanse. Pale-yellow, the front wings crossed by three or four black bars; rear, or outer edge, of all wings widely bordered with black, and some yellow behind it; a short black tail to each hind one, with two blue spots in front of two red-brown ones on the tail")

A beautiful grass-green snake about fifteen inches long, light beneath, with a yellow space under the eyes along the edge of the upper jaw. See May 19, 1860 (“See a green snake, a very vivid yellow green, of the same color with the tender foliage at present, and as if his colors had been heightened by the rain.”); May 9, 1852 ("See a green snake, twenty or more inches long, on a bush, hanging over a twig with its head held forward six inches into the air, without support and motionless.”)  

June 11. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, June 11

Great cumuli with

glowing white borders slowly 

drifting in the sky.

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