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| June 9, 2017 |
A large fog.
Celastrus scandens, maybe a day.
Triosteum, apparently several days (not at all June 1st).
Both kinds of sap, yellow birch and black, are now, in some bottles, quite aromatic and alike; but this year, methinks, it has a more swampy taste and musty, and most of the bottles are merely sour.
P. M. — To Violet Sorrel and Calla Swamp.
A peetweet's nest near wall by Shattuck's barn, Merrick's pasture, at base of a dock; four eggs just on the point of being hatched. A regular nest of weak stubble set in ground.
In the sprout-land beyond the red huckleberry, an indigo-bird, which chips about me as if it had a nest there. This is a splendid and marked bird, high-colored as is the tanager, looking strange in this latitude. Glowing indigo. It flits from top of one bush to another, chirping as if anxious. Wilson says it sings, not like most other birds in the morning and evening chiefly, but also in the middle of the day. In this I notice it is like the tanager, the other fiery-plumaged bird. They seem to love the heat. It probably had its nest in one of those bushes.
The calla is generally past prime and going to seed. I had said to Pratt, "It will be worth the while to look for other rare plants in Calla Swamp, for I have observed that where one rare plant grows there will commonly be others." Carrying out this design, this afternoon, I had not taken three steps into the swamp barelegged before I found the Naumbergia thyrsiflora in sphagnum and water, which I had not seen growing before. (Channing brought one to me from Hubbard's Great Meadow once.) It is hardly beginning yet. (In prime June 24th. Vide June 24th.)
The water in this Calla Swamp feels cold to my feet, and perhaps this is a peculiarity of it; on the north side a hill.
When I was at the yellow-throat's nest (as above) I heard that very loud sharp pheet pheet of a wood- chuck (?) or rabbit which I have often heard before.
The hellebore was very much eaten off about the wall whence it proceeded. It was kept up from time to time while I stayed.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 9, 1857
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| June 9, 2017 |
Both kinds of sap, yellow birch and black, are now, in some bottles, quite aromatic and alike; but this year, methinks, it has a more swampy taste . . . See April 16, 1857 ("Get birch sap, — two bottles yellow birch and five of black birch"). Also see April 12, 1856 ("According to Rees’s Cyclopaedia, the sap of the birches is fermentable in its natural state."); April 11, 1856 ("I have now got four kinds of birch sap. . . .I do not think I could distinguish the different kinds of birch with my eyes shut. I drank some of the black birch wine with my dinner for the name of it; but, as a steady drink, it is only to be recommended to outdoor men and foresters. "); May 27, 1856 ("My three kinds of birch sap have now become more acid, especially the white and canoe birch. The black birch is milder and more agreeable. With sugar it is an agreeable drink. . . ."); June 21, 1856 ("My canoe birch wine smells and tastes like mead considerably. All my birch wines are now more acid and very good indeed with sugar. Am surprised to see it effervesce, all white with white sugar only, like a soda water."); July 26, 1856 ( "Drank up the last of my birch wine. It is an exceedingly grateful drink now, especially the aromatic, mead like, apparently checkerberry-flavored one, which on the whole I think must be the black birch. It is a surprisingly high-flavored drink, thus easily obtained, and considering that it had so little taste at first. Perhaps it would have continued to improve.")
June 9. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, June 9
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 © 2009-2021
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