Caterpillars of the mourning cloak / a promethea moth emerges.

July 5. 

July 5, 2017

A. M. — To Lee's Cliff by boat. 

Potentilla arguta abundantly out. 

Partridges big as quails. 

At Clamshell I found three arrowheads and a small Indian chisel for my guests. 

Rogers determined the rate of the boat's progress by observing by his second-hand how long the boat was going its length past a pad, calling the boat's length so much. 

For some days I have seen great numbers of blackish spiny caterpillars stripping the black willows, some full-grown on June 30th and some now not more than three quarters of an inch long. Are they the caterpillars of the Vanessa Antiopa? [Yes; according to Harris's description, they are.] 

When looking at a blackbird's nest I pricked my hand smartly on them several times; in fact the nest was pretty well protected by this chevaux-de-frise. 

That new ravine at Clamshell is so enlarged that bank swallows already use its sides, and I feel some young there. 

After leaving my companions at the Lee Bridge road, I push up Well Meadow Brook a few rods, through the weeds. I see by the commotion that great numbers of fishes fled before me and concealed themselves amid the weeds or in the mud. The mud is all stirred up by them. Some ran partly ashore.

Higher up, when I leave the boat and walk up the brook on the quaking shore, I find a bay and pool connected with the brook all alive with them, and observe two or three caught partly high and dry by their heedless haste, in a shallow and very weedy place. These are young pickerel two or three inches long. I suspect that all, or the greater part, are pickerel, and that they commonly breed in such still weedy basins in deep muddy meadows. 

Comara palustris apparently in prime. 

A phoebe's nest with four eggs half hatched, at stone bridge. 

There has been, amid the chips where a wood-pile stood, in our yard, a bumblebee's nest for ten days or more. Near it there was what I should have called a mouse's nest of withered grass, but this was mainly of different material and perhaps was made by the bee. It was a little heap two inches high, six long, and four wide, made of old withered grass and small bits of rags, brown paper, cotton-wool, strings, lint, and whole feathers, with a small half-closed hole at one end, at which the [bee] buzzed and showed himself if you touched the nest. I saw the cat putting out her paw there and starting back, and to-day I find the remains, apparently, of the bee dead at the entrance. On opening, I find nothing in the nest.

There came out this morning, apparently from one of those hard stem-wound cocoons on a black birch in my window, a moth whose wings are spread four and a quarter inches, and it is about an inch and three quarters long. It is black, wings and body, with two short, broad feathery antennae. The wings all have a clay-colored border behind, with a distinct black waving line down the middle of it, and, about midway the wings, a less distinct clay-colored line. Near the point of each forward wing, a round black spot or eye, with a bluish crescent within its forward edge, and beyond this spot, a purple tinge with a short whitish waving line continued through it from the crescent. The rear wings have a row of oblong roundish black spots along the clay-colored border, within the black line. There is a very faint light line on the fore wings on each side of the head. Beneath, on wings and body, dark purplish brown takes the place of the black above. It is rather handsomer and higher-colored beneath than above. There is a very small light or clay-colored triangular spot near the middle of wing beneath; also a row of brown spots on a white band along each side of the body. 

This is evidently the male Attacus Promethea. The rich purplish brown beneath — a sort of chocolate purple — makes the figure of a smaller moth of different form. 

The cocoon, about an inch long, is surrounded by the now pale withered leaf of the birch, which is wrapped almost quite around it and extends beneath, and it is very hard and firm, the light silk being wound thickly about the petiole, and also, afterward, the twig itself for half an inch or more both above and beneath the petiole. Sometimes there is no real petiole for a core, but the silky sheath can be slid up and down the twig.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 5, 1857

Partridges big as quails. See July 5, 1856  ("Young partridges . . .as big as robins")  See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, the Partridge

At Clamshell I found three arrowheads and a small Indian chisel for my guests. See July 5, 1854 ("On Lupine Knoll pick up a dark-colored spear-head three and a half inches long, lying on the bare sand; so hot that I can not long hold it tight in my hand."); May 25, 1856 ("I found five arrowheads at Clamshell Hill.")

The caterpillars of the Vanessa Antiopa.  See  March 21, 1853 (" On the warm, dry cliff, looking south over Beaver Pond, I am surprised to see a large butterfly, black with buff-edged wings, so tender a creature to be out so early, and, when alighted, opening and shutting its wings. What does it do these frosty nights? Its chrysalis must have hung in some sunny nook of the rocks. Born to be food for some early bird."); April 11, 1853 ("Dr. Harris says that that early black-winged, buff-edged butterfly is the Vanessa Antiopa, and is introduced from Europe, and is sometimes found in this state alive in winter."); October 1, 1860.(Water was prepared for ice, and C. saw the first Vanessa Antiopa since spring."); November 1,1860 ("The butterflies are out again, — probably some new broods. I see the common yellow and two Vanessa Antiopa,") and A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, The Buff-edged Butterfly


A phoebe's nest with four eggs half hatched, at stone bridge. See  June 20, 1856 ("Five young phoebes in a nest . . .just ready to fly."); June 25, 1855 ("A phoebe’s nest, with two birds ready to fly."); June 29, 1857 ("At Lee's Cliff, a phoebe has built her nest, and it now has five eggs in it, nearly fresh") See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, the Eastern Phoebe

The cocoon, about an inch long, is surrounded by the now pale withered leaf of the birch. See January 19, 1854 ("The A. Promethea is the only moth whose cocoon has a fastening wound round the petiole of the leaf, and round the shoot, the leaf partly folded round it."); February 19, 1854 ("The light ash-colored cocoons of the A. Promethea, with the withered and faded leaves wrapped around them so artfully and admirably secured by fine silk wound round the leaf-stalk and the twig."); May 17, 1857 (" Two cocoons of apparently the Attacus Promethea on a small black birch, the silk wound round the leaf stalk.")