I hear a peculiar sound which I mistake for a woodpecker's tapping.

August 20. 

Thursday. 

P. M. – To Hubbard's Close. 

The hillside at Clintonia Swamp is in some parts quite shingled with the rattlesnake-plantain (Goodyera pubescens) leaves overlapping one another. The flower is now apparently in its prime. 

As I stand there, I hear a peculiar sound which I mistake for a woodpecker's tapping, but I soon see a cuckoo hopping near suspiciously or inquisitively, at length within twelve feet, from time to time uttering a hard, dry note, very much like a woodpecker tapping a dead dry tree rapidly, its full clear white throat and breast toward me, and slowly lifting its tail from time to time. Though somewhat allied to that throttled note it makes by night, it was quite different from that. 

I go along by the hillside footpath in the woods about Hubbard's Close. The Goodyera repens grows behind the spring where I used to sit, amid the dead pine leaves. Its leaves partly concealed in the grass. It is just done commonly. 

Helianthus, strumosus-like, at the south end of Stow's cold pool; how long?

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 20, 1857

The hillside at Clintonia Swamp is in some parts quite shingled with the rattlesnake-plantain . . . See August 27, 1856 (“Goodyera pubescens, rattlesnake-plantain, is apparently a little past its prime. It is very abundant on Clintonia Swamp hillside. . .”)

A hard, dry note, very much like a woodpecker tapping. . .See May 29, 1856 (“A cuckoo’s note, loud and hollow, from a wood-side.”)

Helianthus, strumosus-like, at the south end of Stow's cold pool. . . See note to August 12, 1856 ("Am surprised to see still a third species or variety of helianthus . . . At edge of the last clearing south of spring. I cannot identify it. . . .In some respects it is most like H. strumosus, but not downy beneath.”)