To measure the egg.

May 27. 

May 27, 2018

At Boston, Cambridge, and Concord. 

De Kay describes the Esox fasciatus, which is apparently mine of May 11th. As I count, the rays are the same in number, viz. “P. 13, V. 9, D. 14, A. 13, C. 20.” He says it is from six to eight inches long and abundant in New York; among other things is distinguished by “a muddy tinge of the roundish pectoral, abdominal, and ventral fins; and by a broad concave or lunated tail.” I do not observe the peculiarity in the tail in mine, now it is in spirits. 

Ed. Emerson shows me an egg of a bittern (Ardea minor) from a nest in the midst of the Great Meadows, which four boys found, scaring up the bird, last Monday, the 24th. It was about a foot wide on the top of a tussock, where the water around was about one foot deep. I will measure the egg. They were a little developed. It is clay-colored, one and seven eighths inches long by one and nine sixteenths, about the same size at each end.  

Also an egg of a turtle dove, one of two in a nest in a pitch pine, about six feet from the ground, in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, by the side of a frequented walk, on a fork on a nearly horizontal limb. The egg is milk-white, elliptical, one and three sixteenths inches long by seven eighths wide.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, May 27, 1858

De Kay describes the Esox fasciatus., which is apparently mine of May 11th. See May 11, 1858 (“the little brook (?) pickerel, of Hubbard's ditches, . . . I caught two directly. ”) See also Proceedings of the Boston Society of Natural History ("[Mr. Putnam] exhibited specimens of the young and adult pickerel, to show that the "short-nosed pickerel " is specifically distinct from the "long-nosed " — the Esox reticulatus — and said that the " short-nosed " species is the Esox fasciatus of Dekay, which is not the young of the Esox reticulates”)   See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Pickerel

A nest of a bittern (Ardea minor) in the midst of the Great Meadows about a foot wide on the top of a tussock. See  June 11, 1860 ("I hear a sound just like a small dog barking hoarsely, and, looking up, see it was made by a bittern  (Ardea minor), a pair of which flap over the meadows and probably nest in some tussock thereabouts.”)