The Mystery of the odorless sternothaerus .

June 16. 

June 16, 2018
(Avesong)

P. M. – To Staples's Meadow Wood. 

It is pleasant to paddle over the meadows now, at this time of flood, and look down on the various meadow plants, for you can see more distinctly quite to the bottom than ever. 

A few sedges are very common and prominent, one, the tallest and earliest, now gone and going to seed, which I do not make out, also the Carex scoparia and the C. stellulata. 

How will the water affect these plants, standing thus long over them? 

The head of every sedge that now rises above the surface is swarming with insects which have taken refuge from the flood on it, — beetles, grasshoppers, spiders, caterpillars, etc. How many must have been destroyed!

No doubt thousands of birds' nests have been destroyed by the flood, – blackbirds', bobolinks', song sparrows', etc. I see a robin's nest high above the water with the young just dead and the old bird in the water, apparently killed by the abundance of rain, and after ward I see a fresh song sparrow's nest which has been flooded and destroyed. 

Two sternothaerus which I smell of have no scent to-day. 

Looking into Hubbard's Pool, I at length see one of the minims which I put into it. I brought the last here April 30th. It is now a little perch about an inch and a quarter long; it was then about a quarter of an inch long. I can now see the transverse bars a rod off. It is swimming actively round and round the pool, but avoids the quite shallow water of the edges, so it does not get landlocked or lost in the weedy overflowed edges. I put twenty or thirty into this pool in all. They grow very fast, then, at last. 

Carrion-flower, how long? Not long. 

How agreeable and wholesome the fragrance of the low blackberry blossom, reminding me of all the rosaceous fruit bearing plants, so near and dear to our humanity! It is one of the most deliciously fragrant flowers, reminding of wholesome fruits. 

I see a yellow-spotted turtle digging its hole at midafternoon, but, like the last of this species I saw, it changed its place after I saw it, and I did not get an egg; it is so wary. Some turtles must lay in pretty low fields, or else make a much longer excursion than I think they do, the water in which they dwell is so far from high land. 

Among the geraniums which now spot the wood or sprout-land paths, I see some with very broad, short, rounded petals, making a smaller but full round flower. 

The Salix nigra appears to be quite done.

Edward Emerson, Edward Bartlett, and Storrow Higginson come to ask me the names of some eggs to-night. 

They have the egg of the warbling vireo, – much like the pepe's, but smaller. [Or is it not yellow-throated vireo's P Vide nest. From a maple near Hemlocks, Asset.]

They tell of a hen-hawk's nest seen the 6th, with two eggs. 

They have also, undoubtedly, the egg of the purple finch, seen first two or three weeks ago, and they bring me two nests and one egg. Both these nests were in small fir trees, one by the Lee house (that was), Joe Barrett's, and the other in the New Burying-Ground. 

The last appeared to have been spoiled by the rain, and was against the main stem and contained four fresh eggs, they say, the 14th; the other had five eggs two days earlier; both near the top. The egg is a little more than three quarters of an inch long by nearly five eighths at the bigger end, and so of another from the other nest, rather more slender, — a tapering pale bluish-green egg, with blackish-brown and also dull slate-colored spots and streaks about the larger end and a few very fine spots on the other parts. 

The Lee nest is somewhat like a hair-bird's, though larger. They are both about four inches wide, outside to out side, and two and a half high, two and a quarter to two and a half [in] diameter within, and one and a quarter to one and a half deep. 

The Lee house one (which had the egg in it) is composed externally of many small weed stems — apparently lepidium, lechea — and root-fibres, and the inner part is very thick and substantial, of root-fibres and bark-shreds and a little cow’s hair, lined with much horsehair. 

The other is a little less substantial, externally of pinweed and apparently hypericum stems and root-fibres and within of root-fibres lined with much fine and soft bark-shreds. 

Edward Bartlett brings me a crow's nest, one of several which he found in maple trees, twenty or thirty feet from ground, in a swamp near Copan, and in this he found an addled egg. The mass of twigs which was its foundation were too loose and bulky to be brought away, — half a wheelbarrow-load, at least, chiefly maple, eighteen inches long and a quarter of an inch wide. The rest or inner portion of the nest, which part is ten or twelve inches in diameter, about two inches thick, and slightly concave, is composed almost wholly of coarse strips of grape-vine bark, with some finer, apparently maple, bark-shreds and some hair and hog's bristles, perhaps of carrion carried to its young heretofore; and the under part is loosely earthy to some extent.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 16, 1858

The head of every sedge that now rises above the surface is swarming with insects which have taken refuge from the flood on it. See August 25, 1856 (“Almost every stem which rises above the surface has a grasshopper or caterpillar upon it. Some have seven or eight grasshoppers, clinging to their masts, one close and directly above an other, like shipwrecked sailors, now the third or fourth day exposed. . . . They are so thick that they are like a crop which the grass bears; some stems are bent down by their weight.”)

Two sternothaerus which I smell of have no scent to-day. See April 1, 1858 ("I see six Sternothaerus odoratus in the river thus early. . . .. I took up and smelt of five of these, and they emitted none of their peculiar scent!”); May 1, 1858 ("Two sternothaeruses which I catch emit no scent yet.”)  See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Musk Turtle (Sternothaerus odoratus )

Looking into Hubbard's Pool, I at length see one of the minims which I put into it. See April 3, 1858 (“When returning, we discovered, on the south side of the river, just at the old crossing-place from the Great Meadows, north of the ludwigia pool, a curious kind of spawn.”); ; April 7, 1858 ("I brought home ... two kinds of spawn in a pail. ...  I see the embryo, already fish-like (?), curved round the yolk, with a microscope.”);April 14, 1858 (“At Ed. Hoar's in the evening.. . .. with his microscope I see the heart beating in the embryo fish and the circulations distinctly along the body.”); April 16, 1858("My fish ova in a tumbler has gradually expanded till it is some three sixteenths of an inch in diameter, and for more than a week the embryos have been conspicuously active, hardly still enough to be observed with a microscope. Their tails, eyes, pectoral fins, etc., were early developed and conspicuous. . . .This morning I set them in the sun, and, looking again soon after, found that they were suddenly hatched, and more than half of them were free of the egg.”); April 30, 1858 (“I carry the rest of my little fishes, fifteen or twenty, to the cold pool in Hubbard's ground. They are about a quarter-inch long still, and have scarcely increased in length. ”)

Edward Bartlett brings me a crow's nest. See April 29, 1859 ("E. Bartlett has found a crow's nest with four eggs a little developed in a tall white pine in the grove east of Beck Stow's")

June 16. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, June 16

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau

"A book, each page written in its own season,

out-of-doors, in its own locality."

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