The smooth sumach’s lower leaves are bright-scarlet on dry hills.

August 31. 

P. M. — To Flint’s Pond. 

A hot afternoon. We have had but few warmer. 

wood aster
August 31, 2018

I hear and see but few bobolinks or blackbirds for several days past. The former, at least, must be withdrawing. I have not heard a seringo of late, but I see to-day one golden robin. 

The birches have lately lost a great many of their lower leaves, which now cover and yellow the ground. Also some chestnut leaves have fallen. Many brakes inthe woods are perfectly withered. 

At the Pout’s Nest, Walden, I find the Scirpus debilis, apparently in prime, generally aslant; also the Cyperus dentatus, with some spikes changed into leafy tufts; also here less advanced what I have called Juncus acuminatus. 

Ludwigia alternifolia still. Sericocarpus about done. 

High blackberries are abundant in Britton’s field. At a little distance you would not suspect that there were any, — even vines, — for the racemes are bent down out of sight, amid the dense sweet-ferns and sumachs, etc. The berries still not more than half black or ripe, keeping fresh in the shade. Those in the sun are a little wilted and insipid. 

The smooth sumach’s lower leaves are bright-scarlet on dry hills. 

Lobelia Dortmanna is not quite done. 

Some ground-nuts are washed out. 

The Flint’s Pond rush appears to be Cladium mariscoides, twig rush, or, in Bigelow, water bog rush, a good while out of bloom; style three-cleft. It is about three feet high. This, with Eleocharis palustris, which is nearest the shore, forms the dense rushy border of the pond. It extends along the whole of this end, at least about four rods wide, and almost every one of the now dry and brown flower-heads has a cobweb on it. I perceive that the slender semicircular branchlets so fit to the grooved or flattened culm as still, when pressed against it, to make it cylindrical! —very neatly. 

The monotropa is still pushing up. Red choke-berry, apparently not long. 

At Goose Pond I scare up a small green bittern. It plods along low, a few feet over the surface, with limping flight, and alights on a slender water-killed stump, and voids its excrement just as it starts again, as if to lighten itself. 

Edward Bartlett brings me a nest found three feet from the ground in an arbor-vitae, in the New Burying Ground, with one long-since addled egg in it. It is a very thick, substantial nest, five or six inches in diameter and rather deep; outwardly of much coarse stubble with its fine root-fibres attached, loose and dropping off, around a thin casing of withered leaves; then finer stubble within, and a lining of fine grass stems and horse hair. 

The nest is most like that found on Cardinal Shore with an addled pale-bluish egg, which I thought a wood thrush’s at first, except that that has no casing of leaves. It is somewhat like a very large purple finch’s nest, or perchance some red-wing’s with a hair lining. 

The egg is three quarters of an inch long, rather broad at one end (or for length), greenish-white with brown dashes or spots, becoming a large conspicuous purple-brown blotch at the large end; almost exactly like — but a little greener (or bluer) and a little smaller — the egg found on the ground in R. W. E.’s garden. 

Do the nest and egg belong together? Was not the egg dropped by a bird of passage in another’s nest? Can it be an indigo-bird’s nest? I take it to be too large.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 31, 1858

The birches have lately lost a great many of their lower leaves, which now cover and yellow the ground.  See August 13, 1854 (“At Thrush Alley, I am surprised to behold how many birch leaves have turned yellow, — every other one, — while clear, fresh, leather-colored ones strew the ground with a pretty thick bed under each tree.”); August 31, 1856 (“The birches on Wheeler's meadow have begun to yellow, apparently owing to the [high] water.”)

High blackberries are abundant in Britton’s field. At a little distance you would not suspect that there were any. See note to August 31, 1857 (“An abundance of fine high blackberries behind Britton's old camp on the Lincoln road, now in their prime there, which have been overlooked.”)

Some ground-nuts are washed out. See August 31, 1857  (“Am surprised to see on the bottom and washing up on to the shore many little farinaceous roots or tubers like very small potatoes, in strings. . . . I never saw so many ground-nuts before.”)

A small green bittern plods along low, a few feet over the surface, with limping flight.  See  May 16, 1855  ("A green bittern with its dark-green coat and crest, sitting watchful, goes off with a limping peetweet flight.”); August 2, 1856 ("A green bittern comes, noiselessly flapping, with stealthy and inquisitive looking to this side the stream and then that, thirty feet above the water.") and note to July 30, 1856 ("A green bittern. . .with heavy flapping flight, its legs dangling")