P. M. — To Saw Mill Brook and Flint's Pond.
That reach in the road this side Britton's Camp might be called Nabalus Road, they are so abundant there. Some of them are fully six feet high, — a singularly tall and slender plant.
See, I think, my first tobacco-pipe this afternoon, now that they are about done, and have seen no pine- sap this year, abundant as both the above were last year. Like fungi, these plants are apparently scarce in a dry year, so that you might at first think them rare plants. This is a phenomenon of drought.
I see in different places small grubs splitting leaves now, and so marking them curiously with light brown or whitish on the green. Here are two at work in a Rhus Toxicodendron leaf. They appear to have been hatched within the leaf at the apex, and each has eaten upward on its own side of the midrib and equally fast, making a light-colored figure shaped like a column of smoke in the midst of the green. They perfectly split the leaf, making no visible puncture in it, even at the ribs or veins. Some creatures are so minute that they find food enough for them between the two sides of a thin leaf, without injuring the cuticle. The ox requires the meadows to be shorn for him, and cronches both blade and stalk, even of the coarsest grass, as corn; but these grubs do their browsing in narrower pastures, pastures not so wide as their own jaws, between fences (inviolable to them) of their own establishing, or along narrow lanes. There, secure from birds, they mine, and no harm can they do now that the green leaf has so commonly done its office.
If you would study the birds now, go where their food is, i. e. the berries, especially to the wild black cherries, elder-berries, poke berries, mountain-ash berries, and ere long the barberries, and for pigeons the acorns.
In the sprout-land behind Britton's Camp, I came to a small black cherry full of fruit, and then, for the first time for a long while, I see and hear cherry-birds — their shrill and fine seringo — and the note of robins, which of late are scarce. We sit near the tree and listen to the now unusual sounds of these birds, and from time to time one or two come dashing from out the sky toward this tree, till, seeing us, they whirl, disappointed, and perhaps alight on some neighboring twigs and wait till we are gone.
The cherry-birds and robins seem to know the locality of every wild cherry in the town. You are as sure to find them on them now, as bees and butterflies on the thistles. If we stay long, they go off with a fling, to some other cherry tree, which they know of but we do not. The neighborhood of a wild cherry full of fruit is now, for the notes of birds, a little spring come back again, and when, a mile or two from this, I was plucking a basketful of elder-berries (for which it was rather early yet), there too, to my surprise, I came on a flock of golden robins and of bluebirds, apparently feeding on them.
Excepting the vacciniums, now past prime and drying up, the cherries and elder berries are the two prevailing fruits now. We had remarked on the general scarcity and silence of the birds, but when we came to the localities of these fruits, there again we found the berry-eating birds assembled, — young (?) orioles and bluebirds at the elder-berries.
Green white pine cones are thrown down. An unusual quantity of these have been stripped for some time past, and I see the ground about the bases of the trees strewn with them.
The spikenard berries in the shade at Saw Mill have but just begun to turn.
The Polygonatum biflorum with its row of bluish-green berries (the blue a bloom), pendulous from the axils of the recurved stem, apparently now in its prime.
Red choke-berry ripe.
Smooth sumach probably hardly ripe yet generally.
The fruit of the arum is the most remarkable that I see this afternoon, such its brilliancy, color, and form; perhaps in prime now. It is among the most easily detected now on the floor of the swamp, its bright- scarlet cone above the fallen and withered leaves and amid its own brown or whitish and withering leaves. Its own leaves and stem perhaps soft and decaying, while it is perfectly fresh and dazzling. It has the brightest gloss of any fruit I remember, and this makes the green ones about as remarkable as the scarlet. With, perchance, a part of the withered spathe still investing and veiling it. The scarlet fruit of the arum spots the swamp floor.
September 1, 2023
Now, also, bright-colored fungi of various colors on the swamp floor begin to compete with these fruits. I see a green one.
The elder-berry cyme, held erect, is of very regular form, four principal divisions drooping toward each quarter around an upright central one. Are said to make a good dye. They fill your basket quickly, the cymes are so large and lie up so light.
The autumnal dandelion is a prevailing flower now, but since it shuts up in the afternoon it might not be known as common unless you were out in the morning or in a dark afternoon. Now, at 11 a. m., it makes quite a show, yet at 2 p. m. I do not notice it.
Bought a pair of shoes the other day, and, observing that as usual they were only wooden-pegged at the toes, I required the seller to put in an extra row of iron pegs there while I waited for them. So he called to his boy to bring those zinc pegs, but I insisted on iron pegs and no zinc ones. He gave me considerable advice on the subject of shoes, but I suggested that even the wearer of shoes, of whom I was one, had an opportunity to learn some of their qualities. I have learned to respect my own opinion in this matter. As I do not use blacking and the seller often throws in a box of blacking when I buy a pair of shoes, they accumulate on my hands.
Saw this afternoon, on a leaf in the Saw Mill woodpath, a very brilliant beetle a quarter or a third of an inch in length with brilliant green and copper reflections. The same surface, or any part of the upper surface, of the bug was green from one point of view and burnished copper from another. Yet there was nothing in its form to recommend this bug.
You must be careful not to eat too many nuts. I one winter met a young man whose face was broken out into large pimples and sores, and when I inquired what was the matter, he answered that he and his wife were fond of shagbarks, and therefore he had bought a bushel of them, and they spent their winter evenings eating them, and this was the consequence.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 1, 1859
The cherry-birds and robins seem to know the locality of every wild cherry in the town. See August 19, 1852 ("The small fruits of most plants are now generally ripe or ripening, and this is coincident with the flying in flocks of such young birds now grown as feed on them."); August 29, 1854 ("Many birds nowadays resort to the wild black cherry tree, as here front of Tarbell's. I see them continually coming and going directly from and to a great distance, — cherry birds, robins, and kingbirds "); September 1, 1860: ("Cherries are especially birds' food, and . . . I shall think the birds have the best right to them..")
The fruit of the arum is the most remarkable that I see this afternoon, such its brilliancy, color, and form; perhaps in prime now. See August 22, 1852 ("The arum berries are mostly devoured, apparently by birds . . . Perhaps fruits are colored like the trillium berry and the scarlet thorn to attract birds to them."); September 2, 1853 ("The dense oval bunches of arum berries now startle the walker in swamps. They are a brilliant vermilion on a rich ground."); September 4, 1856 ("Splendid scarlet arum berries there now in prime.”); September 4, 1857 ("Arum berries ripe.”); September 24, 1856 ("Aarum berries still fresh"); September 28, 1856 ("The arum berries are still fresh and abundant, perhaps in their prime. A large cluster is two and a half inches long by two wide and rather flattish. . . . These singular vermilion-colored berries, about a hundred of them, surmount a purple bag on a peduncle six or eight inches long. ") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Arum Berries
Now, also, bright-colored fungi of various colors on the swamp floor. See September 1, 1856 ("There are many very beautiful lemon- yellow ones of various forms, some shaped like buttons, some becoming finely scalloped on the edge, some club-shaped and hollow, of the most delicate and rare but decided tints, contrasting well with the decaying leaves about them. There are others also pure white, others a wholesome red, others brown, and some even a light indigo-blue above and beneath and throughout.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Season for Fungi
The autumnal dandelion is a prevailing flower now. See August 4. 1854 ("The autumnal dandelion is now more common."); September 2, 1854 ("The autumnal dandelion is conspicuous on the shore."); September 13, 1856 ("Surprised at the profusion of autumnal dandelions in their prime on the top of the hill")
Green white pine cones are thrown down. See September 16, 1857("I see green and closed cones beneath, which the squirrels have thrown down.")
Bought a pair of shoes the other day. See EDK August 9, 1860 (" Bot a pair of shoes for $1.25"); December 4, 1856 ("When I bought my boots yesterday, Hastings ran over his usual rigmarole.")
