The eggs of a downy woodpecker laid in a bluebird’s nest?

June 23. 

To New Bedford with Ricketson.

In R.’s mowing, apparently lucerne, out some days.

His son Walton showed me one of four perfectly white eggs taken from a hole in an apple tree eight feet from ground. I examined the hole. He had seen a bluebird there, and I saw a blue feather in it and apparently a bluebird’s nest. Were not these the eggs of a downy woodpecker laid in a bluebird’s nest? They were all gone now.

Bay-wings sang morning and evening about R.’s house, often sitting on a bean-pole and dropping down and running and singing on the bare ground amid the potatoes. Its note somewhat like Come, here here, there there, —— quick quick quick (fast), — or I ’m gone. 

Prinos laevigatus common and just begun to bloom behind R’s house.

H. D.  Thoreau, Journal, June 23, 1856

White eggs taken from a hole in an apple tree eight feet from ground. . . the eggs of a downy woodpecker laid in a bluebird’s nest?  Compare July 12, 1856 ("Apparently a bluebird's egg in a woodpecker's hole in an apple tree, second brood, just laid.”) See June 20, 1856 ("Walking under an apple tree in the little Baker Farm peach orchard, . . .saw a hole in an upright dead bough, some fifteen feet from ground. . . . the nest of a downy woodpecker”).  See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Downy Woodpecker

Its note somewhat like Come, here here, there there, —— quick quick quick (fast), — or I ’m gone.  See May 12, 1857 (" I hear from across the fields the note of the bay-wing, Come here here there there quick quick quick or I'm gone . . . and it instantly translates me from the sphere of my work and repairs all the world that we jointly inhabit. It reminds me of so many country afternoons and evenings when this bird's strain was heard far over the fields, as I pursued it from field to field. . . As the bay-wing sang many a thousand years ago, so sang he to-night. "). Compare April 13, 1856 ("I hear a bay-wing on the railroad fence sing, the rhythm somewhat like, char char (or here here), che che, chip chip chip (fast), chitter chitter chitter chit (very fast and jingling), tchea tchea (jinglingly). It has another strain, considerably different, but a second also sings the above.")  See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau,  the Bay-Wing Sparrow