The rose-breasted grosbeak

June 2.

I hear that Farmer shot on the 28th ult. two marsh hawks, male and female, and got their four eggs, in which the young were moving. 

P. M. — To Flint's Pond. 

Red maple seed is partly blown off. Some of it is conspicuously whitish or light-colored on the trees.

Examine a small striped snake, some sixteen inches long. Dark-brown above, with a grayish dorsal line and squarish black spots in the brown; then lighter-brown or dead-leaf color on the sides, chocolate-brown still lower, and light or pale-cream brown beneath. A dark- brown spot on each side of each abdominal plate. The sides yellowish forward. This is apparently a striped snake, but not yellow-striped as described. 

Strawberries reddening on some hills

Found within three rods of Flint's Pond a rose-breasted grosbeak's nest. It was in a thicket where there was much cat-briar, in a high blueberry bush, some five feet from the ground, in the forks of the bush, and of very loose construction, being made of the dead gray extremities of the cat-briar, with its tendrils (and some of this had dropped on the ground beneath), and this was lined merely with fine brown stems of weeds like pinweeds, without any leaves or anything else, -- a slight nest on the whole.

The egg is thickly spotted with reddish brown on a pale-blue ground, like a hermit thrush's, but rounder; very delicate.

Saw the birds. The male uttered a very peculiar sharp clicking or squeaking note of alarm while I was near the nest.

H.D. Thoreau, Journal, June 2, 1859

A rose-breasted grosbeak's nest. . . .The male uttered a very peculiar sharp clicking or squeaking note of alarm while I was near the nest. See May 25, 1854 ("Hear and see . . . the rose-breasted grosbeak, a handsome bird with a loud and very rich song, in character between that of a robin and a red-eye. . . . Rose breast, white beneath, black head and above, white on shoulder and wings.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Rose-breasted Grosbeak