Saturday, April 14, 2012

One or two pewees?

Sayornis phoebe
April 14.

I do not hear those peculiar tender die-away notes from the pewee yet. Is it another pewee, or a later note?

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 14, 1852


See April 23, 1852 ("The wood pewee [?} on an elm sings now peer-r-weet peer-r-weet, peer-wee’. It is not the simple peer-r-wet peer-r-wee' that I heard at first. Will it not change next to that more tender strain?") 

Note: What we call the Phoebe (the first to arrive around April first) HDT calls the "pewee." In the later Journal he identifies as such the eastern wood pewee (which is the last species to arrive, usually around May 24th). Though few have ever lived more fully in the moment, the season of the phoebe is today hardly begun before HDT begins to live in anticipation of the note of the wood pewee five weeks hence, May 26th. See also May 22, 1854, May 24, 1859; May 24, 1860; May 24 2009 and A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Eastern Phoebe

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