Wednesday, June 25, 2014

To Assabet Bathing-Place and Derby Bridge.


June 25.

A green bittern, apparently, awkwardly alighting on the trees and uttering its hoarse, zarry note, zskeow-xskeow-xskeow



Shad-berry ripe. 

Garlic open, eighteen inches high or more. 

The calla fruit is curving down. 

I observe many kingfishers at Walden and on the Assabet, very few on the dark and muddy South Branch.  

A raspberry on sand by railroad, ripe. 

Through June the song of the birds is gradually growing fainter.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 25, 1854

Shad-berry ripe. See June 25, 1853 ("an unusual quantity of amelanchier berries, –. . . the first, and I think the sweetest, bush berries.”) See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Shad-bush, Juneberry, or Service-berry (Amelanchier canadensis)

I observe many kingfishers at Walden and on the Assabet. See May 10, 1854 ("Above the railroad bridge I see a kingfisher twice sustain himself in one place, about forty feet above the meadow, by a rapid motion of his wings, somewhat like a devil's-needle, not progressing an inch, apparently over a fish.”); June 9, 1854 (".Meanwhile the kingfishers are on the lookout for the fishes as they rise. I see one dive in the twilight and go off uttering his cr-r-ack, cr-r-rack. "); June 12, 1854 ("Scare a kingfisher on a bough over Walden. As he flies off, he hovers two or three times thirty or forty feet above the pond, and at last dives and apparently catches a fish, with which he flies off low over the water to a tree."); July 28, 1858 ("Heard a kingfisher, which had been hovering over the river, plunge forty rods off. ")

A raspberry on sand by railroad, ripe. See June 30, 1854 ("Rubus triflorus berries, some time, — the earliest fruit of a rubus. The berries are very scarce, light red, semitransparent, showing the seed.")

Through June the song of the birds is gradually growing fainter. See June 15, 1854 ("Methinks the birds sing a little feebler nowadays. ")

July 25. See A Book of the Seasons,, by Henry Thoreau, June 25

A Book of the Seasons,by Henry Thoreau
"A book, each page written in its own season,
out-of-doors, in its own locality.”
~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx © 2009-2021

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