On the migration of swallows.

August 5. 

4 A. M. — On river to see swallows. They are all gone; yet Fay saw them there last night after we passed. Probably they started very early. 

I asked Minott if he ever saw swallows migrating, not telling him what I had seen, and he said that he used to get up and go out to mow very early in the morning on his meadow, as early as he could see to strike, and once, at that hour, hearing a noise, he looked up and could just distinguish high overhead fifty thousand swallows. He thought it was in the latter part of August. 

What I saw is like what White says of the swallows, in the autumn, roosting “every night in the osier beds of the aits” of the river Thames; and his editor, Jesse, says, “Swallows in countless numbers still assemble every autumn on the willows growing on the aits of the river Thames.” And Jardine, in his notes to Wilson, says that a clergyman of Rotherham describes in an anonymous pamphlet their assembling (in the words of the pamphlet) “at the willow ground, on the banks of the canal, preparatory to their migration,” early in September, 1815, daily increasing in numbers until there were tens of thousands. 

As I was paddling back at 6 A. M., saw, nearly half a mile off, a blue heron standing erect on the topmost twig of the great buttonwood on the street in front of Mr. Prichard’s house, while perhaps all within were abed and asleep. Little did they think of it, and how they were presided over. He looked at first like a spiring twig against the sky, till you saw him flap his wings. Presently he launched off and flew away over Mrs. Brooks’s house. 

It seems that I used to tie a regular granny’s knot in my shoe-strings, and I learned of myself —rediscovered—to tie a true square knot, or what sailors sometimes call a reef-knot. It needed to be as secure as a reef-knot in any gale, to withstand the wringing and twisting I gave it in my walks. 

The common small violet lespedeza out, elliptic leaved, one inch long. The small white spreading polygala, twenty rods behind Wyman site, some time. Very common this year. 

It is the wet season, and there is a luxuriant dark foliage. Hear a yellow-legs flying over,—phe' phe phe, phe' phe phe. 

8 P. M. — On river to see swallows. 

At this hour the robins fly to high, thick oaks (as this swamp white oak) to roost for the night. 

The wings of the chimney swallows flying near me make a whistling sound like a duck’s. Is not this peculiar among the swallows? They flutter much for want of tail. 

I see martins about. Now many swallows in the twilight, after circling eight feet high, come back two or three hundred feet high and then go down the river.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal,  August 5, 1855

Yellow-legs. See May 31, 1854 ( "It acts the part of a telltale." "watchful, but not timid, ... while it stands on the lookout ... wades in the water to the middle of its yellow legs; goes off with a loud and sharp phe phe phe phe. ..."); September 14, 1854 ("A flock of thirteen tell tales, great yellow-legs, start up with their shrill whistle from the midst of the great Sudbury meadow, and away they sail in a flock...").

August 5. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, August 5

 

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