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| June 6. |
P. M. — To Andromeda Ponds.
Cold mizzling weather.
In the large circular hole or cellar at the turntable on the railroad, which they are repairing, I see a star-nosed mole endeavoring in vain to bury himself in the sandy and gravelly bottom.
Some inhuman fellow has cut off his tail.
It is blue-black with much fur, a very thick, plump animal, apparently some four inches long, but he occasionally shortens himself a third or more. Looks as fat as a fat hog. His fore feet are large and set sidewise or on their edges, and with these he shovels the earth aside, while his large, long, starred snout is feeling the way and breaking ground. I see deep indentations in his fur where his eyes are situated, and once I saw distinctly his eye open, a dull blue (?) black head, not so very small, and he very plainly noticed my movements two feet off. He was using his eye as plainly as any creature that I ever saw. Yet Emmons says it is a question whether their eyes are not merely rudimentary. I suppose this was the Condylura macroma, since that is most common, but only an inch of its tail was left, and that was quite stout.
I carry him along to plowed ground, where he buries himself in a minute or two.
Still see cherry-birds in flocks of five or six.
A catbird nest on shore of Andromeda and in shrub oak, three feet high, twigs and bark shreds lined with root-fibres; three eggs.
Those nests in the andromeda are blackbird’s. Many sound the alarm while I am wading through the swamp. Noticed one with three eggs.
That willow, male and female, opposite to Trillium Woods on the railroad, I find to be the Salix rostrata, or long-beaked willow, one of the ochre-flowered (I had remarked the peculiar yellow of its flowers) willows (fulvae) of Barratt. It is now just beginning to open its long beaks. The S. cordata is another of the ochre-flowered ones.
How well suited the lining of a bird’s nest, not only for the comfort of the young, but to keep the eggs from breaking! Fine elastic grass stems or root-fibres, pine needles, or hair, or the like. These tender and brittle things which you can hardly carry in cotton lie there without harm.
J. Hosmer, who is prosecuting Warner for flowing his land, says that the trees are not only broken off when young by weight of ice, but, being rubbed and barked by it, become warty or bulge out there.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 6, 1856
I carry him along to plowed ground, where he buries himself in a minute or two. See July 23, 1856 ("Saw . . . a small bullfrog in the act of swallowing a young but pretty sizable apparently Rana palustris, . . . I sprang to make him disgorge, but it was too late to save him. "); April 22, 1857 (“Near Tall's Island, rescue a little pale or yellowish brown snake that was coiled round a willow half a dozen rods from the shore and was apparently chilled by the cold.”); August 28, 1854 (“The meadow is drier than ever, and new pools are dried up. The breams, from one to two and a half inches long, lying on the sides and quirking from time to time. . . — pretty green jewels, dying in the sun. I saved a dozen or more by putting them in deeper pools.”); April 12, 1858 (“We came upon a partridge standing on the track, between the rails over which the cars had just passed. She had evidently been run down, but. . . was apparently more disturbed in mind than body. I took her up and carried her one side to a safer place.”)
That willow, male and female, opposite to Trillium Woods on the railroad. . . . See May 10, 1856 {"On the railroad causeway against Trillium Wood, I see an apparently native willow, a shrub, with greenish bark and conspicuous yellow catkins, now in full bloom, apparently a little earlier than the Salix alba, but its leafets or bracts much less advanced and conspicuous. Another on the Walden road. What is it?")
The S. cordata is another of the ochre-flowered ones. See June 6, 1855 ("The Salix cordata (which apparently blossomed some days after the S. sericea) is very common on Prichard’s shore and also Whiting’s.")
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