A wood tortoise making a hole for her eggs -- a striped snake running about in its new skin.

June 10. 

June 10, 2017

At R.W.E.'s a viburnum, apparently nudum var. cassinoides (?) (pyrifolium Pursh), four or five days at least. (Vide in press.) It agrees with Bigelow's account, except that the leaves are decidedly serrate and the calyx-segments not acute. Has but a very slight tendency to thorns! ! Twigs of this year red. The cymes are nearly sessile; petioles, etc., very little rusty-dotted. Compare it with prunifolium, and see fruit. It stands in a row with E.'s pear trees and has been mistaken for one, which, when not in flower, it very much resembles. Probably came from Watson's with them. (On the 13th I see apparently the same at Watson's, Plymouth, which he calls, and imported as, V. prunifolium!) 

P. M. — To White Cedar Swamp. 

A wood tortoise making a hole for her eggs just like a picta's hole. 

The Leucothoe racemosa, not yet generally out, but a little (it being mostly killed) a day or two. 

In Julius Smith's yard, a striped snake (so called) was running about this forenoon, and in the afternoon it was found to have shed its slough, leaving it half way out a hole, which probably it used to confine it in. It was about in its new skin. Many creatures — devil's- needles, etc., etc. — cast their sloughs now. Can't I?

Fanner tells me to-day that he has seen a regular barn swallow with forked tail about his barn, which was black, not rufous; also of an owl's nest in a pine, the young probably two or three weeks old. Vide June 24th.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 10, 1857

A wood tortoise making a hole for her eggs just like a picta's hole. See June 10, 1856 (“A painted tortoise laying her eggs ten feet from the wheel-track on the Marlborough road.”); June 18, 1855 (“a painted tortoise lays her eggs near the Leaning Hemlocks. . . .”); June 16, 1855 ("A painted tortoise just burying three flesh-colored eggs . . . Find near by four more about this business.”); June 7, 1854 (“Yesterday I saw the painted and the wood tortoise out. Now I see a snapping turtle. . . It had just been excavating”); June 28, 1860  (“I see no tortoises laying nowadays, but I meet to-day with a wood tortoise which is eating the leaves of the early potentilla, and, soon after, another . . .deliberately eating sorrel.”) See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau The Wood Turtlw (Emys insculpta)

The Leucothoe racemosa, not yet generally out, but a little (it being mostly killed) a day or two. See note to June 3, 1857 (“The racemed andromeda (Leucothoe) has been partly killed, — the extremities of the twigs, — so that its racemes are imperfect.”)

Many creatures — devil's- needles, etc., etc. — cast their sloughs now. See June 10, 1856 (“[W]ater-plants are thickly covered and defiled with the sloughs, perhaps of those little fuzzy gnats (in their first state) which have so swarmed over the river.”); June 6, 1857 (“[S]ee many great devil's-needles . . . stationary on twigs, etc. . . . their eyes . . . whitish and opaque . . . evidently just escaped from the slough.”)