His notes fall with the apple blossoms in the orchard.

clintonea borealis June 1, 2017
(avesong)

June 1. 

P. M. — To Hill. 

The weather has been less reliable for a few weeks past than at any other season of the year. Though fair in the forenoon, it may rain in the afternoon, and the continuance of the showers surpasses all expectation. After several days of rain a fair day may succeed, and you close your eyes at night on a starlit sky, but you awake unexpectedly to a steady rain in the morning. 

June 1, 2017 (avesong)

The morus at the Lee house is apparently the same with that at Howe's and Pratt's, and the berries are now three quarters of an inch long. I see no staminate blossoms. It must have been out several days. It is undoubtedly the Morus rubra, our only native one, for the nigra has lobed leaves and is a smaller tree, rare, and not quite hardy enough to do well in New England, they say.

The second thorn on Hill will evidently open tomorrow. It is altogether smooth while the first has downy peduncles, and its sepals are about entire while those of the first are cut-fringed. That largest and earliest thorn is now in full bloom, and I notice that its an apple tree, which has a blue tinge (or, earlier, rosaceous). This thorn has pink anthers, seen close at hand. The leaves are very evenly distributed amid the bloom. 

I see a swamp white fully and abundantly out, apparently a day or two; so the chestnut oak (which begins to shed pollen in house June 2d; its young reddish leaves resemble the young Q. Chinquapin, and its bloom, and apparently it opens with it in similar places) may be put apparently with the white oak. But it grows in a rather late place. 

P. arbutifolia var. erythrocarpa in house; perhaps a day or two earlier in some places. 

A red-wing's nest, four eggs, low in a tuft of sedge in an open meadow. What Champollion can translate the hieroglyphics on these eggs? It is always writing of the same character, though much diversified. While the bird picks up the material and lays the egg, who determines the style of the marking? 

When you approach, away dashes the dark mother, betraying her nest, and then chatters her anxiety from a neighboring bush, where she is soon joined by the red-shouldered male, who comes scolding over your head, chattering and uttering a sharp phe phee-e. 

I hear the note of a bobolink concealed in the top of an apple tree behind me. Though this bird's full strain is ordinarily somewhat trivial, this one appears to be meditating a strain as yet unheard in meadow or orchard. Paulo majora canamus. He is just touching the strings of his theorbo, his glassichord, his water organ, and one or two notes globe themselves and fall in liquid bubbles from his teeming throat. It is as if he touched his harp within a vase of liquid melody, and when he lifted it out, the notes fell like bubbles from the trembling strings. 

Methinks they are the most liquidly sweet and melodious sounds I ever heard.  They are refreshing to my ear as the first distant tinkling and gurgling of a rill to a thirsty man. Oh, never advance farther in your art, never let us hear your full strain, sir. But away he launches, and the meadow is all bespattered with melody. His notes fall with the apple blossoms in the orchard. The very divinest part of his strain dropping from his overflowing breast singultim, in globes of melody. It is the foretaste of such strains as never fell on mortal ears, to hear which we should rush to our doors and contribute all that we possess and are. Or it seemed as if in that vase full of melody some notes sphered themselves, and from time to time bubbled up to the surface and were with difficulty repressed.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 1, 1857

The chestnut oak . . . its young reddish leaves resemble the young Q. Chinquapin and its bloom, and apparently it opens with it in similar places. See May 25, 1852 ("The chinquapin shrub oak is blossoming.")

A red-wing's nest, four eggs, . . .who determines the style of the marking? See May 20, 1853 ("Probably a red-wing blackbird's nest, of grass, hung between two button-bushes; whitish eggs with irregular black marks"); May 25, 1855 ("Red-wing’s nest with four eggs — white, very faintly tinged with (perhaps) green and curiously and neatly marked with brown-black spots and lines on the large end.”); June 11, 1855 ("What a difference between one red-wing blackbird’s egg and another’s! C. finds one long as a robin’s, but narrow, with large black spots on larger end and on side, on or between the bushes by riverside; another much shorter, with a large black spot on the side. Both pale-blue ground."); June 12, 1855  ("At mouth of Mill Brook, a red-wing’s nest tied on to that thick, high grass and some low willow, eighteen inches from ground, with four eggs variously marked, full of young.”) ; June 28, 1855 ('Two red-wings’ nests, four eggs and three —one without any black marks.")

What Champollion can translate the hieroglyphics on these eggs? Jean-François Champollion was a French scholar, philologist and orientalist, known primarily as the decipherer of Egyptian hieroglyphs and a founding figure in the field of egyptology. Wikipedia

I hear the note of a bobolink concealed in the top of an apple tree behind me . . . It is the foretaste of such strains as never fell on mortal ears, to hear which we should rush to our doors and contribute all that we possess and are. See May 10, 1853 (“All at once a strain that sounds like old times and recalls a hundred associations. Not at once do I remember that a year has elapsed since I heard it, and then the idea of the bobolink is formed in my mind.”); May 16, 1854 ("The earth is all fragrant as one flower. And bobolinks tinkle in the air. Nature now is perfectly genial to man.”); and note to May 12, 1856 (“We hear the first bobolink. . . How much life the note of the bobolink imparts to the meadow! ”)

His notes fall with the apple blossoms in the orchard. See May 21. 1853 ("And while I hear the bobolink strain dying away in the distance through the maples, I can [ sic ] the falling apple blossoms which I do not see, as if they were his falling notes.")

June 1, 2017