P. M. —Walking in Ebby Hubbard's woods, I hear a red squirrel barking at me amid the pine and oak tops, and now I see him coursing from tree to tree. How securely he travels there, fifty feet from the ground, leaping from the slender, bending twig of one tree across an interval of three or four feet and catching at the nearest twig of the next, which so bends under him that it is at first hard to get up it. His travelling a succession of leaps in the air at that height without wings! And yet he gets along about as rapidly as on the ground.
I hear the faintest possible quivet from a nuthatch, quite near me on a pine. I thus always begin to hear this bird on the approach of winter, as if it did not breed here, but wintered here.*
I hear of two more flocks of geese going over to-day.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 1, 1857
*[Hear it all the fall (and occasionally through the summer of ’59).]
And now I see him coursing from tree to tree. See May 7, 1855 ("Scare up two gray squirrels in the Holden wood, which run glibly up the tallest trees on the opposite side to me, and leap across from the extremity of the branches to the next trees, and so on very fast ahead of me.")
I hear the faintest possible quivet from a nuthatch, quite near me. See November 26, 1860 ("I hear the faint note of a nuthatch like the creak of a limb. I detect it on the trunk of an oak much nearer than I suspected, and its mate or companion not far off. This is a phenomenon of the late fall or early winter; for we do not hear them in summer that I remember."); July 12, 1860 ("Hear a nuthatch in the street. So they breed here."); See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Nuthatch
I hear of two more flocks of geese going over to-day. See note to November 30, 1857 ("The air is full of geese. I saw five flocks within an hour, about 10 A. M., containing from thirty to fifty each, and afterward two more flocks, making in all from two hundred and fifty to three hundred at least”)
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