June 18.
How dogs will resort to carrion, a dead cow or horse, half buried, no matter how stale, — the best-bred and petted village dogs, and there gorge themselves with the most disgusting offal by the hour, as if it were a season of famine! Surely they are foul creatures that we make cossets of.
P. M. – To Walden to see a bird's nest, a red-eye's, in a small white pine; nest not so high as my head; still laying.
A boy climbs to the cat owl's nest and casts down what is left of it, — a few short sticks and some earthy almost turfy foundation, as if it were the accumulation of years. Beside much black and white skunk-hair, there are many fishes scales (!) intimately mixed with its substance, and some skunk’s bones.
E. Bartlett has found three bobolinks’ nests. One or more of them he thinks has been covered by the recent flood.
A little boy brings me an egg of Wilson's thrush, which he found in a nest in a low bush about a foot from the ground.
Coming across the level pasture west of E. Hubbard's swamp, toward Emerson's, I find a young Emys insculpta, apparently going to lay, though she had not dug a hole. It was four and a quarter inches long by three and a half wide, and altogether the handsomest turtle of this species, if not of any, that I have ever seen. It was quite fresh and perfect, without wound or imperfection; its claws quite sharp and slender, and the annual striae so distinct on all the scales above and below that I could count them with ease. It was nine years old, though it would be like an infant among turtles, the successive striae being perfectly parallel at equal distances apart.
The sternum, with a large black spot on the rear angle of each scale and else where a rich brown color, even reminded me of the turtle-shell of commerce. While its upper shell was of ‘a uniform wholesome brown, very prettily marked in deed, not only by the outlines of the scales, but more distinctly by the lines of prominences raying out from the starting-point of each scale, perfectly preserved in each year’s growth, a most elaborate coat of mail, worthy the lifelong labor of some reptilian Vulcan.
This must have been a belle among the E. insculpta. Nevertheless I did discover that all the claws but one of one hind foot were gone! Had not a bird peeked them off? So liable are they to injury in their long lives. Then they are so well-behaved; can be taken up and brought home in your pocket, and make no unseemly efforts to escape. The upper shell was remarkably spreading and curving upward on the rear edges.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 18, 1858
A red-eye's, in a small white pine; nest not so high as my head; still laying. See
June 12, 1855 ("In the thick swamp behind the hill I look at the vireo’s nest which C. found on the 10th, within reach on a red maple forked twig, eight feet from ground. He took one cowbird’s egg from it, and I now take the other, which he left. There is no vireo’s egg");
July 21, 1855 ("A red-eyed vireo nest on a red maple on Island Neck, on meadow-edge, ten feet from ground; one egg half hatched and one cowbird’s egg, nearly fresh, a trifle larger");
January 13, 1856 ("What a wonderful genius it is that leads the vireo to select the tough fibres of the inner bark, instead of the more brittle grasses, for its basket, the elastic pine-needles and the twigs, curved as they dried to give it form, and, as I suppose, the silk of cocoons, etc., etc., to bind it together with!")
A boy climbs to the cat owl's nest and casts down what is left of it, — a few short sticks and some earthy almost turfy foundation, as if it were the accumulation of years. Beside much black and white skunk-hair, there are many fishes scales (!) intimately mixed with its substance, and some skunk’s bones. See
May 20, 1858 ("Saw in the street a young cat owl, one of two which Skinner killed in Walden Woods yesterday. . . .So I visited the nest. It was in a large white pine close . . . the nest is some thirty-five feet high on two limbs close to the main stem, and, according to Skinner, was not much more than a foot across, made of small sticks, nearly flat, “without fine stuff!” There were but two young. ")
E. Bartlett has found three bobolinks’ nests. See
June 22, 1858 (“I have one of the nests. There is but little of it ...”); see also
June 26, 1857 ("I must be near bobolinks' nests many times these days, — in E. Hosmer's meadow by the garlic and here in Charles Hubbard's, — but the birds are so overanxious, though you may be pretty far off, and so shy about visiting their nests while you are there, that you watch them in vain.");
July 2, 1855 ("Young bobolinks are now fluttering over the meadow, but I have not been able to find a nest ..")
A little boy brings me an egg of Wilson's thrush. See
June 2, 1852 ("Nest of Wilson's thrush with bluish-green eggs.")
This must have been a belle among the E. insculpta. Nevertheless I did discover that all the claws but one of one hind foot were gone! See
May 14, 1857 ("I see one with a large dent three eighths of an inch deep and nearly two inches long in the middle of its back, where it was once partially crushed. Hardly one has a perfect shell.") See also
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau,
the Wood Turtle (Emys insculpta)
"A book, each page written in its own season,
out-of-doors, in its own locality.”
~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx © 2009-2020
