Two wood pewees’ nests

June 27

Sunday. P. M. — Up Assabet. 

Land at old mill-site and walk through the Lee Woods looking for birds' nests. 

See an Attacus luna in the shady path, smaller than I have seen before. At first it appears unable or unwilling to fly, but at length it flutters along and upward two or three rods into an oak tree, and there hangs inconspicuous amid the leaves. 

Find two wood pewees’ nests, made like the one I have. 

One on a dead horizontal limb of a small oak, fourteen feet from ground, just on a horizontal fork and looking as old as the limb, color of the branch, three eggs far advanced. 

The other, with two eggs, was in a similar position exactly over a fork, but on a living branch of a slender white oak, eighteen feet from ground; lichens without, then pine-needles, lined with usnea, willow down. Both nests three to five feet from main stem.

H.  D. Thoreau, Journal , June 27, 1858

See an Attacus luna in the shady path. See June 27, 1859 ("At the further Brister's Spring, under the pine, I find an Attacus luna") See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,the Luna Moth (Attacus luna)

Two wood pewees’ nests, made like the one I have. See June 26, 1855 ("C. has found a wood pewee’s nest on a horizontal limb of a small swamp white oak, ten feet high, with three fresh eggs, cream-colored with spots of two shades in a ring about large end."); see also August 13, 1858 ("I come to get the now empty nests of the wood pewees found June 27th.)  See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Eastern Wood Pewee