A broad egg, white with large reddish and purplish brown spots.

July 26.

Yellow-winged sparrow

Fringilla passerina

Grasshopper Sparrow

Ammodramus savannarum

Button-bush in prime. 

Edward Bartlett shows me a nest in the Agricultural ground which had four eggs, yet pretty fresh, but the bird has now deserted it. (Vide one.) It is like Farmer’s seringo.

It is a broad egg, white with large reddish and purplish brown spots chiefly about large end. 

The nest is small and deep and low in the grass of this pasture. (Vide nest out of order.)

Could not see the bird; only saw bay-wings and huckleberry-birds. I suspect it may be the Fringilla passerina? He says the bird had a clear yellowish-white breast!

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 26, 1858

Bay-wings and Huckleberry-birds. See A Book of the Seasons, the Bay-Wing [Vesper] Sparrow; also April 27, 1852 ("Heard the field or rush sparrow this morning (Fringilla juncorum), George Minott's "huckleberry-bird." "); April 9, 1856 ("Wandering over that high huckleberry pasture, I hear the sweet jingle of the Fringilla juncorum."); ; April 15, 1856 ("I hear the note of the Fringilla juncorum (huckleberry-bird) from the plains beyond. ")

A broad egg, white with large reddish and purplish brown spots chiefly about large end. I suspect it may be the Fringilla passerina? See June 26, 1856 ("According to Audubon’s and Wilson’s plates, the Fringilla passerina has for the most part clear yellowish-white breast .... Audubon says that the eggs . . .of the yellow-winged sparrow are “of a dingy white, sprinkled with brown spots.”); May 28, 1856 (“A seringo or yellow-browed (?) sparrow’s nest . . .Egg, bluish-white ground, thickly blotched with brown, yet most like a small ground bird’s egg, rather broad at one end, pretty fresh.”)

July 26. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, July 26

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau

"A book, each page written in its own season,

out-of-doors, in its own locality."

~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx © 2009-2021