P. M. — To Fair Haven Hill.
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| August 18, 2018 |
Miss Caroline Pratt saw the white bobolink yesterday where Charming saw it the day before, in the midst of a large flock. [I hear also of a swallow (probably barn swallow), perfectly white, killed by John Flint’s son this year and set up by some one in the North Quarter.]
I go by the place this afternoon and see very large flocks of them, certainly several hundreds in all, and one has a little white on his back, but I do not see the white one. Almost every bush along this brook is now alive with these birds. You wonder where they were all hatched, for you may have failed to find a single nest. I know eight or ten active boys who have been searching for these nests the past season quite busily, and they have found but two at most. Surely but a small fraction of these birds will ever return from the South. Have they so many foes there? Hawks must fare well at present. They go off in a straggling flock, and it is a long time before the last loiterer has left the bushes near you.
I also see large flocks of blackbirds, blackish birds with chattering notes. It is a fine sight when you can look down on them just as they are settling on the ground with outspread wings, — a hovering flock.
Having left my note-book at home, I strip off a piece of birch bark for paper. It begins at once to curl up, yellow side out, but I hold that side to the sun, and as soon as it is dry it gives me no more trouble.
I sit under the oaks at the east end of Hubbard’s Grove, and hear two wood pewees singing close by. They are perched on dead oak twigs four or five rods apart, and their notes are so exactly alike that at first I thought there was but one. One appeared to answer the other, and sometimes they both sung together, — even as if the old were teaching her young. It was not the usual spring note of this bird, but a simple, clear pe-e-eet, rising steadily with one impulse to the end. They were undistinguishable in tone and rhythm, though one which I thought might be the young was feebler.
In the meanwhile, as it was perched on the twig, it was incessantly turning its head about, looking for insects, and suddenly would dart aside or downward a rod or two, and I could hear its bill snap as it caught one. Then it returned to the same or another perch.
Heard a nuthatch.[And a week later. Not heard since spring.]
Last evening one of our neighbors, who has just completed a costly house and front yard, the most showy in the village, illuminated in honor of the Atlantic telegraph. I read in great letters before the house the sentence “Glory to God in the highest.”
But it seemed to me that that was not a sentiment to be illuminated, but to keep dark about. A simple and genuine sentiment of reverence would not emblazon these words as on a signboard in the streets. They were exploding countless crackers beneath it, and gay company, passing in and out, made it a kind of housewarming. I felt a kind of shame for [it], and was inclined to pass quickly by, the ideas of indecent exposure and cant being suggested.
What is religion? That which is never spoken.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 18, 1858
Miss Caroline Pratt saw the white bobolink yesterday where Charming saw it the day before, in the midst of a large flock. See ("Charming tells me that he saw a white bobolink in a large flock of them to-day. Almost all flowers and animals may be found white")
I go by the place this afternoon and see very large flocks of them, certainly several hundreds in all . . . . ..Almost every bush along this brook is now alive with these birds. See August 18, 1854 ("The bobolinks alight on the wool-grass.") See also . August 15, 1854 (" I see large flocks of bobolinks on the Union Turnpike"); August 26, 1859 ("Bobolinks fly in flocks more and more.")
You wonder where they were all hatched, for you may have failed to find a single nest. See July 2, 1855 ("Young bobolinks are now fluttering over the meadow, but I have not been able to find a nest ..”); June 26, 1857 ("I must be near bobolinks' nests many times these days. . . but the birds are so overanxious . . .and so shy about visiting their nests while you are there, that you watch them in vain.”)
It was not the usual spring note of this bird, but a simple, clear pe-e-eet, rising steadily with one impulse to the end. See August 18, 1860 (“The note of the wood pewee sounds prominent of late.”); See also August 12, 1858 ("The note of the wood pewee is a prominent and common one now. You see old and young together."); J.J. Audubon ( "...at this season, their notes are heard at a very late hour, as in early spring. They may be expressed by the syllables pe-wee, pettowee, pe-wee, prolonged like the last sighs of a despondent lover, or rather like what you might imagine such sighs to be, it being, I believe, rare actually to hear them.”) and A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Eastern Wood-Pewee
Nuthatch not heard since spring. See July 12, 1860 ("Hear a nuthatch in the street. So they breed here."); August 6, 1856 (“Hear a nuthatch.”); September 15, 1858 (“I hear a nuthatch occasionally, but it reminds me of winter.”); September 21, 1854 ("The nuthatch is common in woods and on street.”); October 20, 1856 (“Think I hear the very faint gnah of a nuthatch. Thus, of late, when the season is declining, many birds have departed, and our thoughts are turned towards winter . . . the nuthatch is heard again”); November 26, 1860 ("I hear the faint note of a nuthatch . . .a phenomenon of the late fall or early winter; for we do not hear them in summer that I remember. ...”); December 1, 1857 ("I thus always begin to hear this bird on the approach of winter, as if it did not breed here, but wintered here.”)
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