The barberry flower is now in prime.

June 1. 

Farmer has heard the quail a fortnight. Channing yesterday. 

The barberry flower is now in prime, and it is very handsome with its wreaths of flowers. 

Many low blackberry flowers at Lee's Cliff. 

June-grass there well out. 

Krigia, how long? 

Breams' nests begun at Hubbard's Grove shore. They have carefully cleaned the bottom, removing the conferva, small weeds, etc., leaving the naked stems of some coarse ones, as the bayonet rush, bare and red. 

Young Stewart tells me that when he visited again that gray squirrel's nest which I described about one month ago up the Assabet, the squirrels were gone, and he thought that the old ones had moved them, for he saw the old about another nest. He found another, similar nest with three dead blind gray squirrels in it, the old one probably having been killed. 

This makes three gray squirrels' nests that I have seen and heard of (seen two of them) this year, made thus of leaves and sticks open in the trees, and I hear of some more similar ones found in former years, so that I think this mode of nesting their young may be the rule with them here. 

Add to this one red squirrel's nest of the same kind.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 1, 1860


The barberry flower is now in prime, and it is very handsome with its wreaths of flowers. See May 29,  1852 ("Barberry in bloom. “); May 29, 1857 ("I perceive the buttery-like scent of barberry bloom from over the rock,”)

Many low blackberry flowers at Lee's Cliff.  See May 25, 1857 (“Also low blackberry on the rocks a day or two.”); May 28, 1859 (“Low blackberry in bloom on railroad bank.”); June 2, 1852 (“ Low blackberry in bloom. ”); June 5, 1855 (“Low blackberry out in low ground”); June 16, 1858 (“How agreeable and wholesome the fragrance of the low blackberry blossom,”)

Breams' nests begun. See June 6, 1855 (“I notice . . . two or three cleared or light-colored places, apparently bream-nests commenced.”); June 8, 1858 ("I see many breams’ nests”); June 11, 1856 (“See a bream’s nest two and a quarter feet diameter, laboriously scooped out, and the surrounding bottom for a diameter of eight feet (! !) comparatively white and clean”); June 26, 1857 (“Stand over a bream's nest close to the shore ”); July 1, 1852 (“From the bridge I see a bream's nest in soft sand on the edge of deeper water”); July 10, 1853 ("The bream poised over its sandy nest on waving fin”)


Three gray squirrels' nests that I have seen and heard of (seen two of them) this year, made thus of leaves and sticks open in the trees. See April 25, 1860 (“Mr. Stewart tells me that he has found a gray squirrel's nest up the Assabet, in a maple tree. I resolve that I too will find it.”);  May 29, 1860 (“In another white pine near by, some thirty feet up it, I found a gray squirrel's nest, with young”); . See also  January 24, 1856 (“That Wheeler swamp is a great place for squirrels. I observe many of their tracks along the riverside there. The nests are of leaves, and apparently of the gray species.”); March 6, 1856 (“ [A](probably) gray squirrel’s nest high in a pitch pine, and acorn shells about on it. ”); October 23, 1857 (“I see a squirrel's nest in a white pine, recently made, on the hillside near the witch-hazels.”); November 13, 1857 (“ I see, on a white oak on Egg Rock, where the squirrels have lately made a nest for the winter of the dry oak leaves . . . I suspect it is a gray squirrel's nest.”); May 31, 1858 (“go to see a gray squirrel's nest in the oak at the Island point. It is about fifteen feet from the ground,”); November 5, 1860 ([T]here are the nests of several gray squirrels in the trees.”)

Add to this one red squirrel's nest of the same kind. See May 29, 1860 ("Some eighteen feet high in a white pine in a swamp in the oak meadow lot, I climbed to a red squirrel’s nest. . . . This was a mass of rubbish covered with sticks, such as I commonly see (against the main stem), but not so large as a gray squirrel’s . . . I have thus found three squirrels’ nests this year, two gray and one red, in these masses of twigs and leaves and bark exposed in the tree-tops and not in a hollow tree, and methinks this is the rule and not the exception.")