This morning, though perfectly fair except a haziness in the east, which prevented any splendor, the birds do not sing as yesterday. They appear to make distinctions which we cannot appreciate, and perhaps sing with most animation on the finest mornings.
1 p. m. — Lee's Bridge, via Conantum; return by Clematis Brook.
There men in the fields are at work thus indefatigably, more or less honestly getting bread for men. The writer should be employed with at least equal industry to an analogous though higher end.
Flocks of yellow-breasted, russet-backed female bobolinks are seen flitting stragglingly across the meadows. The bobolink loses his song as he loses his colors.
Tansy is now conspicuous by the roadsides, covered with small red butterflies. It is not an uninteresting plant. I probably put it down a little too early.
Is that a slender bellflower with entire leaves by the Corner road?
The green berries of the arum are seen, and the now reddish fruit of the trillium, and the round green-pea-sized green berries of the axil-flowering Solomon's-seal.
Farmers have commenced their meadow-haying.
The Aster macrophyllus, large-leafed, in Miles's Swamp.
Is not that the Lysimachia ciliata, or hairy-stalked loosestrife, by the Corner road, not the lanceolata? Eupatorium sessilifolium now whitish.
A strong west wind, saving us from intolerable heat, accompanied by a blue haze, making the mountains invisible. We have more of the furnace-like heat to-day, after all.
The Rhus glabra flowers are covered with bees, large yellowish wasps, and butterflies; they are all alive with them. How much account insects make of some flowers! There are other botanists than I.
The Asclepias syriaca is going to seed. Here is a kingfisher frequenting the Corner Brook Pond. They find out such places.
Huckleberrying and blackberrying have commenced.
The round-leafed sundew. Monotropa uniflora, Indian- pipe.
Solidago Canadensis (?) almost out.
Either a smooth Polygonum hydropiperoides or a white P. amphibium var. terrestre.
The spear thistle. [Cirsium lanceolatum.]
Galium circcezans, wild liquorice, in Baker Farm Swamp.
What is that minute whitish flower with an upright thread-like stem and thread-like linear leaves, with a kind of interrupted spike or raceme of small, whitish, erect, bell-like flowers, the corolla divided by a stout partition, from which projects the style, with three distinct segments in the edge of the bell each side of the partition? [Canada snapdragon.]
Also found a very small narrow-leaved whitish aster (?).[Erigeron Canadensis.]
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 22, 1852
Flocks of yellow-breasted, russet-backed female bobolinks are seen flitting stragglingly across the meadows See August 15, 1852 (" I see a dense, compact flock of bobolinks going off in the air over a field. They cover the rails and alders, and go rustling off with a brassy, tinkling note as I approach, revealing their yellow breasts and bellies. This is an autumnal sight, that small flock of grown birds in the afternoon sky. ") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Bobolink
The green berries of the arum are seen. See September 28, 1856 ("The arum berries are still fresh and abundant, perhaps in their prime. A large cluster is two and a half inches long by two wide ")
The now reddish fruit of the trillium. See August 19, 1852 ("The trillium berries, six-sided, one inch in diameter, like varnished and stained cherry wood, glossy red, crystalline and ingrained, concealed under its green leaves in shady swamps. ")
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