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| May 29, 2020 |
P. M. – After hawks with Farmer to Easterbrooks Country.
He tells me of a sterile bayberry bush between his house and Abel
Davis, opposite a ledge in the road, say half a dozen rods off in the field, on
the left, by a brook. Hearing a warbling vireo, he asked me what it was, and
said that a man who lived with him thought it said, “Now I have caught it, О
how it is sweet!” I am sure only of the last words, or perhaps, “Quick as I
catch him I eat him. O it is very sweet.”
Saw male and female wood tortoise in a meadow in front of his house,-- only a little brook anywhere near. They are the most of a land turtle except the box turtle.
Saw male and female wood tortoise in a meadow in front of his house,-- only a little brook anywhere near. They are the most of a land turtle except the box turtle.
We proceeded to the Cooper’s hawk nest in an oak and pine wood (Clark’s)
north of Ponkawtasset.
I found a fragment of one
of the eggs which he had thrown out. Farmer’s egg, by the way, was a dull or
dirty white, i. e. a rough white with large dirty spots, perhaps in the
grain, but not surely, of a regular oval form and a little larger than his
marsh hawk’s egg.
I climbed to the nest, some thirty to thirty-five feet high in a
white pine, against the main stem. It was a mass of bark-fibre and sticks about
two and a half feet long by eighteen inches wide and sixteen high. The lower
and main portion was a solid mass of fine bark-fibre such as a red squirrel
uses. This was surrounded and sur mounted by a quantity of dead twigs of pine
and oak, etc., generally the size of a pipe-stem or less. The concavity was
very slight, not more than an inch and a half, and there was nothing soft for a
lining, the bark fibres being several inches beneath the twigs, but the bottom
was floored for a diameter of six inches or more with flakes of white oak and
pitch pine bark one to two inches long each, a good handful of them, and on
this the eggs had lain.
We saw nothing of the hawk. This was a dozen rods south of the oak
meadow wall.
Saw, in a shaded swamp beyond, the Stellaria borealis,
still out, — large, broadish leaves.
Some eighteen feet high in a white pine in a swamp in the oak
meadow lot, I climbed to a red squirrel’s nest. The young were two-thirds grown,
yet feeble and not so red as they will be. One ran out and along a limb, and
finally made off into another tree. 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.
We next proceeded to the marsh hawk’s nest from which the eggs
were taken a fortnight ago and the female shot. It was in a long and narrow
cassandra swamp northwest of the lime-kiln and some thirty rods from the
road, on the side of a small and more open area some two rods across, where
were few if any bushes and more [?] sedge with the cassandra.
The nest was on a low tussock, and about eighteen inches across,
made of dead birch twigs around and a pitch pine plume or two, and sedge grass
at bottom, with a small cavity in the middle. The female was shot and eggs
taken on the 16th; yet here was the male, hovering anxiously over the spot and
neighborhood and scolding at us. Betraying himself from time to time by that
peculiar clacking note reminding you of a pigeon woodpecker.
We thought it likely that he had already got another mate and a
new nest near by. He would not quite withdraw though fired at, but still would
return and circle near us. They are said to find a new mate very soon.
In a tall pine wood on a hill, say southwest of this, or northwest
of Boaz’s Lower Meadow, I climbed to a nest high in a white pine, apparently a
crow’s just completed, as it were on a squirrel’s nest for a foundation, but
finished above in a deep concave form, of twigs which had been gnawed off by
the squirrel.
In another white pine nearby, some thirty feet up it, I found a
gray squirrel’s nest, with young about as big as the red squirrels were, but
yet blind. This was a large mass of twigs, leaves, bark-fibre, etc., with a
mass of loose twigs on the top of it, which was conical. Perhaps the twigs are
piled on the warmer part of the nest to prevent a hawk from pulling it to
pieces.
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.
Farmer says that he finds the nests or holes or forms of the gray
rabbit in holes about a foot or a foot and a half deep, made sideways into or
under a tussock, especially amid the sweet-fern, in rather low but rather open
ground. Has found seven young in one.
Has found twenty-four eggs in a quail’s nest.
In many places in the woods where we walk to-day we notice the now
tender branches of the brakes eaten off, almost in every case, though they may
be eighteen or more inches from the ground. This was evidently done by a rabbit
or a woodchuck.
The wild asparagus beyond Hunt’s Bridge will apparently open in
two days.
C. has seen to-day an orange-breasted bird which may be the female
(?) Blackburnian warbler. The leaves now conceal the warblers, etc., considerably.
You can see them best in white oaks, etc., not maples and birches.
I hear that there was some frost last night on Hildreth’s plain;
not here.
On the 28th, the latest trees and shrubs start thus in order of
leafing
1. Locust
2. Dangle-berry 21st
3. Mountain rhus 22d
4. Poison-dogwood 23d
5. Black spruce 23d
6. Black ash 24th
7. Button-bush 26th
8. Hemlock 27th
9. Bayberry
10. Vaccinium dumosum
11. Holbrook aspens
I hear from vireos (probably red-eyes) in woods a fine harsh note, perhaps when angry with each
other
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, 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. See April 1, 1858 ("I see a squirrel's nest twenty-three or twenty-four feet high in a large maple, and, climbing to it, — for it was so peculiar, having a basketwork of twigs about it."); April 23, 1859 ("The owl-hole contains a squirrel's nest . . This nest, which I suppose was that of a red squirrel, was at the bottom of a large hole some eighteen inches deep and twenty-five feet from the ground, where a large limb had been broken off formerly.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Red Squirrel.
We thought it likely that he had already got another mate and a new nest near by. See June 4, 1860 ("I hear that the nest of that marsh hawk which we saw on the 29th (q. v.) has since been found with five eggs in it. So that bird (male), whose mate was killed on the 16th of May, has since got a new mate and five eggs laid.") See also November 20, 1858 ("Martial Miles. . . says that a marsh hawk had his nest in his meadow several years, and though he shot the female three times, the male with but little delay returned with a new mate.") and see A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Marsh Hawk (Northern Harrier)
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