I have come with a spy-glass to look at the hawks

June 9.

4. 30 A. M.— To Nawshawtuct by boat.

A prevalent fog, though not quite so thick as the last described.

It is a little more local, for it is so thin southwest of this hill that I can see the earth through it, but as thick as before northeast. Yet here and there deep valleys are excavated in it, as painters imagine the Red Sea for the passage of Pharaoh's host, wherein trees and houses appear as it were at the bottom of the sea.

What is peculiar about it is that it is the tops of the trees which you see first and most distinctly, before you see their trunks or where they stand on earth.

Far in the northeast there is, as before, apparently a tremendous surf breaking on a distant shoal. It is either a real shoal, i. e. a hill over which the fog breaks, or the effect of the sun's rays on it. 

I was amused by the account which Mary, the Irish girl who left us the other day, gave of her experience at-- the milkman's, in the north part of the town. She said that twenty-two lodged in the house the first night, including two pig men, that Mr. —-kept ten men, had six children and a deaf wife, and one of the men had his wife with him, who helped sew, beside taking care of her own child. Also all the cooking and washing for his father and mother, who live in another house and whom he is bound to carry through, is done in his house, and she, Mary, was the only girl they hired; and the workmen were called up at four by an alarm clock which was set a quarter of an hour ahead of the clock down stairs, — and that more than as much ahead of the town clock, — and she was on her feet from that hour till nine at night. Each man had two pairs of overalls in the wash, and the cans to be scalded were countless. Having got through washing the breakfast dishes by a quarter before twelve, Sunday noon, by — ' s time, she left, no more to return. He had told her that the work was easy, that girls had lived with him to recover their health, and then went away to be married. He is regarded as one of the most enterprising and thrifty farmers in the county, and takes the premiums of the Agricultural Society. He probably exacts too much of his hands.

June 9, 2023

The steam of the engine streaming far behind is regularly divided, as if it were the vertebræ of a serpent, probably by the strokes of the piston.

The reddish seeds or glumes of grasses cover my boots now in the dewy or foggy morning.

The diervilla out apparently yesterday.

The first white lily bud.

White clover is abundant and very sweet on the common, filling the air, but not yet elsewhere as last year.


8 A. M. – To Orchis Swamp; Well Meadow.

Hear a goldfinch; this the second or third only that I have heard.

Whiteweed now whitens the fields.

There are many star flowers.

I remember the anemone, especially the rue anemone, which is not yet all gone, lasting longer than the true one above all the trientalis, and of late the yellow Bethlehem-star, and perhaps others.

I have come with a spy-glass to look at the hawks. They have detected me and are already screaming over my head more than half a mile from the nest.

I find no difficulty in looking at the young hawk (there appears to be one only, standing on the edge of the nest), resting the glass in the crotch of a young oak. I can see every wink and the color of its iris.

It watches me more steadily than I it, now looking straight down at me with both eyes and outstretched neck, now turning its head and looking with one eye.

How its eye and its whole head express anger! Its anger is more in its eye than in its beak.

It is quite hoary over the eye and on the chin.

The mother meanwhile is incessantly circling about and above its charge and me, farther or nearer, sometimes withdrawing a quarter of a mile, but occasionally coming to alight for a moment almost within gunshot, on the top of a tall white pine; but I hardly bring my glass fairly to bear on her, and get sight of her angry eye through the pine-needles, before she circles away again.

Thus for an hour that I lay there, screaming every minute or oftener with open bill. Now and then pursued by a kingbird or a blackbird, who appear merely to annoy it by dashing down at its back.

Meanwhile the male is soaring, apparently quite undisturbed, at a great height above, evidently not hunting, but amusing or recreating himself in the thinner and cooler air, as if pleased with his own circles, like a geometer, and enjoying the sublime scene.

I doubt if he has his eye fixed on any prey, or the earth. He probably descends to hunt.



Got two or three handfuls of strawberries on Fair Haven. They are already drying up.

The huckleberry bedbug-smelling bug is on them.It is natural that the first fruit which the earth bears should emit and be as it were an embodiment of that vernal fragrance with which the air has teemed.

Strawberries are its manna, found ere long where that fragrance has filled the air. Little natural beds or patches on the sides of dry hills, where the fruit sometimes reddens the ground. But it soon dries up, unless there is a great deal of rain.

Well, are not the juices of early fruit distilled from the air? 

Prunella out.

The meadows are now yellow with the golden senecio, a more orange yellow, mingled with the light glossy yellow of the buttercup.

The green fruit of the sweet-fern now.

The Juniperus repens appears, though now dry and effete, to have blossomed recently.

The tall white Erigeron annuus ( ? ), for this is the only one described as white tinged with purple, just out.

The bullfrogs are in full blast to-night.

I do not hear a toad from my window; only the crickets beside. The toads I have but rarely heard of late. So there is an evening for the toads and another for the bullfrogs.



H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 9, 1853

June 9, 2013

The steam of the engine streaming far behind is regularly divided, as if it were the vertebræ of a serpent.  See December 25, 1851 ("If there is not something mystical in your explanation, something unexplainable to the understanding, some elements of mystery, it is quite insufficient.  . . Just as inadequate to a pure mechanic would be a poet's account of a steam-engine.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Steam of the Engine

I have come with a spy-glass to look at the hawks. See June 8, 1853 ("At length I detect the nest about eighty feet from the ground, in a very large white pine by the edge of the swamp. It is about three feet in diameter, of dry sticks, and a young hawk, apparently as big as its mother, stands on the edge of the nest looking down at me")

So there is an evening for the toads and another for the bullfrogs.  See June 13, 1851 ("The different frogs mark the seasons pretty well,- the peeping hyla, the dreaming frog, and the bullfrog."); See also  June 1, 1853 ("The birds have now all come and no longer fly in flocks. The hylodes are no longer heard. The bullfrogs begin to trump.”); June 11, 1853 ("Another fog this morning. The mosquitoes first troubled me a little last night. On the river at dusk I hear the toads still, with the bullfrogs.");  June 15, 1860 ("A new season begun. The bullfrogs now commonly trump at night, and the mosquitoes are now really troublesome. For some time I have not heard toads by day, and the hylodes appear to have done.")

The meadows are now yellow with the golden senecio, a more orange yellow, mingled with the light glossy yellow of the buttercup. See May 23, 1853 ("I am surprised by the dark orange-yellow of the senecio. At first we had the lighter, paler spring yellows of willows, dandelion, cinquefoil, then the darker and deeper yellow of the buttercup; and then this broad distinction between the buttercup and the senecio, as the seasons revolve toward July."); June 6, 1858 ("Golden senecio is not uncommon now") See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, The Golden Senecio