The loud snap of a wood pewee's bill overhead.

August 2. 

The wing of the sugar maples is dry and ripe to look at, but the seed end and seed are quite green. I find, as Michaux did, one seed always abortive. 

P. M. — Up Assabet.

The young red maples have sprung up chiefly on the sandy and muddy shores, especially where there is a bay or eddy.

 At 2 P. M. the river is twelve and seven eighths above summer level, higher than for a long time, on account of the rain of the 31st.

 Seed of hop-hornbeam not ripe.

 The button-bush is about in prime, and white lilies considerably past prime. 

Mikania begun, and now, perhaps, the river's brink is at its height. 

The black willow down is even yet still seen here and there on the water. 

The river, being raised three or four inches, looks quite full, and the bur-reed, etc., is floating off in considerable masses.

See those round white patches of eggs on the upright sides of dark rocks.

There is now and of late a very thin, in some lights purplish, scum on the water, outside of coarser drift that has lodged, — a brown scum, somewhat gossamer like as it lies, and browner still on your finger when you take it up. What is it? The pollen of some plant? 

As we rest in our boat under a tree, we hear from time to time the loud snap of a wood pewee's bill overhead, which is incessantly diving to this side and that after an insect and returning to its perch on a dead twig. We hear the sound of its bill when it catches one. 

In huckle-berry fields I see the seeds of berries recently left on the rocks where birds have perched. How many of these small fruits they may thus disseminate!

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 2, 1860

We hear from time to time the loud snap of a wood pewee's bill overhead. See August 18, 1858 (“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. August 18, 1858”)

I see the seeds of berries recently left on the rocks where birds have perched. See August 2, 1854 (“Here are the seeds of some berries in the droppings of some bird on the rock.”) See also July 14, 1856 (“While drinking at Assabet Spring in woods, noticed a cherry-stone on the bottom. A bird that came to drink must have brought it half a mile. So the tree gets planted!”); August 19, 1852 ("The small fruits of most plants are now generally ripe or ripening, and this is coincident with the flying in flocks of such young birds now grown as feed on them.”); September 21, 1860 ("I suspect that ... those [seeds] the wind takes are less generally the food of birds and quadrupeds than the heavier and wingless seeds")