The contents of creatures' stomachs

April 16. 

Horace Mann says that he killed a bullfrog in Walden Pond which had swallowed and contained a common striped snake which measured one foot and eight inches in length.

Says he saw two blue herons (?) go over a fortnight ago.

He brought me some days ago the contents of a stake driver's stomach or crop. It is apparently a perch (?), some seven inches long originally, with three or four pebble-shaped, compact masses of the fur of some very small quadruped, as a meadow mouse, some one fourth inch thick by three fourths in diameter, also several wing-cases of black beetles such as I see on the meadow flood.

He brought me also some time ago the contents of a black duck's crop (killed at Goose Pond), -- green gobbets of fine grass (?) or weeds (?), apparently from the bottom of the pond (just then begun to spring up), but I have not yet examined these out of the bottle.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 16, 1861

Horace Mann says that he killed a bullfrog which had swallowed and contained a common striped snake. See May 19, 1856 ("Saw a small striped snake in the act of swallowing a Rana palustris, within three feet of the water. The snake, being frightened, released his hold, and the frog hopped off to the water. ")

Says he saw two blue herons go over.  See April 14, 1859 ("You have not seen our weedy river, you do not know the significance of its weedy bars, until you have seen the blue heron wading and pluming itself on it"); April 15, 1855 ("We have a fine view of a blue heron, standing erect and open to view on a meadow island, by the great swamp south of the bridge."); April 29, 1854 ("I meet a blue heron flying slowly down stream. He flaps slowly and heavily, his long, level, straight and sharp bill projecting forward, then his keel-like neck doubled up, and finally his legs thrust out straight behind.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Blue Heron and April 16, 1855 ("At sunset, the mountains, after this our warmest day as yet, have a peculiar soft mantle of blue haze, pale blue as a blue heron.")