Wednesday. P. M. — To Farmer's Owl-Nest Swamp.
Melvin thinks there cannot be many black ducks' nests in the town, else his dog would find them, for he will follow their trail as well as another bird's, or a fox. The dog once caught five black ducks here but partly grown.
Farmer was hoeing corn with his Irishmen.
The crows had got much of it, and when he came to a vacant hill he took a few beans from his pocket — for each hoer had a pocketful — and dropped them there, so making his rows complete.
Melvin was there with his dog, which had just caught a woodchuck. M. said that he once saw a fox jump over a wall with some thing in his mouth, and, going up, the fox dropped a woodchuck and a mouse, which he had caught and was carrying home to his young. He had eaten the head of the woodchuck. When M. looked there the next morning they were gone.
Went to Farmer's Swamp to look for the owl's nest Farmer had found.
You go about forty-five rods on the first path to the left in the woods and then turn to the left a few rods. I found the nest at last near the top of a middling-sized white pine, about thirty feet from the ground. As I stood by the tree, the old bird dashed by within a couple of rods, uttering a peculiar mewing sound, which she kept up amid the bushes, a blackbird in close pursuit of her.
I found the nest empty, on one side of the main stem but close to it, resting on some limbs. It was made of twigs rather less than an eighth of an inch thick and was almost flat above, only an inch lower in the middle than at the edge, about sixteen inches in diameter and six or eight inches thick, with the twigs in the midst, and beneath was mixed sphagnum and sedge from the swamp be neath, and the lining or flooring was coarse strips of grape-vine bark; the whole pretty firmly matted together.
How common and important a material is grape-vine bark for birds' nests! Nature wastes nothing.
There were white droppings of the young on the nest and one large pellet of fur and small bones two and a half inches long. In the meanwhile, the old bird was uttering that hoarse worried note from time to time, some what like a partridge's, flying past from side to side and alighting amid the trees or bushes.
When I had descended, I detected one young one two thirds grown perched on a branch of the next tree, about fifteen feet from the ground, which was all the while staring at me with its great yellow eyes. It was gray with gray horns and a dark beak. As I walked past near it, it turned its head steadily, always facing me, without moving its body, till it looked directly the opposite way over its back, but never offered to fly.
Just then I thought surely that I heard a puppy faintly barking at me four or five rods distant amid the bushes, having tracked me into the swamp, — what what, what what what. It was exactly such a noise as the barking of a very small dog or perhaps a fox. But it was the old owl, for I presently saw her making it.
She repeated perched quite near. She was generally reddish-brown or partridge-colored, the breast mottled with dark brown and fawn-color in downward strings, and had plain fawn-colored thighs.
Found there the Calla palustris, out of bloom, and the naumbergia, now in prime, which was hardly begun on the 9th at Bateman Pond Swamp. This was about four or five rods southerly of the owl tree.
The large hastate tear-thumb is very common there; and what is that large, coarse, flag-like sedge, with two ridges to its blade? Just out of bloom. In dense fields in water, like the flag.
I think that this is a cold swamp, i. e. it is springy and shady, and the water feels more than usually cold to my feet.
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| (Fringilla juncorum) |
Looked over Farmer's eggs and list of names. He has several which I have not. Is not his "chicklisee," after all, the Maryland yellow-throat? The eggs were numbered with a pen, — 1, 2, 3, etc., — and corresponding numbers written against the names on the cover of the pasteboard box in which were the eggs.
Among the rest I read, "Fire never redder." That must be the tanager. He laughed and said that this was the way he came to call it by that name: Many years ago, one election-day, when he and other boys, or young men, were out gunning to see how many birds they could kill, Jonathan Hildreth, who lived near by, saw one of these birds on the top of a tree before him in the woods, but he did not see a deep ditch that crossed his course between him and it. As he raised his gun, he exclaimed, "Fire never redder!" and, taking a step or two forward, with his eye fixed on the bird, fell headlong into the ditch, and so the name became a byword among his fellows.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 24, 1857
Heard a fine, clear note from a bird on a white birch near me, — whit whit, whit whit, whit whit, (very fast) ter phe phe phe, — sounding perfectly novel. Looking round, I saw it was the huckleberry-bird . . . . See April 27, 1852 ("Heard the field or rush sparrow this morning (Fringilla juncorum), George Minott's "huckleberry-bird." It sits on a birch and sings at short intervals, apparently answered from a distance. It is clear and sonorous heard afar; but I found it quite impossible to tell from which side it came; sounding like phe, phe, phe, pher-pher-tw-tw-tw-t-t-t-t, — the first three slow and loud, the next two syllables quicker, and the last part quicker and quicker, becoming a clear, sonorous trill or rattle, like a spoon in a saucer.”)
