10 September 1855 – 16 September 1855

I can find no trace of the tortoise-eggs of June 18, though there is no trace of their having been disturbed by skunks. They must have been hatched earlier. C. says he saw a painted tortoise a third grown, with a freshly killed minnow in his mouth as long as himself, eating it. Thinking over the tortoises, I gave these names: rough tortoise, scented ditto, vermilion (rainbow, rail ?), yellow box, black box, and yellow-spotted.

Loudly the mole cricket creaks by mid- afternoon. Muskrat-houses begun.

A few clams freshly eaten. Some grapes ripe.

P. M. — To Hubbard’s Close. I scare from an oak by the side of the Close a young hen-hawk, which, launching off with a scream and a heavy flight, alights on the topmost plume of a large pitch pine in the swamp northward, bending it down, with its back toward me, where it might be mistaken for a plume against the sky, the light makes all things so black. It has a red tail; black primaries; scapu- lars and wing-coverts gray-brown; back showing much white and whitish head. It keeps looking round, first this side then that, warily. I see no fringed gentian yet. It costs so much to publish, would it not be better for the author to put his manuscripts in a safe?

P. M. — Up Assabet. See many painted tortoise scales being shed, half erect on their backs. An Emys insculpta which I mis- took for dead, under water near shore; head and legs and tail hanging down straight. ‘Turned it over, and to my surprise found it coupled with another. It was at first difficult to separate them with a paddle. I see many scales from the sternum of tortoises. Three weeks ago saw many brown thrashers, cat- birds, robins, etc., on wild cherries. They are worth raising for the birds about you, though objectionable on account of caterpillars.

As I go up the Walden road, at Breed’s, Hubbard, driving his cows through the weed-field, scares a woodchuck, which comes running through the wall and down the road, quite gray, and does not see me in the road a rod off. He stops a rod off when I move in front of him. Short legs and body flat toward the ground, 2. e. flattened out at sides.