22 June 1857 – 28 June 1857

Monday. Took the steamer Acorn [ ? ] about 9 a. M. for Boston, in the fog. The captain said that the mate to the whale taken on the 17th had been about the steamer all night. It was a thick fog with some rain, and we saw no land nor a single sail, till near Minot’s Ledge. The boat stopped and whistled once or twice. The monotony was only relieved by the numerous petrels, those black sea-swallows, incessantly skimming over the undulating [surface], a few inches above and parallel with it, and occasionally picking some food from it. Now they dashed past our stern and now across our bows, as if we were stationary, though going at the rate of a dozen knots an hour. It is remarkable what great solitudes there may be on this bay, notwithstanding all its commerce, and going from Boston to Provincetown you might be wrecked | in clear weather, without being seen by any passing * vessel. Once, when the fog lifted a httle and the boat was stopped, and the engine whistled, I thought that 1 saw an open sea without an object for three or four miles at least. We held on, and it suddenly thickened up again, and yet in three minutes, notwithstanding the fog, we saw the light-boat right ahead. This shows how deceptive and dangerous fogs are. I should have said we might have run half an hour without danger of striking any object. The greatest depth in the Bay between Long Point, Provincetown, and Manomet, Plymouth, according to Coast Survey charts, is about twenty-five fathoms. Get home at 5 p. M.' It seems that Sophia found an Attacus Cecropia out in my chamber last Monday, or the 15th. It soon went to laying eggs on the window-sill, sash, books, etc., of which vide a specimen. ‘Though the window was open (blinds closed), it did not escape. Another was . seen at the window outside the house on the south side (mother’s chamber) on the 21st, which S. took in, supposing it the first which had got out, but she found the first still in the chamber. This, too, she says, went right to laying eggs. I am not sure whether this, too, came from the other cocoon. Neither was quite so large as the one I had. The second had broken off the better part of its wings. Their bodies were quite small, perhaps because they were empty of eggs. I let them go. The eggs are large, pretty close together, glued to the wood or paper.

Skinner, the harness-maker, tells me that he found a black duck’s nest Sunday before the last, 2. e. the 14th, with perhaps a dozen eggs in it, a mere hollow on the top of a tussock, four or five feet within a clump of bushes forming an islet (in the spring) in Hubbard’s great meadow. He scared up the duck when within a few feet. Pratt says he knows of a black walnut at Hunt’s on Ponkawtasset. P. M. — Looked for the black duck’s nest, but could find no trace of it. Probably the duck led her young to the river as soon as hatched. What with gunners, dogs, pickerel, bullfrogs, hawks, etc., it is a wonder if any of them escape. Small rudbeckia, 7. e. hirta, at Hubbard’s Bath.

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 screech 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.

Most of the mountain-ash trees on the street are the European, as Prichard’s, Whiting’s, etc. The American ones (Pyrus Aucuparia is the European) in Cheney’s (from Winchendon) row have only opened within a day or two; that American one in Mrs. Hoar’s yard, apparently a week. The fruit of the European one is as large as small peas already. P. M. — To Gowing’s Swamp. White pine effete. Gaylussacia dumosa apparently in a day or two.!

Friday. Stand over a bream’s nest close to the shore at Hubbard’s rear wood. At length she ventures back into it, after many approaches. The apparent young bream, hardly half an inch long, are hovering over it all the while in a little school, never offering to swim away from over that yellow spot; such is their instinct. The old one at length returns and takes up her watch beneath, but I notice no recogni- tion of each other.’ The largest tupelo I remember in Concord is on the northerly edge of Staples’s clearing. See a pack of par- tridges as big as robins at least. I must be near bobo- links’ nests many times these days, —in E. Hosmer’s meadow by the garlic and here in Charles Hubbard’s, — but the birds are so overanxious, though you may be pretty far off, and so shy about visiting their nests while you are there, that you watch them in vain. The female flies close past and perches near you on a rock or stump and chirps whit tit, whit tit, whit rt tit tit te incessantly. Some of the Salix Torreyana by railroad is cordate and some not. The sterile one there is not, nor those near it.

P. M. — Up Assabet. See apparently a young bobolink fluttering over the meadow. The garlic not even yet quite. In the Wheeler meadow, the bushy one southwest of Ege Rock, the coarse sedge —I think the same with that in the Great Meadows — evidently grows in patches with a rounded outline; 2. ¢., its edge is a succession of blunt, rounded capes, with a very distinct outline amid the other kinds of grass and weeds. I cannot find one of the three bits of white cotton string which I tied to willows in that neighborhood in the spring, and | have no doubt that the birds, per- haps crow blackbirds, have got every one for their nests. I must drive down a stake for a mark next time.

Geum Virginianum some time, apparently, past its prime by red cohosh. It was not nearly out June 7th; say, then, the 18th. I hear on all hands these days, from the elms and other trees, the twittering peep of young gold robins, which have recently left their nests, and apparently indicate their locality to their parents by thus inces- santly peeping all day long. Observed to-night a yellow wasps’ (?) nest, made of the same kind of paper with the hornets’, in horizon- tal strips, some brownish, some white. It was broad cone-shape, some two inches in its smallest diameter, with a hole at the apex beneath about one half inch [in] diameter, and was suspended to the sheathing overhead within the recess at Mrs. Brown’s front door. She was afraid of the wasps, and so I brushed it off for her. It was apparently the same kind of nest that I observed first a few days since, of the same size, under the peak of our roof, just over my chamber windows. (The last is now five inches in diameter, July 7th.) It contained only one comb about one and one eighth inches in diameter suspended from above, and this was sur- rounded by about two thin coverings of paper an eighth of an inch or more apart. The wasps looked at first like bees, with yellow rings on the abdomen. The cells contain what look and move like white grubs. (July 7th, watching the nest over my window, I see that the wasps are longer than honey-bees and have a white place between the abdomen and breast. There are commonly three or four visible at once about the nest, and they are continually -bringing down new layers of paper from the top about a sixth of an inch distant from the last, building downward on all sides at once evenly and beginning, or starting, a new one before they have finished the first.1 They have turned the entrance a little outward; 7. e., have built the suc- cessive layers a little over its inner side, 2. e. that to- ward the house; so that it partly faces outward. They are continually arriving and departing, and one or two commonly are at work at once on the edge of the $ new curtain or layer. What becomes of the first layers surrounding the comb within? Do they steadily cut them away and use them on the outside, and build new and larger combs beneath? Some that come forth appear to have something white like the paper in their mouths, at any rate. ) There is one in Mr. Smith’s bank, one side open and flat against the ground. One of his men thinks they will not sting him if he holds his breath.