26 July 1858 – 1 August 1858

Button-bush in prime. Edward Bartlett shows me a nest in the Agricultural ground which had four eggs, yet pretty fresh, but the bird has now deserted it. (Vide one.) Itis like Farmer’s seringo. It is a broad egg, white with large reddish and purplish brown spots chiefly about large end. ‘The nest is small and deep and low in the grass of this pasture. (Vzde nest out of order.) Could not see the bird; only saw bay-wings and huckle- berry-birds. I suspect it may be the F'ringilla passerina ? He says the bird had a clear yellowish-white breast!

P. M.— To Conantum. From wall corner saw a pinkish patch on side-hill west of Baker Farm, which turned out to be epilobium, a rod across. ‘Through the glass it was as fine as a moss, but with the naked eye it might have been mistaken for a dead pine bough. This pink flower was distinguished perhaps three quarters of a mile.’ Heard a kingfisher, which had been hovering over the river, plunge forty rods off. The under sides of maples are very bright and con- spicuous nowadays as you walk, also of the curled [?] panicled andromeda leaves. Some grape leaves, also, are blown up. .

P. M.— To Pine Hill, looking for the Vac- cuntum Pennsylvanicum berries. I find plenty of bushes, but these bear very sparingly. They appear to bear but one or two years before they are overgrown. Also they probably love a cool atmosphere, for they bear annually on mountains, as Monadnock. Where the woods have been cut a year or two they have put forth fresh shoots of a livelier green. The V. vacillans berries are in dense clusters, raceme-like, as huckleberries are not. I see nowadays young martins perched on the dead tops of high trees; also young swallows on the telegraph- wire. In the Chinese novel “ Ju-Kiao-Li, or The Two Fair Cousins,” I find in a motto to a chapter (quoted): “He who aims at success should be continually on his guard against a thousand accidents. How many preparations are necessary before the sour plum begins to sweeten!

P. M. — To Flint’s Pond. I see much eriocaulon floating, with its mass of white roots uppermost, near the shore in Goose Pond. I suspect it may have been loosened up by the mus- quash, which either feeds on it, or merely makes its way through its dense mats. I also see small fishes, appar- ently shiners, four or five inches long, in this pond. Yet I have seen this almost all dried up. I have smelled fungi in the thick woods for a week, though they are not very common. I see tobacco-pipes now in the path. You are liable to be overtaken by a thunder-shower these afternoons. The anychia already shows green seed-vessels on its lower branches. Petty morel has begun to bloom in shady swamps, how long? Got the wood thrush’s nest of June 19th (now empty). It was placed between many small upright shoots, against the main stem of the slender maple, and mea- sures four and a half to five inches in diameter from out- side to outside of the rim, and one and three quarters deep within. It is quite firm (except the external leaves falling off), the rim about three quarters of an inch thick, and it is composed externally of leaves, appar- ently chiefly chestnut, very much decayed, beneath which, in the place of the grass and stubble of which most nests are composed, are apparently the midribs of the same leaves, whose whole pulp, etc., is gone, arranged as compactly and densely (in a curving man- ner) as grass or stubble could be, upon a core, not of mud, but a pale-brown composition quite firm and smooth (within), looking like inside of a cocoanut-shell, and apparently composed of decayed leaf pulp (?), which the bird has perhaps mixed and cemented with its saliva. This is about a quarter of an inch thick and about as regular as a half of a cocoanut-shell. Within this, the lower part is lined with considerable rather coarse black root-fibre and a very little fine stubble. From some particles of fine white sand, etc., on the pale- brown composition of the nest, I thought it was obtained from the pond shore. This composition, viewed through a microscope, has almost a cellular structure.

P. M. — Up Assabet. The radical or immersed leaves of the pontederia are linear and grass-like, and I see that I have mistaken them for vallisneria just springing from the bottom. The leaves of new plants are just reaching and leaving the surface now, like spoons on the end of long handles. Edward Bartlett and another brought me a green bittern, this year’s bird, apparently full grown but not full plumaged, which they caught near the pool on A. Heywood’s land behind Sleepy Hollow. They caught it in the woods on the hillside. It had not yet acquired the long feathers of the neck. The neck was bent back on itself an inch or more, — that part being bare of feathers and covered by the long feathers from above, — so that it did not appear very long until stretched out. This doubling was the usual condition and not appar- ent, but could be felt by the hand. So the green bitterns are leaving the nest now.