13 June 1859 – 19 June 1859

To Boston. My rail’s egg of June Ist looks like that of the Virginia rail in the Boston collection. A boy brought me a re- markably large cuckoo’s egg on the 11th. Was it not that of the yellow-billed? The one in the collection looks like it. This one at B. is not only larger but lighter- colored. In the plates of Hooker’s “ Flora Boreali-Americana,”’ the leaves of Vaccinium cespitosum are not so wide as the fruit; yet mine of Tuckerman’s Ravine may be it.

P. M. — To Flint’s Pond. Early strawberries begin to be common. The lower leaves of the plant are red, concealing the fruit. Violets, especially of dry land, are scarce now. Eleocharis palustris abundant in Stow’s meadow, by railroad. See a rose-bug. A pout’s nest (at Pout’s Nest) with a straight en- trance some twenty inches long and a simple round nest at end. The young just hatched, all head, light-colored, under a mass of weedy hum- mock which is all un- der water. The common utricularia out. Hear the phebe note of a chickadee. Cow-wheat, how long? A rose-breasted grosbeak betrays itself by that peculiar squeak, on the Britton path. It is evident that many breed in the low woods by Flint’s Pond. Catbird’s nest with four eggs i a swamp-pink, three and a half feet up. The rose-breasted grosbeak is common now in the Flint’s Pond woods. It is not at all shy, and our richest singer, perhaps, after the wood thrush. The rhythm is very like that of the tanager, but the strain 1s per- fectly clear and sweet. One sits on the bare dead twig of a chestnut, high over the road, at Gourgas Wood, and over my head, and sings clear and loud at regular intervals, — the strain about ten or fifteen seconds long, rising and swelling to the end, with various mod- ulations. Another, singing in emulation, regularly answers it, alternating with it, from a distance, at least a quarter of a mile off. It sings thus long at a time, and I leave it singing there, regardless of me.

A. M. — To lead-mill, Acton. Suddenly hot weather, — 90° — after very cool days. Yarrow out, how long? Blue flag abundant. Blue-eyed grass at height. Saw near mill, on the wooded hillside, a regular old-fashioned country house, long and low, one story unpainted, with a broad green field, half orchard, for all yard between it and the road, —a part of the hill- side, — and much June-grass before it. This is where the men who save the country are born and bred. Here is the pure fountain of human life. Walked over a rocky hill there in the midst of the heat. How interesting a thin patch of strawberry vines now on a rocky hillside, though the fruit is quite scarce! Good for suggestion and intention, at least. Herd’s-grass spikes just appear; not in bloom. (My notes on this hitherto not to be trusted.) ! Sitting by Hubbard Bath [? ] swamp wood and looking north, at 3 p. m., I notice the now peculiar glaucous color of the very water, as well as the meadow-grass (i. e. sedge), at a dozen or twenty rods’ distance, seen through the slight haze which accompanies this first June heat. A sort of leaden color, as if the fumes of lead floated over it. Young crow blackbirds which have left the nest, with great heads and bills, the top of the head covered with a conspicuous raised light-colored down. A fly (good-sized) with a large black patch on the wing and a reddish head alights on my hand. (A day or two after, one with a greenish head.) Birds shoot like twigs. The young are as big as the old when they leave the nest; have only got to harden and mature.

P. M. — Paddle to Great Meadows. Small snapdragon, how long? Examined a kingfisher’s nest, — though there is a slight doubt if I found the spot. It was formed singu- larly like that of the bank swallow, 1. e. flat-elliptical, thus: c> some eight inches, as I remember, in the largest diameter, and located just like a swallow’s, in a sand-bank, some twenty inches below the surface. Could feel nothing in it, but it may have been removed. Have an egg from this. Walked into the Great Meadows from the angle on the west side of the Holt, in order to see what were the prevailing sedges, etc. On the dry and hard bank by the river, grows June- grass, etc., Carex scoparia, stellulata, stricta, and Bux- baumii; in the wet parts, pipes two and a half feet high, C. lanuginosa, C. bullata (?), [C.] monile, Eleo- charis palustris, Panicum virgatum ' (a little just begins to show itself), and Glyceria fluitans here and there and out. There was a noble sea of pipes, — you may say pipes exclusively, —a rich dark green, quite distinct from the rest of the meadow and visible afar, a broad stream of this valuable grass growing densely, two and a half feet high in water. Next to this, south, where it was quite as wet, or wetter, grew the tall and slender C. lanuginosa, the prevailing sedge in the wetter parts where I walked. This was a sheeny glaucous green, bounding the pipes on each side, of a dry look. Next in abundance in the wet parts were the inflated sedges above named.” Those pipes, in such a mass, are, me- thinks, the richest mass of uniform dark liquid green now to be seen on the surface of the town [?]. You might call this meadow the “Green Sea.” Phalaris Americana, Canary grass, just out. ‘The island by Hunt’s Bridge is densely covered with it. Saw, in the midst of the Great Meadows, the trails or canals of the musquash running an indefinite dis- tance, now open canals full of water, in which ever minnows dart constantly, deep under the grass; and here and there you come to the stool of a musquash, where it has flatted down the tufts of sedge and perhaps gnawed them off.

Rain, especially heavy rain, raising the river in the night of the 17th.

P. M. — Sail up river. Rain again, and we take shelter under a bridge, and again under our boat, and again under a pine tree. It is worth the while to sit or lie through a shower thus under a bridge or under a boat on the bank, because the rain is a much more interesting and remarkable phe- nomenon under these circumstances. The surface of the stream betrays every drop from the first to the last, and all the variations of the storm, so much more ex- pressive is the water than the comparatively brutish face of earth. We no doubt often walk between drops of rain falling thinly, without knowing it, though if on the water we should have been advertised of it. At last the whole surface is nicked with the rebounding drops as if the surface rose in little cones to accompany or meet the drops, till it looks like the back of some spiny fruit or animal, and yet the different-colored cur- rents, light and dark, are seen through it all; and then, when it clears up, how gradually the surface of the water becomes more placid and bright, the dimples growing fewer and finer till the prolonged reflections of trees are seen in it, and the water is lit up with a joy which is in sympathy with our own, while the earth is com- paratively dead. I saw swarms of little gnats, light- winged, dancing over the water in the midst of the rain, though you would say any drop would end one’s days. The swamp white oaks and red maples and willows, etc., now first begin to show a slight silveriness on the under edges of their flakes, where the under sides of the new leaves are shown.

Sunday. P. M.—To Heywood Meadow and Well Meadow. In Stow’s meadow by railroad, Scirpus Eriophorum, with blackish bracts, not long out. A flying squirrel’s nest and young on Emerson’s hatchet path, south of Walden, on hilltop, in a covered hollow in a small old stump at base of a young oak, covered with fallen leaves and a portion of the stump; nest apparently of dry grass. Saw three young run out after the mother and up a slender oak. The young half-grown, very tender-looking and weak-tailed, yet one climbed quite to the top of an oak twenty-five feet high, though feebly. Claws must be very sharp and early developed. The mother rested quite near, on a small projecting stub big as a pipe-stem, curled cross- wise On it. Have a more rounded head and snout than our other squirrels. The young in danger of being picked off by hawks. Find by Baker Rock the (apparently) Carex Muh- lenbergiz gone to seed, dark-green, as Torrey says. Resembles the stzpata. Blackbirds nest in the small pond there, and generally in similar weedy and bushy pond-holes in woods. The prevailing sedge of Heywood Meadow by Bartlett Hill-side, that which showed yellow tops in the spring, is the Carex stricta. On this the musquash there commonly makes its stools. A tall slender sedge with conspicuous brown staminate spikes. Also some C. lanuginosa with it. C. canescens, too, grows there, less conspicuous, like the others gone to seed. Scare up young pariridges; size of chickens just hatched, yet they fly. The old one in the woods near makes a chuckling sound just like a red squirrel’s bark, also mewing. Flies rain about my head. Notice green berries,— blueberries and huckleberries. Is that red-top, nearly out on railroad bank? Erio- phorum polystachyon of Torrey, Bigelow, and Gray, the apparently broadish-leaved, but Gray makes the wool too long. In Pleasant and Well Meadow; at height. Carex polytrichoides in fruit and a little in flower, Heywood Meadow in woods and Spanish Meadow Swamp. Trisetum palustre (?), Well Meadow Head, in wet; apparently at height.