15 April 1861 – 21 April 1861

Horace Mann says that he killed a bullfrog in Walden Pond which had swallowed and contained a common striped snake which measured one foot and eight inches in length. Says he saw two blue herons (?) go over a fortnight ago. He brought me some days ago the contents of a stake- driver’s stomach or crop. It is apparently a perch (?), some seven inches long originally, with three or four pebble-shaped, compact masses of the fur of some very small quadruped, as a meadow mouse, some one fourth inch thick by three fourths in diameter, also several wing-cases of black beetles such as I see on the meadow flood. He brought me also some time ago the contents of a black duck’s crop (killed at Goose Pond), — green gobbets of fine grass (?) or weeds (?), apparently from the bottom of the pond (just then begun to spring up), but I have not yet examined these out of the bottle.

H. Mann brings me the hermit thrush.

Pratt collects very handsome tufts of Hepatica triloba in flower at Melrose, and the bloodroot out also there.