| Summary: | Accompanying Journal Entry: "5 A.M. To Island. Finger-cold and windy. The sweet-flags showed themselves about in the pads. Hear Maryland yellow-throat. Many grackles still in flocks signing on trees, male and female, the latter a very dark or black ash, but with silvery eye. I suspect the red-wings are building. Large white maples began to leaf yesterday at least, generally; one now shows considerably across the river. The aspen is earlier. Vibrunum dentatum yesterday leafed. Bass to-morrow (some shoots sheltered now). A crow's nest near the top of a pitch pine about twenty feet high, just completed, betrayed by the birds' cawing and alarm. As on the 5th, one came and sat on a bare oak within forty feet, cawed, reconnoitred; and then both flew off to a distance, while I discovered and climbed to the nest within a dozen rods. One comes near to spy you first. It was about sixteen inches over, of the pitch pine dead twigs laid across the forks, and white oak leaves and bark fibres laid copiously on them; the cavity deep, and more than half covered and concealed with a roof of leaves; a long, sloping approach or declivity left on one side the nest. Red curreant out. P.M. To Lee's Cliff via Hubbard's Bath. Viola cucullata apparently a day or two. A ladybug and humblebee, the last probably some time. A lily wholly above water, and yellow, in Skull-Cap Meadow, ready to open. See Rana fontinalis. Climbed to two crows' nests, -- or maybe one of them a squirrel's, -- in Hubbard's Grove. Do they not sometimes use a squirrel's nest for a foundation? A ruby-crested wren is apparently attracted and eyes me. It is wrenching and fatiguing, as well as dirty, work to climb a tall pine with nothing, or maybe only dead twigs and stubs, to hold by. You must proceed with great deliberation and see well where you put your hands and your feet. Saw probably a female Falco fuscus sail swift and low close by me and alight on a rail fence. It was a rich, very dark, perhaps reddish slate brown. I saw some white under the head; no white on rump. Wings thickly barred with dark beneath. It then flew and alighted on a maple. Did not fly so irregularly as the last one I called by this name. The early willow on the left beyond the bridge has begun to leaf, but by no means yet the one on the right. Scared up two gray squirrels in the Holden wood, which ran glibly up the tallest trees on the opposite side to me, and leaped across from the extremity of the branches to the next trees, and so on very fast ahead of me. Remembering aye, aching with my experience in climbing trees this afternoon and morning, I could not but admire their exploits. To see them travelling with so much swiftness and ease that road over which I climbed a few feet with such painful exertion! A partridge flew up from within three or four feet of me with a loud whir, and betrayed one cream-colored egg in a little hollow amid the leaves. Hear the tweezer-bird. It looks like a bluish slate above, with a greenish(?)-yellow back and bright orange-yellow throat and breast, forked tail, two white bars on wings, whitish vent. Another, probably female, paler bluish, with fainter yellow and a conspicuous black crescent on breast. This is undoubtedly the parti-colored warbler, i.e. Brewer's blue yellow-back (Sylvia Americana of Latham and Audubon, pusilla of Wilson). Vide June 18th, 1854 and May 9th, 1853. I believe the yellow-rumped warbler has a note somewhat like the tweezer's. Climbed a hemlock to a very large and complete, probably gray squirrel's, nest, eighteen inches [in] diameter, -- a foundation of twigs, on which a body of leaves and some bark fibres, lined with the last, and the whole covered with many fresh green hemlock twigs one foot or more long with the leaves on, -- which had been gnawed off, -- and many strewed the ground beneath, having fallen off. Entrance one side. A short distance beyond this and the hawk's-nest pine, I observed a middling-sized red oak standing a little aslant on the side-hill over the swamp, with a pretty large hole in one side about fifteen feet from the ground, where apparently a limb on which a felled tree lodged had been cut some years before and so broke out a cavity. I thought that such a hole was too good a one not to be improved by some inhabitant of the wood. Perhaps the gray squirrels I had just seem had their nest there. Or was not eh entrance big enough to admit a screech owl? So I thought I would tap on it and put my ear to the trunk and see if I could hear anything stirring within it, but I heard nothing. Then I concluded to look into it. So I shinned up, and when I reached up one hand to the hole to pull myself up by it, the thought passed through my mind perhaps something may take hold my fingers, but nothing did. The first limb was nearly opposite to the hole, and, resting on this, I looked in, and, to my great surprise, there squatted, filling the hole, which was about six inches deep and five to six wide, a salmon-brown bird not so big as a partridge, seemingly asleep within three inches of the top and close to my face. It was a minute or two before I made it out to be an owl. It was a salmon-brown or fawn (?) above, the feathers shafted with small blackish-brown somewhat hastate (?) marks, grayish toward the ends of the wings and tail, as far as I could see. A large white circular space about or behind eye, banded in rear by a pretty broad (one third of an inch) and quite conspicuous perpendicular dark-brown stripe. Egret, say one and a quarter inches long, sharp, triangular, reddish-brown without mainly. It lay crowded in that small space, with its tail somewhat bent up and one side of its head turned up with one egret, and its large dark eye open only by a long slit about a sixteenth of an inch wide; visible breathing. After a little while I put in one hand and stroked it repeatedly, whereupon it reclined its head a little lower and closed its eye entirely. Though curious to know what was under it, I disturbed it no farther at that time. In the meanwhile, the crows were making a great cawing amid and over the pine-tops beyond the swamp, and at intervals I heard the scream of a hawk, probably the surviving male hen-hawk, whom they were pestering (unless they had discovered the male screech owl_, and a part of them came cawing about me. This was a very fit place for hawks and owls to dwell in, -- the thick woods just over a white spruce swamp, in which the glaucous kalmia grows; the gray squirrels, partridges, hawks, and owls, all together. It was probably these screech owls which I heard in moonlight nights hereabouts last fall. Vide end of this day. Birch leafs to-day; probably some yesterday, with white maple. The Conantum thorn (cockspur?) leafs with earliest. That little red-stemmed (?) moss has now yellow-green oval fruit hanging densely in the sod. Sweet-briar shoots two inches long; this one of the earlier roses to leaf. Put it with early rose. The Rubus triflorus up two inches or more. Put it next after raspberry for present. Polygonatum pubescens at Lee's, in three or four days. Amclanchier Botryapium on rocks, partly open; will probably shed pollen to-morrow. The long, narrow unfolded flower-buds, rose-pink without, are very pretty with the dark-purplish leaves, -- prettier than the open ones, -- like little cigarettes, to compare fair with foul. The dark-purple fruit-like fascicles of the staminate flowers of the ash on the rocks are now very remarkable, about the size of pignuts, and looking somewhat like them against the sky on the perfectly bare tree, or like dry alder scales or cones; will shed pollen in a day or two. Oftener one pedicelled anther and stamen than two together in the very minute calyx, -- if it is one. Young bass from seed an inch high, the two leaves remarkably cut. Returning by owl's nest, about one hour before sunset, I climbed up and looked in again. The before sunset, I climbed up and looked in again. The owl was gone, but there were four nearly found dirty brownish white eggs, quite warm, on nothing but the bits of rotten wood which made the bottom of the hole. The eggs were very nearly as large at one end as the other, slightly oblong, 1 3/8 inches by 1 2/8, as nearly as I could measure. I took out one. It would probably have hatched within a week, the young being considerably feathered and the bill remarkably developed. Perhaps she heard me coming, and so left the nest. My bird corresponds in color, as far as I saw it, with Wilson's Strix asio, but not his navia, which Nuttall and others consider a young (?) bird, though the egg was not pure white. I do not remember that my bird was barred or mottled at all. Nuttall says, Little Screech-Owl: Greenland to Florida; chiefly prey on mice; also small birds, beetles, crickets, etc.; nest in May and June, and lined with etc., etc., eggs four to six; several bluebirds, blackbirds, and song sparrows in one. In cloudy weather come out earlier. Wilson's thrush attacked one. Note in autumn, _ã-ho, ho ho ho ho ho ho, preceeding from high and clear to a low guttural shake or trill._ãù Was not that an owl's feather which I found half a mile beyond, downy more than half, and with base and separate white points beyond a dark band at the end? Was not mine a bird of last year? But MacGillivray says of owls that the young differ very little from the old; _ã-the older the individual becomes, the more simple is the colouring; the dark markings diminish in extend, and the finer mottlings are gradually obliterated._ãù Rhus Toxicodendron under rocks leafs."
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