Log Search Results

  See many sparrows in flocks with a white feather in tail! The smooth sumach leaves are fast reddening. The berries of the dwarf sumach are not a brilliant crimson, but as yet, at least, a dull sort of dusty or mealy crimson. As they are later, so their leaves are more fresh and green than those of the smooth species. The acorns show now on the shrub oaks. A cool, white, autumnal evening.

  P.M.—To tortoise eggs, Marlborough road.

  Potentilla Norvegica again. I go over linnæa sproutlands. The panicled cornel berries are whitening, but already mostly fallen . . .

  I open the painted tortoise nest of June 10th, and find a young turtle partly out of his shell . He is roundish and the sternum clear uniform pink. The marks on the sides are pink. The upper shell is fifteen sixteenths of an inch plus by thirteen sixteenths. He is already wonderfully strong and precocious. Though those eyes never saw the light before, he watches me very warily, even at a distance. With what vigor he crawls out of the hole I have made, over opposing weeds! He struggles in my fingers with great strength . . .

  A cool day; wind northwest Need a half-thick coat. Thus gradually we withdraw into winter quarters. It is a clear, flashing air, and the shorn fields now look bright and yellowish and cool, tinkled and twittered over by bobolinks, goldfinches, sparrows, etc. . . .

  I saw a month or more ago where pine-needles which had fallen (old ones) stood erect on low leaves of the forest floor, having stuck in, or passed ass through, them. They stuck up as a fork which falls from the table. Yet you would not think that they fell with sufficient force . . .

  At first the sky was completely overcast, but, just before setting, the sun came out into a clear space in the horizon and fell on the east end of the pond and the hillside, and this sudden blaze of light on the still very fresh green leaves was a wonderful contrast with the previous and still surrounding darkness. Indeed, the bright sunlight was at this angle reflected from the water at the east end—while I in the middle was in the shade of the east woods—up under the verdure of the bushes and trees on the shore and on Pine Hill, especially to the tender under sides and to the lower leaves not often lit up. Thus a double amount of light fell on them, and the most vivid and varied shades of green were revealed. I never saw such a green glow before . . .

  At sunset the air over the pond is 62+; the water at the top, 74° . . .