Page:Summer - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/97

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SUMMER.
87

about me, as if it had a nest there. This is a splendid and marked bird, high-colored as is the tanager, looking strange in this latitude. Glowing indigo. It flits from the top of one bush to another, chirping as if anxious. Wilson says it sings, not like most other birds, in the morning and evening chiefly, but also in the middle of the day. In this I notice it is like the tanager, the other fiery-plumaged bird. They seem to love the heat. It probably had its nest in one of these bushes.

I had said to P—— "It will be worth the while to look for other rare plants in Calla Swamp, for I have observed that where one rare plant grows, there will commonly be others." Carrying out that thought this p. m., I had not taken three steps at this swamp bare-legged, before I found the Naumburgia thyrsiflora in sphagnum and water, which I had not seen growing before. (C—— brought one to me from Hubbard's Great Meadow once.) It is hardly beginning yet. (In prime June 24th.)

June 9, 1860. 6 p. m. Paddle to Flint's Bridge. The water bugs begin to venture out on to the stream from the shadow of a dark wood, as at the Island. So soon as the dusk begins to settle on the river, they begin to steal out, and to extend their circling far amid the bushes and reeds over the channel of the river.