Page:Summer - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/238

pretty firmly matted together. How common and important a material is grape-vine bark for birds' nests! Nature wastes nothing. There were white droppings of the young on the nest, and one large pellet of fur and small bones two and a half inches long. In the meanwhile the old bird was uttering that hoarse, worried note from time to time, somewhat like a partridge's, flying past from side to side, and alighting amid the trees or bushes. When I had descended, I detected one young one, two thirds grown, perched on a branch of the next tree about fifteen feet from the ground, which was all the while staring at me with its great yellow eyes. It was gray, with gray horns and a dark beak. As I walked past near it, it turned its head steadily, always facing me, without moving its body, till it looked directly the opposite way over its back, but never offered to fly. Just then, I thought surely that I heard a puppy faintly barking at me four or five rods distant amid the bushes, having tracked me into the swamp, what-what, what-what-what. It was exactly such a noise as the barking of a very small dog or perhaps a fox. But it was the old owl, for I presently saw her making it. . . . She was generally reddish brown or partridge-colored, the breast mottled with dark brown and fawn color . . . and had plain fawn-colored thighs.