Page:Summer - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/103

Rh barn swallow, with forked tail, about his barn, which was black, not rufous.

June 10, 1858 As we entered a rye field, I saw what I took to be a hawk fly up from the other end, though it may have been a crow. It was soon pursued by small birds. When I got there, I found an Emys insculpta on its back, with its head and feet drawn in and motionless, and what looked like the track of a crow on the sand. Undoubtedly the bird which I saw had been pecking at it, and perhaps they get many of their eggs.

June 10, 1859. Surveying

June 10, 1860. 2 To Anursnack There is much handsome interrupted fern in the Painted Cup Meadow, and near the top of one of the clumps we noticed something like a large cocoon, the color of the rusty cinnamon fern wool. It was a red bat, the New York bat, so-called. It hung suspended, head directly downward, with its little sharp claws or hooks caught through one of the divisions at the base of one of the pinnæ, above the fructification. It was a delicate rusty brown, in color very like the wool of the cinnamon fern, with the whiter bare spaces, seen through it early in the season. I thought at first glance it was a broad cocoon, then that it was the plump body of a monstrous emperor moth. It was rusty or reddish brown,