The Clerk of the Woods

I should like to know how common it is for blackpolls to sing on their southward migration. Eleven years ago, in September, 1889, they came very early,--or I had the good fortun...

In sober truth I have been scrupulously careful of the birds’ feelings; or, if not of their feelings, at least of their safety. I began, indeed, by being almost ludicrously care...

What a long procession of things and events have gone by us and been forgotten. Almost we have forgotten our own childish names, it is so many years since any one called us by t...

Apple trees were loaded; hollyhocks, marigolds, and even tender cannas and dahlias, still brightened the gardens (so much for being near the sea, even on the North Shore), but w...

I have fancied, all winter, that the birds--these two nuthatches, I mean--were mated, seeing them so often together; and perhaps they are; but the other day I witnessed a little...

On the same day I heard of a servant who hastened into the sitting-room to say to her mistress, “Oh, Mrs. ----! there’s a little bird out in the hedge singing to beat the band.”...

A few steps more, and a larger bird stirred amid the short marsh herbage beyond the muddy flat--a black-bellied plover, or “beetle-head.” He also must be disabled, I thought, to...

Now I turn the corner, leaving the farms behind, and as I do so I bethink myself of a bed of yellow galium just beyond. It ought to be in blossom. And so it is--the prettiest si...

Next comes a dry, homely, crooked, blackish, dead-looking twig, the slender divisions of which are tipped with short clusters of very fine purplish buds, rich in color, but so s...

I recall at this moment the bitterly cold day when one of our number skated into an airhole on Whitman’s Pond. It was during the noon recess. His home was a mile or more east of...

The chapters of this book were written week by week for simultaneous publication in the “Evening Transcript” of Boston and the “Mail and Express” of New York, and were intended...

In all my tramping over eastern Massachusetts I have met with two foxes. One I saw for perhaps the tenth part of a second, the other for perhaps two or three seconds. And probab...