Our Common Birds and How to Know Them 
Thoreau had the faculty of quick and accurate observation to a most extraordinary 
degree. Emerson, in a biographical sketch of him, says: ‘‘He noted what repeatedly 
befell him, that after receiving from a distance a rare plant, he would presently find 
the same in his own haunts. And those pieces of luck which happen only to good 
players happened to him. One day, walking with a stranger who inquired where 
Indian arrow-heads could be found, he replied, ‘Everywhere,’ and, stooping forward, 
picked one on the instant from the ground. At Mt. Washington, in Tuckerman’s 
Ravine, Thoreau had a bad fall, and sprained his foot. As he was getting up from his 
fall, he saw for the first time the leaves of Arnica mollis.” 
Read in his journals how he chronicles the reddening of the maple buds, the first 
appearance of the skunk-cabbage, the earliest note of the tree-frog, the arrangement of the 
sand upon the rail-road embankments in tiny ridges caused by showers of rain. Nothing 
is too trivial to escape him, and there is nothing that does not secure the interest of his 
reader also When once pointed out and commented upon in his own happy manner. 
Not every one may hope to equal White or Thoreau. Few people have either their 
talent or the leisure for its exercise. But there are many, nevertheless, whose love of nature 
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