LOON 3 



off with my glass, but I could see no white on the breast. 

 It was all black and brownish, and head not enlarged. 

 Who knows how many little dippers are sailing and 

 sedulously diving now along the edge of the pickerel- 

 weed and the button-bushes on our river, unsuspected 

 by most? This hot September afternoon all may be 

 quiet amid the weeds, but the dipper, and the bittern, 

 and the yellow-legs, and the blue heron, and the rail are 

 silently feeding there. At length the walker who sits 

 meditating on a distant bank sees the little dipper sail 

 out from amid the weeds and busily dive for its food 

 along their edge. Yet ordinary eyes might range up and 

 down the river all day and never detect its small black 

 head above the water. 



[See also under General and Miscellaneous, pp. 417, 

 433.] 



LOON 



1845-47 (no exact date) . The loon comes in the fall 

 to sail and bathe in the pond, 1 making the woods ring 

 with its wild laughter in the early morning, at rumor of 

 whose arrival all Concord sportsmen are on the alert, 

 in gigs, on foot, two by two, three by three, with pa- 

 tent rifles, patches, conical balls, spy-glass or open hole 

 over the barrel. They seem already to hear the loon 

 laugh ; come rustling through the woods like October 

 leaves, these on this side, those on that, for the poor 

 loon cannot be omnipresent ; if he dive here, must come 



he has to say of this bird of September 9th will apply very well to the 

 pied-billed grebe, however, and the paragraph is placed here for want 

 of a better place.] 

 1 [Walden Pond.] 



