1889
June 27
Ashby, Massachusetts.
  Morning cloudy with heavy showers; afternoon
clear with driving clouds. We started for mt. Wat-
atic at 11 o'clock in the forenoon. Reaching
Woodard's we again put up our horse there,
and took lunch behind the house. Faxon then
started down into the valley to the south at
the base of the mountain where, as I afterwards
learned, he found kinglets, Blackburnian War-
blers and Black and Yellow Warblers singing
in a spruce swamp. He then skirted the
mountain on the south-west side, meeting
me late in the afternoon on the western side.
My route was up through the open pastures into
the spruce pastures where I found, in addition to
the birds observed yesterday, a Red Crossbill. I
then kept on into the heavy spruce forest
where we heard the Kinglets singing yesterday,
and [delete]I[/delete] continued around the mountain side to
find that this tract of heavy timber extended
for five or six hundred yards. The trees were
mainly black spruces with a great many hem-
locks and a few balsams. There were also scat-
tered ashes, red maples, mountain maples, red
oaks, yellow and paper birches, and a few strag-
gling and stunted white pines. The mountain
side was very steep and rocky, the ground
covered with moss and the rocks [delete]covered[/delete] with
moss and rock[delete]y[/delete] ferns. The spruces varied from
thirty to seventy-five feet in height and
were slender, well-proportioned trees, growing
thickly together. Some of the larger ones