1891
March 30
Mass.
Watertown & Belmont. - Starting at 8.30 A.M. I drove around
Mt. Auburn and Fresh Pond. The morning was 
delightful, cloudless, perfectly still, the air a trifle 
frosty but the sunshine warm. There is no snow in 
the fields and the grass is getting green on the lawns.
The roads are everywhere as dry and dusty as in
midsummer.
  Several Song Sparrows were singing among evergreens
in the southern end of Mt. Auburn and I heard
others at various places in bush heaps and
along bush-grown stone walls. Robins were 
generally distributed in the orchards but nowhere
numerous. Saw three Bluebirds, all males. The
country through which I passed was alive
with noisy, quarreling English Sparrows peeping
into holes of apple trees evidently looking for 
nesting places. I heard a Colaptes singing in
the beech and oak woods on Fresh Pond opposite
the hotel.
  Five or six houses have been built on the hill
behind the French place on the Coolidge farm
during the last year and this old haunt of
mine is ruined forever although the cedar belt
on the south slope remains intact. On the 
other side of the road the woods behind the
Catholic cemetery has been more than half cut
down this winter. Last year they removed
the greater part of the orchard between these 
woods and the road and cleared nearly the
whole of the ground occupied by the fine old
Arsenal woods.