1891
April 6
No 5
  Mass.
Concord. the oak at over the goldfinches singing
most deliciously - medley singing most of the time
but once or twice the real summer song from
an old male.
  After lunch wandered over the fields, seeing a
fine old male Marsh Hawk, then retraced our
steps and passing the [?] hill visited the
large field to the S. W. Here we found a
flock of fully 100 sparrows, containing about
fifty juncos, thirty Fox sparrows, the remainder
Song sparrows. They were feeding among weeds & 
on seeing us flew into the birches just over the
wall the fox Sparrows [?] Beginning to sing
The juncos warbling the usual low accompanying wind.
We watched them for a long time and when they
returned to the field, crept up behind the wall
and studied their [delete]feeding[/delete] manner of feeding under
unusually favorable conditions for we had
many of them within a few yards of us.
  The row back to town, across the flooded
meadow the first part of the way, afterwards
in the channel of the river against a swift
current, was marked by only one episode of
unusual interest [?] the sight of a pair of
Muskrats copulating. They were in the water several 
feet in depth but among the stems of a cluster 
of young maples on which the female obtained a
foothold part of the time but much of the time
she was swimming or nearly quite submerged
by the might of the male. There were three periods
of contact each lasting several minutes. One or both
animals uttered almost [?] the love intimacy [?]
[?] [?] this species.