1892
Aug. 28
Concord, Massachusetts.
[margin]Ball's Hill.[/margin]
Mass.
Concord.- A cool gray day the sun obscured most of the time
by clouds, the air remarkably clear, the light on the woods
and meadows beautifully soft yet strong defining distant
objects with unusual clearness. No wind.

  Down river with C. in P.M. landing at Ball's Hill for
an hour or more and paddling slowly homeward in
the late afternoon.

  Birds have become wholly songless and seem to be getting
scarcer every day. Probably seventy five per cent at least of
our summer residents have departed and there has been as yet
no marked influx from the north, at least of such
species as tarry with us. I hear migrants passing overhead
every clear night but most of them must pass on
without stopping for our woods and fields seem well-nigh
deserted.
[margin]Birds silent
& scarce.[/margin]

  A Kingfisher, flitting from tree to tree as we advanced,
a few Barn & White-bellied Swallows with several Swifts,
lingering about Beaver Dam rapids, ten or a dozen Red-wings
gleaning the last of the wild rice on the island below the
tent, Phoebees perched on dead branches over the water, a
Carolina Dove which alighted in the field north of Hunts Pond,
a flock of fully 100 Bobolinks drifting back and forth over
the Great Meadows like a cloud of smoke driven by the wind,
ragged, silent Song Sparrows in the button bushes, a brace
of Orioles chattering in a white maple, and four young
Purple Martins flying about at evening over the river &
meadows near the Y. tree — these, with three King Birds, and
five Chickadees, two Chestnut-sided Warblers and a Parula congregated
in the birches in front of my cabin made up the sum total to-day.
[margin]Species &
individuals
seen to-day.[/margin]
[margin]Bobolinks[/margin]