CONCORD 
1901 
October 11 
# 
There was a dense fog this morning. It had not begun 
to lift at 8 A, M, when I started down river in the open 
canoe, but when I reached Pad Island I could make out the 
line of woods that bordered the meadow all the way from 
Ball's Hill to Davis’s Hill. The trees looked immensely 
tall and the shore wholly unfamiliar. The maples appeared 
like pillars of flame obscured by smoke. A Dipper was 
floating on the glassy water and Jays were screaming in the 
distance. 
As I passed Davis’s Hill, I saw four or five small 
birds in the top of a tall birch, hopping and flitting about 
among the terminal twigs. They acted so very like 7/arblers 
that i was surprised,on approaching nearer,to find that they 
were all White-throated Sparrows. The birches are infested 
with immense numbers of small greenish insects (mealy bugs”, 
Mrs. John Thayer tells me Claries Sargent calls them) and 
the Sparrows were apparently eating them, I get simply 
covered with them every time I pass through a thicket of 
birches for they shake down in diowers whenever the stems 
are jolted, 
I have never before seen Swamp Sparrows so 
numerous along Concord River as they were this morning, I 
could hear them chirping in the grass in every direction 
and I saw a dozen or more flying from place to place or 
perched on the taller reeds. 
/r 
