From Cheney’s boat-house I hear very distinctly the tapping of a woodpecker at the Island about a quarter of a mile . . .

  P.M.—To early willow behind Martial Miles’s . . . On the railroad I hear the telegraph . . . Under the south side of Clamshell Hill, in the sun, the air is filled with those black fuzzy gnats and I hear a fine hum from them . . . Walking along near the edge of the meadow under Lupine Hill, I slumped through the sod into a muskrat’s nest, for the sod was only two inch thick over it, which was enough when it was frozen . . . A wood tortoise in Nut Meadow Brook . . . Dugan tells me that three otter were dug out the past winter in Deacon Farrar’s wood-lot, side of the swamp, by Powers and Willis of Sudbury. He has himself seen one in the Second Division woods. He saw two pigeons to-day. Prated[sic] for them; they came near and then flew away. He saw a woodchuck yesterday . . . Dugan wished to get some guinea-hens to keep off the hawks.