21 November: Rather bright sky. In the morning at seven thirty, temperature of -5 3/4°R [19.1°F, -7.2°C]. Mr. Say visited us and gave me a bottle of amphibians. Our tame parakeet seems to be holding up and healing. At midday, 6°R [45.5°F, 7.5°C] in the sunshine (at one o’clock). In the afternoon during my stroll with Mr. Say, I shot a Picus varius in Mr. Maclure’s orchard, an interesting specimen now molting, the head of which was already red, with individual red feathers on its throat. In the meadow along the Wabash, we found among a tangle of the many trunks that had floated down here a domestic pig that was just consuming its dead piglets. It had farrowed too late, and the piglets were scarcely several days old. Consequently, four of them had certainly died of cold, for in this country people do not concern themselves about the livestock. Two lairs that we found had probably been occupied by the pig for several nights. In each of them, there were dead piglets, and the mother was just eating them. The remaining three young ones were stiff from the cold. I picked up one of them, but it squealed and the mother left her dismal repast to run to the aid of her young one, whereupon I let it go.

We saw no additional birds, except for gray-and-white finches (Fringilla hudsonia), which were at the edge of the cornfields. On one of the lower branches of a tree, we found the cocoon, surrounded with a firm, paperlike mass, of that beautiful big nocturnal moth Bombyx Cidonia cecropia Fabr. It has approximately this shape [see fig. 5.5] and is 4 to 5 inches long. Mr. Say took it with him to raise the young larvae. M29Probably Illustrated in Cramer’s Schmetterlinge, also perhaps [in] Hübner’s Ausländische Schmetterlinge.