Bird Life Big Cypress Swamp Region 



89 



Next morning as the first light of dawn tinged the eastern 

 sky a pair of Sandhill Cranes began whooping on a little 

 pond scarcely a quarter of a mile away, an old Turkey 

 Gobbler struck up his mating call down the open glade that 

 lay between us and the cypress swamp, the thousands of 

 young Wood Ibis and other nestlings set up their insistent 

 clamor for food, which did not hush nor diminish until the 

 sun was high in the heavens, and then I realized that here 



nest and eggs of white ibis 



Photo by O. E. Baynard 



was nature at first hand and that opportunities awaited me 

 that do not come to every ornithologist. 



I passed several very pleasant and profitable days with 

 Green, and perhaps a few words in description of this splen- 

 did rookery, known as the Corkscrew among the plume 

 hunters of South Florida, will not be amiss. In form it is a 

 great ellipse of cypress swamp enclosing an open treeless 

 area some three miles long and a mile or more in width, 

 covered with saw grass and other swamp grasses. The 

 encircling band of cypress varies in width from about one- 



