352 COCCYGUS MINOR. 



The floating debris becomes entangled in this labyrinth of trunks and, decaying, forms- 

 soil which accumulating with incredible rapidity, soon becomes dry land. When the wa- 

 ter no longer flows about them, the mangroves die, only to be replaced by other trees a- 

 mong the most noticeable of which are the button wood. Thus island after island is be- 

 ing formed along the entire extent of the Florida Reef and so quickly do they spring up 

 that spongers who lived at Key West, pointed out to me keys of considerable size which 

 occupy spots that when they were boys, were nothing but the water-covered tops of coral 

 reefs. 



Such, in brief, is the history of the mangrove, a tree which is so intimately connected 

 with the name, and in fact with the lives, of the Cuckoos which we have under considera- 

 tion, for it is in the foliage of these trees or in the thickets near them that they pass their 

 existence. The first and only living specimen that I ever saw of this species was on Bam- 

 boo Key which I have described on page 176. This was during the first week in May, 

 1871. I was standing, near a thicket when I observed a Cuckoo very near me which at 

 first sight I thought was a Yellow-bill, but something in its appearance, what, I cannot 

 now tell, caused me to look at it more closely when it at once flashed across my mind that 

 it was a bird for which I had hitherto been looking in vain, and that a specimen of the 

 Mangrove Cuckoo was before me. I had left my gun leaning against the wrecker's shan- 

 ty, only a few steps away, but although I traversed that space twice in much quicker time 

 than it takes to write these lines and stood with my thumb on the hammer of my gun in the 

 exact spot that I had occupied a moment before, I could not find the bird nor did I ever 

 see it again, although I searched carefully every square rod of the Key. Three years later, 

 the members of one of my expeditions obtained one at Key West on the twenty-first of 

 May but did not find another although they searched diligently for them. According to 

 their description, the bird which they obtained was very wary, being shot on the wing as it 

 darted out of a mangrove thicket and, as the one which I saw was far from being unsus- 

 picious, I judge that these Cuckoos are quite shy, probably keeping well hidden in the 

 dense thickets. I do not think that they are particularly common or I should have seen 

 more of them but, without doubt, they are of regular occurrence among the Keys and I have 

 reasons for believing that they are occasionally found along the East Coast of Florida, at 

 least, as far north as Cape Cannarveral. They breed on the Keys but migrate early as I 

 saw none in the autumn. 



