6 Kennard, On the Trail of the Ivory-bill. [ Jan . 



located accurately, and then when it is sufficiently dark, creep up 

 with infinite pains to some spot where you can shoot him in the 

 head. It is hardly believable to one who has not tried to locate him 

 how inconspicuous a very large old gobbler may be while sitting in 

 perfectly plain sight, on the limb of a big old pine. My objection 

 to this method of hunting is that when a large bird like a gobbler, 

 weighing fifteen to eighteen pounds, falls seventy-five feet or so 

 from the top of a tall tree he is likely to damage his plumage by 

 striking the limbs and be ruined as a specimen. 



"Still hunting" hardly needs a description further than to say 

 that one must know something of the habits of the birds and their 

 daily haunts, and remember that a turkey's eyes are extremely 

 sharp, and that it can run like a deer. There was one enormous 

 old gobbler that I particularly wanted to bring home to an unbe- 

 lieving friend of mine, and I laid for him on several occasions. 

 I knew almost exactly where to find him at a certain hour in 

 the afternoon, and would approach this particular hammock as 

 stealthily as possible, only to be rewarded each time by seeing 

 him scooting across the prairie to a neighboring swamp. Once, 

 and only once, I chased him. He never seemed really to hurry 

 and disdained taking to his wings. We named this particular place 

 "the quarter mile run"; and yet I have on several occasions 

 walked almost onto an old gobbler "a-droning" in the middle of 

 the trail. 



The turkeys of this region are reputedly the smallest of the 

 Florida subspecies; the hens that we shot weighing from five and 

 three quarters to eight and a half pounds, but old hens, I am told, 

 frequently weigh as much as ten pounds or more and I know of one 

 big one that weighed eleven pounds. The young gobblers that we 

 shot weighed from eight and a half to ten pounds, and I am in- 

 formed, frequently weigh as much as twelve, or even in extreme 

 cases, fourteen pounds. The old gobblers that we collected on 

 this trip, and we did not kill any very large ones, weighed from 

 fifteen to eighteen pounds, but I know of Big Cypress gobblers 

 that have been weighed by friends of mine whose evidence is un- 

 questionable, that weighed twenty-two, twenty-three, and in one 

 extreme case, twenty-five pounds. 



On the afternoon of February 19 we broke camp for a hammock 



