° 1915 J Kennard, On the Trail of the Ivory-bill. 13 



recently swallowed snake three feet long and about two inches in 

 diameter, and another partially digested, eighteen inches long, and 

 about one and a quarter inches in diameter. 



We stayed at Van Agnew's until the 10th, replenishing our 

 water and grapefruit supplies, hunting turkeys etc., and, of course, 

 always on the outlook for a glimpse of an Ivory-bill. 



On March 10th we moved north to our first camping ground in 

 the Big Cypress where we stayed for two days, hunting turkey 

 hens of which we had hitherto secured but few good specimens. 

 We had killed only gobblers at first thinking that we could get the 

 hens at any time, but as the hens were now taking to the woods for 

 their nesting season good specimens had not been so easy to secure. 



The next day, while Tom was again hunting hens, Peter and 

 I explored the nearby strand of the big swamp in a last hunt for 

 the elusive Ivory-bill but without success. Red-bellied Wood- 

 peckers were breeding and in the woods only a little way from 

 camp a Pileated Woodpecker was sitting on a nest, about seventy- 

 five feet up in the top of a tall cypress. The nest was evidently 

 very shallow, for the bird, a male, invariably sat with his head out 

 of the window apparently examining the surroundings. One 

 Florida Red-shouldered Hawk's nest that we investigated, con- 

 tained a day old chick and one pipped egg. 



On Friday the 13th of March, we broke camp, and after crossing 

 the main strand of the swamp, in which the waters had now sub- 

 sided considerably, said goodby to the Big Cypress and its many 

 attractions. 



In my early youth I had had a geography in which was a picture, 

 supposedly of the Big Cypress Swamp, with an Indian magni- 

 ficently gotten up in war paint, feathers, etc., just stepping 

 into a birch bark canoe from a wooded bank. That picture, which 

 at the time made a great impression on me, might have been fairly 

 accurate except for the fact that the Seminoles neither wear war 

 paint nor feathers, do not build birch bark canoes, and there are 

 no wooded banks in the Big Cypress. The few Indians that we 

 saw were much better dressed than I. Their canoes are long, 

 very graceful dugouts, made from cypress logs. 



The region known as the Big Cypress covers a large area, extend- 

 ing in a generally northeasterly direction from near the gulf coast to 

 a point a few miles southeast of Immokalee, and is very different 



