16 On the trail of vanishing birds 



the mud and sat back, in mud and water to my armpits, exhausted. 

 Sweat streamed down my face, blinded my eyes. Tiny mosquitoes 

 stung me, and somehow I ignored them. 



Across my path I saw a broad trail, a fantastic trail. There in 

 the slime something as large as a Pleistocene lizard had crawled 

 only a little while before. Its wide belly had left a sickening swath 

 in the mud, wider than my two hands. And clawlike feet had 

 planted themselves on either side, with measured, inexorable regu- 

 larity. I knew, of course, that it was the trail of a crocodile, for a 

 remnant of that race remains in that lonely corner of Florida. I 

 peered into the silent wall of mangrove that fringed the pool, un- 

 able to see what lay just beyond and felt definitely unhappy be- 

 cause of it. 



Other trails crossed and recrossed the muddy surface. At the 

 end of some of the trails I found several slow, plodding, dia- 

 mondback terrapins. When I picked them up they blinked with- 

 out concern. Placed once more in the mud they barged on four 

 or five feet and then huddled in their shells. They seemed oblivi- 

 ous of me, of the time of day, or of anything whatever. 



The spoonbills hovered close overhead, and finally, with sudden 

 good fortune, I found a nest. It was a pile of large sticks seven 

 feet up in a red mangrove, and in it was a clutch of three dull- 

 white eggs, their shells etched and dotted with various shades of 

 brown and chestnut. I tagged the nesting tree and retreated, 

 awkward and uncomfortable, but repaid for my pains. 



This journey took place in the full sunlight of midmorning on 

 a clear, fairly calm winter's day. But picture it at night when the 

 mud disgorges creatures of myriad shapes and sizes! At the be- 

 ginning of my second season in Florida Bay I built a camp on 

 stilts, right over the marly flats at the south rim of a nearby key. 

 The camp itself was hemmed in by mangrove except for a narrow 

 entrance. Here I could study the feeding habits of the pink birds 

 "on location," and here, too, I could share with them the sheltered 

 habitat of mangrove by which they defeat the chill of winter 

 winds. 



By day it is a placid, almost uninteresting place. The milky 

 waters are apparently lifeless. In the mangrove a prairie warbler 



