17 The spoonbill comes into its own 



searches for insects and a yellowthroat chatters amiably. But with 

 darkness the mangrove seems to spring to life. Close to my tent 

 a clapper rail unleashes his mad, yammering call and immediately 

 three or four of his kind echo the sound. In that silent, lonely spot 

 the clatter is wild, insane. 



As the darkness deepens the waters crawl and churn. Tiny 

 fishes stir the mud with little spirals that look like small clouds of 

 thick, brown smoke. Crabs race sidewise, careening. Large fish, 

 wraithlike in the beam of the flashlight, swim closer menacingly. 

 Mollusks, as small as one's little fingernail, move by fractions of 

 inches, some in straight lines, others whirling into the muddy film 

 and engulfing smaller creatures with ponderous rapidity. The 

 empty shells of dead mollusks race dizzily across the mud on the 

 backs of hermit crabs. 



On a warm, still night the movement of many hundreds of 

 tiny fish is a sound as large as that of surf on a shoreline. Some- 

 times at night, listening, I would imagine that Teleoceras, the 

 extinct rhino of Florida, had survived in this unvisited solitude 

 and was now feeding along the edge of the flat inside the key. 

 But it was always the hosts of tiny fish, none of them longer than 

 an inch and a half! 



In this atmosphere the cautious, truth-seeking naturalist must 

 constantly sit back, clear his throat (and his head!), and start in 

 afresh. He must destroy illusions, hog-tie his imagination, and 

 scratch away at facts. If he can find any! In the marl and the man- 

 grove they have a way of hiding, and their silence is that of the 

 ages. 



The fish that live in the mud are one of the common every- 

 day items that were utterly obscure to me at first but that grew 

 in importance and numbers in a gradual sort of way. I first found 

 the fish in the bottom film of the pools of water, some three 

 inches deep, far inside the outer rim of the key. Pneumatophores, 

 the breathers of the black mangrove, dot the surface of these 

 areas, and I was unable to drag an ordinary seine net through 

 them. But I found little schools of miniature fish darting among 

 the beds of quills, and by the careful use of a small dip net I 

 eventually captured several specimens. Still uninformed as to the 



