158 On the trail of vanishing birds 



abandoning the keel boat in shoal water, found that we could 

 outdistance Montour in his "flamingo boat" by walking at a good 

 pace along the shorelines and wading the channels from cay to 

 cay. But of course Montour had to stop and bail every few 

 minutes. 



Once he caught up with us, late in the afternoon, I asked him 

 where he thought the flamingos might be. "Veil, sor," he replied 

 at once, "ve go in this bight here because my mind tell me the 

 fillamingo nesting somevere up there. My people tell me they al- 

 ways nest in sight of Israel Hill " And so on, for ten minutes. 



But when we returned to the Ramona at dark, tired and thirsty, 

 we had seen no flamingos. 



Next day we moved the big boat to Shallow Water Point, where 

 Montour showed us a well in the hard sand above the beach. It 

 contained water that was slightly brackish to the taste, but as we 

 were running short we filled all vessels and jars. At noon we 

 anchored again, this time off Thatch Point, and I went into The 

 Marls with Montour, who led me directly to the nesting site that 

 he had guarded a decade before. Nineteen of the old nest mounds 

 were still intact, though grown through with red mangrove shoots. 

 It was at this juncture that we saw the first flamingos, flying by 

 overhead on a westerly course. Montour danced for joy. As we 

 returned to the sloop late in the day, five flamingos flew over, 

 heading southwest. Young Rodney had caught a mess of mangrove 

 snappers while off exploring in another direction, and as we ate 

 these, which old Rodney had cooked over a lovely fire of button- 

 wood coals in the sandbox "stove" on deck, we argued the question 

 of where to continue our search the next morning. 



As it turned out, young Rodney and I elected to take the keel 

 boat up the long channel to the north of our anchorage, while 

 Montour insisted on paddling his craft into the easterly channel 

 known vaguely as Cherokee River. Both were good possibilities, 

 but it was Junior and I who found the flamingos. They were 

 nesting on a little islet of mud and sand not far beyond our 

 anchorage. As we moved up the channel we spotted a few adults 

 in the distance, partially hidden by the mangroves of an inter- 

 vening point of land. Poking along as cautiously as possible, we 



