164 On the trail of vanishing birds 



Tapion, myself, the captain, whose name was Alejo, and a grin- 

 ning assistant whose name wasn't mentioned. In a good-sized 

 skiff propelled by a 10-h.p. outboard, we headed out across the 

 bay toward the river mouth. The name Tapion may come from 

 the verb tapiar, "to block up," for we soon came upon narrow 

 places in this tidal stream where sticks formed a sort of crude 

 stop net to keep fish from getting out during low water. In other 

 respects as well, the Tapion is much like the rivers of southwest 

 Florida. The shores are lined with a dense growth of red mangrove 

 that becomes narrower upstream until, with the channel barely 

 wide enough for our boat, the tangle forms a solid roof overhead. 



The tide was ebbing rapidly. Off in the northeast we could hear 

 thunder, and shortly after one o'clock, when we were well up to- 

 ward the head of the river, it began to rain. We had seen one 

 roseate spoonbill, a yellow-billed egret, a green heron, and a few 

 white ibises. With our motor stopped by the soft mud, we poled 

 on until we could go no farther. In a mangrove maze we found 

 a small colony of tricolored herons, little blue herons, and egrets, 

 with young just newly hatched. Suddenly, hearing something 

 above the chatter of the heronry, Alejo raised a hand for silence. 

 Pointing off toward the far bank, he whispered, "Flamencos!" 

 Climbing through the mangrove in that direction we came out at 

 length into a long open mud flat. There were legions of fiddler 

 crabs, the males with enormous claws. At the far end of the flat 

 we came into a weird-looking area of black mud and hundreds 

 of dead mangrove stubs. In this rather dismal setting we counted 

 some sixty flamingos, moving about in small groups and feeding. 

 With them were numbers of willets, stilts, herons, egrets, and 

 roseate spoonbills. Food supplies seemed to consist of an abun- 

 dance of algae, countless aquatic insects, a few mollusks, and at 

 least one variety of killifish. Alejo volunteered the interesting in- 

 formation that the flamencos didn't nest here but came over from 

 Florida! It is likely that they actually come from the big colony 

 on Inagua, which lies only some 60 miles due north of lie de la 

 Tortue on the nearby Haitian coast. 



Finding no more flamingos or rumors of flamingos on the north 

 coast, I moved on to Barahona, on Bahia de Neiba to the south, 



