RED FLAMINGO. 391 



and breeding. The congregated flocks of the neigh- 

 bouring islands disperse themselves; and stragglers 

 appear upon the sand-bars at the mouths of our 

 rivers, occasionally, in seasons remarkable for visits 

 of the Hyperborean and the Canada Goose. We 

 are best acquainted with them as inhabitants of 

 Cuba. The waters between the thinly peopled 

 shores of that island, and the clustered green kays 

 of the coast, to which Columbus gave the names of 

 the Gardens of the King and Queen, are low and 

 shoaly. In these shallow seas, in adjacent swamps, 

 in river-lakes, in marshes and lagoons, and salina- 

 ponds, they are to be always seen moving in flocks, 

 or flying and feeding in ranks of two and three hun- 

 dred together. Their lengthened lines and red 

 plumage have led the colonial Spaniards to call them 

 English soldiers, a name not inappropriate to birds 

 that marshal themselves under a leader, and regulate 

 their movements by signals, when the remotest dan- 

 ger threatens; and obey the bugle-blast of their 

 sentinel, when he summons the cohorts to the wing, 

 and to betake themselves to other feeding-grounds. 



" I visited the district of Boyamo on the south 

 side of Cuba in the year 1821, and was on the 

 coast from January to April. I was much among 

 the marshes and swamps about the river Conta, a 

 stream that receives the tidal waters, which here 

 rise and fall six or seven feet, at fifty miles along 

 its course. At the mouth of this river there are 

 long stretches of shoal ground, where the floods of 

 the river and the sea form lakelets, and successively 

 deposit their stores of living atoms, with the rising 



