16 WILD WINGS 



About two weeks later I made the trip again with another 

 friend who had joined us. This time the day was perfect, 

 with a fair wind both ways, and nothing could have been 

 more comfortable and enjoyable. Upon our return, our 

 boarding-mistress, Mrs. Latham, entertained us with her 

 accounts of how she secured some live pelicans for the Bronx 

 Park (New York) aviary. She sat among the nests on dark 

 nights covered with brush and stubble, and, when the birds 

 finally gathered around her, seized one of them by the neck 

 and reduced the flapping thing to subjection. 



The year following my visit, Pelican Island was set apart 

 by President Roosevelt as a government reservation for the 

 propagation of wild native birds. Warning notices were 

 posted and a warden empowered to prevent people from 

 landing. Here these pelicans had always nested within the 

 memory of man, subject to all manner of cruel persecutions, 

 from which now they were to be ever freed, as long as they 

 should repair to this sanctuary. Unfortunately the govern- 

 ment made no appropriation to instruct the pelicans in read- 

 ing, for the next spring, harassed by an early high tide, they 

 forsook the abodes of their fathers and nested upon some 

 adjoining islands. One day I told the President how the 

 Indian River pelicans, citizens of the State of Florida, had 

 refused to submit to the national ordinances. With a merry 

 twinkle in his eye, and an amused smile, he exclaimed, "The 

 provoking things ! " Mighty are the wild, free children of 

 Nature ! We could exterminate them, to be sure, but yet not 

 all the rulers and governments and armaments upon earth 

 could compel that band of pelicans to breed where they did 

 not take a notion to. Since then, having vindicated their 

 right to independence, they have returned and placed them- 

 selves under Federal protection. 



I also found that the experiences of the Indian River had 



