174 



BAHAMA BIRD-LIFE 



roar of wings and clanging of horns, they passed overhead, 

 turned, and on set wings again shot back to the lagoon. 



On every one of the hundreds of occasions when, in 

 fancy, I had entered a city of Flamingos, I had devised 

 some plan for a place of concealment from which the birds 

 might be observed and photographed. Should the} r occupy 



A Composite Picture of Blind and Flamingo City 



a site on a flat far from vegetation, similar to that of the 

 abandoned rookery visited iu 1902, 1 had proposed to sink a 

 barrel in the marl, fringing it about with small mangroves ; 

 but should the growth be near enough,! had decided to place 

 my umbrella-blind in the bushes. But the sight of the birds 

 over the swash, as we landed, had banished from my mind 

 every thought but the desire to know whether they were 

 nesting; the blind was forgotten, an 1 fearing now to keep 

 them too long from their homes, I erected around a small 

 bush, some thirty feet from the border of the rookery, a 

 shield of branches behind which the blind might be placed 

 the following day. 



We now returned to the boats, seeing, with immense sat- 



