192 
NATURE STUDY. 
One Morning in Florida. 
BY A PINFUATHUR ORNITHOROGIST. 
On the 28th of February we astonished the driver of our 
thin, hired horses by telling him that we did not care to be 
driven by the oldest house in America, nor yet to Fort 
Marion and the Slave Market, but that we wanted to go to 
a place where we could see birds. St. Augustine offers so 
much of historic interest to the tourist that Joe needed a 
good deal of talking to before he said he “reckoned Kerr’s 
Island ’ud be the place.” So to Kerr’s Island we went b}^ 
way of a live oak wood hung with Spanish moss. 
Black and turkey vultures were dreamily circling in the 
brilliant blue sky, blue as Italy’s it seemed to me. The 
cardinals, male and female, were whistling “whit ts er” re¬ 
peatedly from bush to bush and kindly allowing us to ap¬ 
proach within satisfying distance. A white throated spar¬ 
row, some song sparrows, silent but fairly tame, and a 
phoebe,called “bee biddy” by Joe, and a red winged black 
bird greeted our sight as we emerged from the wood out on 
to the marshes. Those marshes! Acres and acres of them 
stretched away on every hand, and through them wound 
narrow, tortuous arms from the bay, which at low tide left 
mud flats exposed, dear to the stomachs of many waders. 
A marsh hawk-was flying over the sedges in low, wide 
circles, great blue herons stood patiently fishing in mid¬ 
stream, and far to the left, looking like a white post in the 
reeds, was the American Egret, a bird some forty odd inch¬ 
es long and who seemed to stand three feet and a half high, 
a beautiful, snowy creature all too rare in Florida now, 
thanks to the man with the gun. We saw three of these 
birds there that morning, and none anywhere else in Flor¬ 
ida, though we walked far and wide in hope of finding them 
again. Kerr’s Island being private grounds where no shoot¬ 
ing had been allowed for a period of years, the egret was 
