Te Following Audubon among the Florida Keys 
silastic one on the borders of this land of 
promise, harassed though they were by 
mosquitoes and by troops of horrible-look- 
ing cockroaches, each two inches long— 
with which boats in this region are in- 
fested, as well as with scorpions. 
Early the next morning we sailed out 
through the coral reef into the open sea to 
cruise outside the keys further westward, 
since the Maggie, drawing four feet of 
water, was too deep for the flats of Card’s 
and Barnes’ Sounds. ‘The ever-wonderful 
migration of the birds was now at its 
height, and thousands of little land-birds 
were making their long, weary flight from 
the West Indies, or even farther, across 
the sea to our shores. Even with Florida 
in sight, those last two miles often proved 
heart-breaking. ‘The tired little creatures 
often would alight on our spars, or even 
on deck, sometimes allowing us to take 
them in our hands. One such wasa male 
bobolink, in a curious mottled transition 
stage of plumage. Another male bobo- 
link tried to alight on the end of the boom, 
but was too much exhausted to gain a 
footing, and fell into the water, where he 
lay struggling pitifully, unable to rise. 
Thus, undoubtedly, do multitudes of the 
little migrants perish. Besides this kind 
we also identified water-thrushes, red- 
starts, and black-poll warblers. 
Toward evening we ran in to anchor 
under the lee of Indian Key, where Audu- 
bon, in 1832, began his famous entrance 
into Florida Bay, coming there on the 
U.S. revenue cutter Warion. Herehe was 
entertained by a resident customs col- 
lector, and with him made boating- trips 
among the keys. It was with absorbing i in- 
terest that I gazed upon and explored this 
beautiful tropical islet. Though I could 
not trace the great naturalist’s literal 
footsteps upon the littoral stretch of hard 
coral rock, I could recall his words of ad- 
miration at the beautiful little birds he saw 
flitting among the bushes—this very same 
time of year, it was—migrants that had 
happily escaped the dangers of the sea. 
And here, now, many warblers, thrushes, 
finches, dov es, and the like, were happy 
among the luxuriant growth of cocoanut 
palms, century-plants, and the thorny 
thickets—in which last the mother ground- 
doves were brooding young in their frail 
nests—as the evening shadows fell. When 
the sun rose, they were all jubilant with 
song. We drank milk from the green 
cocoanuts, rambled about and took pho- 
tographs, and talked with the old man, 
who, with his wife, represented the human 
population. The old fellow had never 
heard of Audubon, and cared more for 
the boat he was building than for an- 
tiquities. This island was the scene of 
an Indian massacre in the Seminole War, 
and later was occupied by an enterprising 
rascal who ran a drinking and gambling 
dive, which was resorted to by smugglers 
and outlaws. Shades of Audubon! 
Audubon narrates that, immediately 
landing on Indian Key, he was conducted 
by his host across to a neighboring key, 
where he and his party inspected a rook- 
ery of Florida cormorants. From his ac- 
count I should judge that this was Lower 
Metacombe Key, which we could see 
about a mile to the westward, a long, dark 
strip of mangroves some four miles long. 
We did not visit it, as the guide said that 
the cormorants did not resort there, but 
frequented some smaller islands further 
in the bay. So, hoping to happen upon 
the route of Audubon’s second-day excur- 
sion, which he made between 3 A.M. and 
dusk, to a key evidently some miles away, 
where he found the man-o’-war birds re- 
sorting and beginning to nest, we got 
under way about 8 A.M. Our course 
lay between Lower Metacombe and Lig- 
num Vite Keys, and on into the mazes of 
“soapy mud-flats,” or “soap-flats,” as 
Audubon called them. ‘The simile is an 
apt one, for the sticky, whitish clay mud 
has a very soapy appearance, and the tide 
running over the flats stirs up a whitish 
lather suggestive of soapy dish-water. 
Approaching some small flats marked 
on the chart as the “ Boot-leg Keys,” six 
or eight miles north of Indian Key, the 
schooner stuck hard and remained fast for 
the day. But it proved an interesting day, 
for noticing near-by keys we set forth with 
camera and note book, and rowed the ten- 
der as far as we could, dragging it the rest 
of the way over the slippery white “soap,” 
in which we sank half way to the knees. 
On the first island there were some twenty 
pairs of Louisiana herons nesting, and one 
pair of the red-bellied woodpecker. As 
we neared the second island I waded on 
ahead, camera in hand, ready for a snap- 
shot when the birds rose, and when I ap- 
peared around the end of the island great 
