‘“Now they begin to rise.” 
very unpromising for agriculture; but the 
profusion of all sorts of tropical fruits was 
convincing and delightful. Potatoes are 
dug, they say, with crow-bars instead of 
shovels. 
Having now plenty of provisions, fruit 
galore, and a fine mess of craw-fish, we 
proceded to explore many of the inner 
keys. On most of them there were no 
resident water birds, save a few herons. 
On one large key, along the shores of two 
salt lakes in its interior, we found least 
terns, Wilson’s plovers, and black-necked 
stilts, breeding, and a colony of laughing 
gulls about todoso. The migration of the 
shore-birds was interesting, and I found 
the best opportunities for photographing 
them that I had ever met. 
Despite all our efforts thus far, we had 
not found the man-o’-war birds actually 
breeding. So one day we were more than 
glad to anchor near a small key to which 
the guide said thousands of these great 
birds constantly resorted. It was back 
under Key Largo, farther up the sound 
than we had yet been. We reached there 
just before sunset, and at once I started 
out in the tender, the other ornithologists 
deciding to wait till morning. As the 
guide rowed me through a narrow passage 
in the mangroves, a break in a long pe- 
ninsula, there lay before us the little round 
green islet. First of all some cormorants 
flew from a mangrove clump out in the 
water. Then, as we approached within long 
gunshot of the island, began a wonderful 
scene. A few man-o’-war birds had been 
visible, alighting on the trees, or flying 
.about; now they began to rise in scores, 
in hundreds, and then in thousands. When 
one realizes that these birds measure near- 
ly seven feet in extent of wing, it will give 
a better idea of the imposing spectacle be- 
fore us. ‘The area of the island was hard- 
ly an acre, and it seemed incredible that so 
many of the great birds could have found 
footing in the trees, or that anything short 
of the toughness of the red mangrove 
wood could sustain them all. I secured 
a picture of them as they began to rise 
from the island, and then a number more 
as they soared overhead, fairly covering 
the sky. One only had to point a camera 
upward almost anywhere and snap to get 
a plate full of gracefully soaring birds. 
After a few moments the cloud gradually 
drifted away, to hover for hours over a dis- 
tant key. 
