White Ibises in *‘ Flight-Line”’ for Rookery. 
IN THE CAPE SABLE WILDERNESS * 
By HERBERT K. JOB 
’ 
PHOTOGRAPHS BY THE AUTHOR 
bracing northerly wind, the 26th of 
April, when we shoved the tender 
over the slippery “soap-flat,” and stood 
upon the shore of the southernmost main- 
land in the United States. An almost un- 
broken wilderness lay before us, with all 
its interesting possibilities. A handful of 
settlers had taken up government claims 
along the shore, and built their rude cot- 
tages or curious palmetto shacks. Back 
from the strip of timber along the water’s 
edge is a moderate area of marshy prairie 
which is flooded in the summer rainy sea- 
son. Aside from this, all the Cape Sable 
peninsula is a wild, tangled, pathless man- 
grove swamp, extending back a number 
ie was a cool, sparkling morning with a 
* This is the second of a series of articles by Mr. 
Job, illustrated by photographs he made during a 
recent trip taken especially for OuTiNG into this great 
untraveled swamp land. 
of miles to the open saw-grass. marshes of 
the Everglades. In the embraces of this 
swamp lie a series of shallow lakes with 
muddy bottoms, connected by various 
channels through the thickets, and more 
or less overflowed by the sea, especially 
when strong on-shore winds heap up the 
waters into the shallow bays. The whole 
region is as flat as a floor, and hardly 
above the level of the sea. 
The first lake we visited after an ardu- 
ous tramp over mangrove roots and. 
through the jungle was a mile long, with 
densely wooded shores, a mere layer of 
water over a bed of mud of the consist- 
ency of molasses. Up near the further 
end we could see an islet with a lot of 
snow-white birds roosting on the trees, 
and, as we neared, I saw that they were 
the great wood ibis—technically, a stork 
