Pte DWBON BULLETIN 
Published Quarterly by the 
ments Ase. bO Nis O.C LR TY 
2001 NoRTH CLARK STREET, CHICAGO 14, ILLINOIS 
Number 66 June, 1948 
Florida, the “Vanishing Eden” 
By JANET HULL ZIMMERMANN 
FLORIDA, “THAT VANISHING EDEN,” is still a bird lover’s paradise. But the 
rarer wild things have retreated farther and farther from the highways. 
The traveler whose time is limited, and who is more interested in egrets 
and spoonbills than he is in dog races, tropical night clubs, and bathing 
beauties, requires experienced leadership to find the delights that still await 
those who seek them. 
The National Audubon Society provides that leadership in its Wilder- 
ness Tours. I was already “sold” on the Society after two weeks at the 
Nature Camp in Maine last summer. I am more sold than ever after tak- 
ing the tours to Lake Okeechobee, and to the Everglades and Florida Bay. 
With Mrs. Amy Baldwin, one of the most skillful field observers in the 
Chicago Ornithological Society, I made the trip to Florida the middle of 
March. We left Chicago shivering in a temperature of one degree, and 
wasted no time in starting a list of train window observations. Mrs. 
Baldwin took one side of the car and I took the other, occupying various 
seats whose owners were in the observation car. Every time one of us 
shouted, the other scrambled over to the opposite side of the car. We 
explained early in the day to our startled fellow passengers that we were 
only mildly crazy, and that they could safely ignore us. 
Indiana was populated with myriads of crows, starlings, few flocks of 
dainty, bounding horned larks, and an occasional flicker, red-tailed and 
marsh hawk. Near the Ohio River we met our first grackles and mourning 
doves of the season. 
We woke up the second morning in the piney woods that le across the 
Georgia-Florida boundary. Our first American egrets appeared in the 
swamp water along the tracks. They rose heavily as the train roared past, 
and slipped into the darkness of the woods. As the woods and water with- 
drew from the tracks, off in the distance across the flat prairies we could 
see the white forms of birds. Were they American egrets, white ibis, or 
wood ibis? We couldn’t tell. The smaller birds could be snowy egrets or 
immature little blue herons, but we were unable to distinguish them at a 
distance. On the wires perched mockingbirds and shrikes. They are the 
same size, and both have white breasts. When we couldn’t see the black 
mask of the shrike we learned to distinguish them by the way they held 
their tails. The mocker seemed to wobble uncertainly, and wave his tail 
back and forth to keep in balance on the wire; the shrike held his tail 
steadily to the rear. 
Sel 
