Evening Republican, Volume 18, Number 69, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 March 1914 — THE EVERGLADES. [ARTICLE]

THE EVERGLADES.

Vhat Peaceful Hasten Saw to the Florida Swamp. la Harper’s, A. W. Dimock writes of a recent visit to oae of the Islands mt the Everglades, where he went to study the many kinds of wild birds living Chare. No guns were fired, and the birds seeing that no harm was intended soon became tame: “Day after day we paddled our cum In the little sloughs around and through the rookery, and each day the birds grew tamer. The cam-era-man waded and climbed trees out peles and made long legs tor his camera, until he got the views he wanted of eggs and young birds, while the mother birds fussed around him and scolded at first, but sometimes oame back to their nests before, the work was finished. Nature worked dally miracles through these young birds. One day they were egg-ehaped pouchee of parchment, stuffed by their parents with lumps of dead fish, and infew hours, by processes so rapid as to be almost visible, they had converted the offensive mass into living flesh and feathers, and in a few days evolved form and beauty from a chaos of corruption. When the eamera-man wanted young birds that had graduated from their nests they had to be chased through the swamp and followed up the trees, and our hunter-boy went np the latter Uke a squirrel and slashed through mud and water like an oter, sometimes for a long distance, but he always brought back bis bird, even if he had to cross deep sloughs to get him. He taught the birds he caught to pose by petting them and putting them on the branches chosen by the camera-man, and when they scrambled away by catching them again, scolding them, stroking them. "The system never failed at the time, but when afterward we paddied among the nests, certain vociferous young birds scrambled in haste from their homes to the tops of the tallest trees, and curlew matrons croaked from their nests, “Johnny can't pose to-day; he isn’t feeling well.” Birds too young to get away were very friendly, and from many nests our approach was bailed with cries of welcome and mouths opened wide for the fish and frogs that often went with us. Mother birds, too, grew unfearful, and as we fed their babies looked on with complacency, if hot ifatitude. One snake-blrd, or water-turkey, which on our first call dropped from her nest Into the water in the clumsy fashion of her species, on our later visits merely stepped aside and viewed with approval our performance of her duty. Her two youngsters used to stand on the extreme edge of the nest, with wideopened bills extended for the delloacies we brought them, until one of them fell Into the water, and when we tried to rescue him, gave a full grown exhibition of the aquatic skill which was hit inheritance. That night he disappeared, and we thought we knew the hawk that got him but couldn’t afford to destroy with a gun the confidence of our feathered cronies, even to avenge one of them.”