Page:Florida Trails as seen from Jacksonville to Key West and from November to April inclusive.djvu/360

 with longer legs and necks, a different bird altogether, yet all feeding in a group. If you could mate a black vulture and a white heron the resulting progeny might be such a bird as this. Primaries, secondaries and tail were glossy, greenish black, the rest of the bird was white. The head and neck were bare like a vulture, and the group took flight together, the white birds going into the air with the black ones, and soaring about in the sky later in much the same sort of circling, flapless flight. Here they looked like big white water turkeys, their legs stretched heron-wise behind their fan-shaped tails, their necks stretched forward like that of a water turkey when flying, a thing a heron never does.

After all the answer was easy. Bird gazing on a roaring St. Johns River steamer, I had chanced upon a flock of birds of a variety that I had not before found in all Florida, the woodland ibis. They remained contentedly soaring in the heavens with their black friends as long as I could keep them in sight from the steamer, with a glass. It was a curious group, too, these long-necked, long-legged birds soaring like crazy cranes with the sedate, graceful vultures.

Nightfall catches the steamer still churning the dark waters down winding walls of forest, now and then stopping at a rough dock which represents some invisible town. The water gets black