By noon we were among the islands of the reservation. We had already passed other and larger islands, for the most part well wooded. On these there were great numbers of coons and minks, and therefore none of the sea-birds which rest on the ground or in low bushes. The coons are more common than the minks and muskrats. In the inundations they are continually being carried out to sea on logs; a planter informed me that on one occasion in a flood he met a log sailing down the swollen Mississippi with no less than eleven coons aboard. Sooner or later castaway coons land on every considerable island off the coast, and if there is fresh water, and even sometimes if there is none, they thrive; and where there are many coons, the gulls, terns, skimmers, and other such birds have very little chance to bring up their young. Coons are fond of rambling along beaches; at low tide they devour shell-fish; and they explore the grass tufts and bushes, and eat nestlings, eggs, and even the sitting birds. If on any island we found numerous coon tracks there were usually few nesting sea-fowl, save possibly on some isolated point. The birds breed most plentifully in the numberless smaller islands—some of considerable size—where there is no water, and usually not a tree. Some of these islands are nothing but sand, with banks and ramparts of shells, while others are fringed with marsh-grass and covered with scrub mangrove. But the occasional fierce tropical storms not only change the channels and alter the shape of many of the islands, but may even break up some very big island. In such case an island with trees and water may for years be entirely uninhabited by coons, and the birds may form huge rookeries thereon. The government should exterminate the coons and minks on all the large islands, so as to enable the birds to breed on them; for on the small islands the storms and tides work huge havoc with the nests.
Captain Young proved himself not only a first-class captain but a first-class pilot through the shifting and tangled maze of channels and islands. The Royal Tern, her engines breaking down intermittently, fell so far in the rear that in the early afternoon we anchored, to wait for her, off an island to which a band of pelicans resorted—they had nested, earlier in the year, on another island some leagues distant. The big birds, forty or thereabouts in number, were sitting on a sand-spit which projected into the water, enjoying a noontide rest. As we approached they rose and flapped lazily out to sea for a few hundred yards before again lighting. Later in the afternoon they began to fly to the fishing-grounds, and back and forth, singly and in small groups. In flying they usually gave a dozen rapid wing-beats, and then sailed for a few seconds. If several were together the leader gave the "time" to the others; they all flapped together, and then all glided together. The neck was carried in a curve, like a heron's; it was only stretched out straight like a stork's or bustard's when the bird was diving. Some of the fishing was done, singly or in parties, in the water, the pelicans surrounding shoals of sardines and shrimps, and scooping them up in their capacious bags. But, although such a large, heavy bird, the brown pelican is an expert wing-fisherman also. A pair would soar round in circles, the bill perhaps pointing downward, instead of, as usual, being held horizontally. Then, when the fish was spied the bird plunged down, almost perpendicularly, the neck stretched straight and rigid, and disappeared below the surface of the water with a thump and splash, and in a couple of seconds emerged, rose with some labor, and flew off with its prey. At this point the pelicans had finished breeding before my arrival—although a fortnight later Mr. Job found thousands of fresh eggs in their great rookeries west of the mouth of the Mississippi. The herons had well-grown nestlings, whereas the terns and gulls were in the midst of the breeding, and the skimmers had only just begun. The pelicans often flew only a few yards, or even feet, above the water, but also at times soared or wheeled twenty or thirty rods in the air, or higher. They are handsome, interesting birds, and add immensely, by their presence, to the pleasure of being out on these waters; they should be completely protected everywhere—as, indeed, should most of these sea-birds.
The two Parker boys—the elder of whom had for years been doing a man's work in the best fashion, and the younger of whom had just received an appointment to Annapolis—kept us supplied with fish, caught with the hook and rod, except the flounders, which were harpooned. The two boys were untiring; nothing impaired their energy, and no chance of fatigue and exertion, at any time of the day or night, appealed to them save as an exhilarating piece of good fortune. At a time when so large a section of our people, including especially those who claim in a special sense to be the guardians of cultivation, philanthropy, and religion, deliberately make a cult of pacifism, poltroonery, sentimentality, and neurotic emotionalism, it was refreshing to see the fine, healthy, manly young fellows who were emphatically neither "too proud to fight" nor too proud to work, and with whom hard work, and gentle regard for the rights of others, and the joy of life, all went hand in hand.
Toward evening of our first day the weather changed for the worse; the fishers among the party were recalled, and just before nightfall we ran off, and after much groping in the dark we made a reasonably safe anchorage. By midnight the wind fell, dense swarms of mosquitoes came aboard, and, as our mosquito-nets were not well up (thanks partly to our own improvidence, and partly to the violence of the wind, for we were sleeping on deck because of the great heat), we lived in torment until morning. On the subsequent nights we fixed our mosquito-bars so carefully that there was no trouble. Mosquitoes and huge, green-headed horse-flies swarm on most of the islands. I witnessed one curious incident in connection with one of these big, biting horse-flies. A kind of wasp preys on them, and is locally known as the "horse-guard," or "sheriff-fly," accordingly. These horse-guards are formidable-looking things and at first rather alarm strangers, hovering round them and their horses; but they never assail beast or man unless themselves molested, when they are ready enough to use their powerful sting. The horses and cattle speedily recognize these big, humming, hornet-like horse-guards as the foes of their tormentors. As we walked over the islands, and the green-headed flies followed us, horse-guards also joined us; and many greenheads and some horse-guards came on board. Usually when the horse-guard secured the greenhead it was pounced on from behind, and there was practically no struggle—the absence of struggle being usual in the world of invertebrates, where the automaton-like actions of both preyer and prey tend to make each case resemble all others in its details. But on one occasion the greenhead managed to turn, so that he fronted his assailant and promptly grappled with him, sinking his evil lancet into the wasp's body and holding the wasp so tight that the latter could not thrust with its sting. They grappled thus for several minutes. The horse-guard at last succeeded in stabbing its antagonist, and promptly dropped the dead body. Evidently it had suffered much, for it vigorously rubbed the wounded spot with its third pair of legs, walked hunched up, and was altogether a very sick creature.
On the following day we visited two or three islands which the man-of-war birds were using as roosts. These birds are the most wonderful fliers in the world. No other bird has such an expanse of wing in proportion to the body weight. No other bird of its size seems so absolutely at home in the air. Frigate-birds—as they are also called—hardly ever light on the water, yet they are sometimes seen in mid-ocean. But they like to live in companies, near some coast. They have very long tails, usually carried closed, looking like a marlin-spike, but at times open, like a great pair of scissors, in the course of their indescribably graceful aerial evolutions. We saw them soaring for hours at a time, sometimes to all seeming absolutely motionless as they faced the wind. They sometimes caught fish for themselves, just rippling the water to seize surface swimmers, or pouncing with startling speed on any fish which for a moment leaped into the air to avoid another shape of ravenous death below. If the frigate-bird caught the fish transversely, it rose, dropped its prey, and seized it again by the head before it struck the water. But it also obtained its food in less honorable fashion—by robbing other birds. The pelicans were plundered by all their fish-eating neighbors, even the big terns; but the man-of-war bird robbed the robbers. We saw three chase a royal tern, a very strong flier; the tern towered, ascending so high we could hardly see it, but in great spirals its pursuers rose still faster, until one was above it; and then the tern dropped the fish, which was snatched in midair by one of the bandits. Captain Sprinkle had found these frigate-birds breeding on one of the islands the previous year, each nest being placed in a bush and containing two eggs. We visited the island; the big birds—the old males jet black, the females with white breasts, the young males with white heads—were there in numbers, perched on the bushes, and rising at our approach. But there were no nests, and, although we found one fresh egg, it was evidently a case of sporadic laying, having nothing to do with home-building.
On another island, where we also found a big colony of frigate-birds roosting on the mangrove and Gulf tamarisk scrub, there was a small heronry of the Louisiana heron. The characteristic flimsy heron nests were placed in the thick brush, which was rather taller than a man's head. The young ones had left the nests, but were still too young for anything in the nature of sustained flight. They were, like all young herons, the pictures of forlorn and unlovely inefficiency, as they flapped a few feet away and strove with ungainly awkwardness to balance themselves on the yielding bush tops. The small birds we found on the islands were red-winged blackbirds, Louisiana seaside sparrows, and long-billed marsh-wrens—which last had built their domed houses among the bushes, in default of tall reeds. On one island Job discovered a night-hawk on her nest. She fluttered off, doing the wounded-bird trick, leaving behind her an egg and a newly hatched chick. He went off to get his umbrella-house, and when he returned the other egg was hatching, and another little chick, much distressed by the heat, appeared. He stood up a clam-shell to give it shade, and then, after patient waiting, the mother returned, and he secured motion-pictures of her and her little family. These birds offer very striking examples of real protective coloration.
The warm shallows, of course, teem with mollusks as well as with fish—not to mention the shrimps, which go in immense silver schools, and which we found delicious eating. The occasional violent storms, when they do not destroy islands, throw up on them huge dikes or ramparts of shells, which makes the walking hard on the feet.
There are more formidable things than shells in the warm shallows. The fishermen as they waded near shore had to be careful lest they should step on a sting-ray. When a swim was proposed as our boat swung at anchor in mid-channel, under the burning midday sun, Captain Sprinkle warned us against it because he had just seen a large shark. He said that sharks rarely attacked men, but that he had known of two instances of their doing so in Mississippi Sound, one ending fatally. In this case the man was loading a sand schooner. He was standing on a scaffolding, the water half-way up his thighs, and the shark seized him and carried him into deep water. Boats went to his assistance at once, scaring off the shark; but the man's leg had been bitten nearly in two; he sank, and was dead when he was finally found.
The following two days we continued our cruise. We steamed across vast reaches of open Gulf, the water changing from blue to yellow as it shoaled. Now and then we sighted or passed low islands of bare sand and scrub. The sky was sapphire, the sun splendid and pitiless, the heat sweltering. We came across only too plain evidence of the disasters always hanging over the wilderness folk. A fortnight previously a high tide and a heavy blow had occurred coincidentally. On the islands where the royal terns especially loved to nest the high water spelled destruction. The terns nest close together, in bird cities, so to speak, and generally rather low on the beaches. On island after island the waves had washed over the nests and destroyed them by the ten thousand. The beautiful royal terns were the chief sufferers. On one island there was a space perhaps nearly an acre in extent where the ground was covered with their eggs, which had been washed thither by the tide; most of them had then been eaten by those smart-looking highwaymen, the trim, slate-headed laughing gulls. The terns had completely deserted the island and had gone in their thousands to another; but some skimmers remained and were nesting. The westernmost island, we visited was outside the national reservation, and that very morning it had been visited and plundered by a party of eggers. The eggs had been completely cleared from most of the island, gulls and terns had been shot, and the survivors were in a frantic state of excitement. It was a good object-lesson in the need of having reserves, and laws protecting wild life, and a sufficient number of efficient officers to enforce the laws and protect the reserves. Defenders of the short-sighted men who in their greed and selfishness will, if permitted, rob our country of half its charm by their reckless extermination of all useful and beautiful wild things sometimes seek to champion them by saying that "the game belongs to the people." So it does; and not merely to the people now alive, but to the unborn people. The "greatest good of the greatest number" applies to the number within the womb of time, compared to which those now alive form but an insignificant fraction. Our duty to the whole, including the unborn generations, bids us restrain an unprincipled present-day minority from wasting the heritage of these unborn generations. The movement for the conservation of wild life, and the larger movement for the conservation of all our natural resources, are essentially democratic in spirit, purpose, and method.
On some of the islands we found where green turtles had crawled up the beaches to bury their eggs in the sand. We came across two such nests. One of them I dug up myself. The eggs we took to the boat, where they were used in making delicious pancakes, which went well with fresh shrimp, flounder, weakfish, mackerel, and mullet.