As a first glimpse of Florida bird life they are satisfying and of unusual interest. I recommend them to any who may sail in my wake.
The cormorants came next. The viking bird of which Longfellow jingled,
“Then as with wings aslant,
Sails the fierce cormorant,
Seeking some rocky haunt,
With his prey laden,”
may have been all that the poet’s fancy painted him, but the Florida cormorant certainly does not fill up to the measure of the poem. Fierce he may be to little fishes, but to the eye of the passer up the river his chief characteristic is purely dolce far niente. Hardly a river buoy or a sand-bar marker post but has a cormorant, looking as much like a black carving at the top of a totem pole as anything else. Usually he is as motionless. He stretches his slim, snake-like neck as the boat goes by, sometimes even moves it uneasily, but his body keeps up the statuesque pose to perfection. No doubt the cormorant dives and swims, flies and fishes, but so far I have found him only as the topmost carving on the buoys and marker posts. This Florida variety is slightly smaller and otherwise different from the birds of the Northern coast. Chapman describes him as a shy bird. A cursory glance would seem to indicate that the only thing he is shy of is energy.
The first Florida land bird that I saw was the buzzard. If the cormorant is the statue of repose, the buzzard is the poet of motion. I suspect that this bird was the original mental scientist. He moves by thought-power alone. I am always reminded, in watching his progress, of the ancient story of the Chinaman watching his first electric car. The buzzard certainly has no visible “pushee” or any observable “pullee.” But how silently and beautifully he goes. Never a flap of the broad black wings and never a quiver of the widespread primary tips. He just thinks himself along, against the wind or with it, up or down. His broad wings are like the prayer rug of the Arabian tale. He adjusts himself upon them, stretches forth his bald red neck and just wishes himself in some place, near or far, and forthwith he sails swiftly to it. In what as yet unexplained principle of progress he finds his power no present-day aeroplanist can say. When he finds out, the flying man of the future may do away with the motor which so frequently fails to mote and the propellers which break in mid-air and spill the passenger. Go to the buzzard, thou Bleriot; consider his ways and be wise.
The little river steamer that takes you up the St. Johns from Jacksonville to Orange Park soon leaves the uproar of the city, the skyscrapers and drawbridges, tugs, lighters, and coastwise steamships behind, and puffs onward into placid reaches that to the eye have changed little since the days of De Soto. If plantations and villages exist ashore there is but little indication of them. The banks are lined with verdure, green and gray,—green with the foliage of century-old live-oaks and tall, long-leaved pines, gray with exquisite festoons and dangling draperies of the moss that decorates every tree and fairly smothers some of them. There is a crinkly grace, an elderly virility about it that is most engaging. It takes but little effort of the imagination to see the red cheeks and twinkling eyes of a myriad disciples of Santa Claus peering through it ready to bring gifts to all good children. I have yet to see with what costume they simulate the good saint in this country. If they do not make his beard of this softly beautiful, crinkly, fatherly gray moss I shall feel that they miss an excellent opportunity. Here and there through the moss and among the big, rough tree-trunks a tiny road winds down through the needle-carpeted sand and leads to a slender long pier, built far out over the shallow reaches of the river to a landing for the river boats. The stream is miles wide in its lower course, but only in its channel is it deep. Shallows stretch far from either bank and fleets of water hyacinths voyaging seaward with the current strand sometimes far from shore. The fifteen-mile trip is thus like one into a sub-tropical wilderness untouched by the chill of approaching winter, little marred by the hand of man. The miracles of gorgeous autumn coloring which we left behind in the Massachusetts woods find no echo here. Now and then a sumac leaf shows dull crimson or the wild grape takes on a somber yellow, yet these tiny dots of color are no more to be noticed in a general survey of the forest than the bright hues of the butterflies that swarm at midday in the bright sun and a temperature of eighty in the shade.
It is a new land, yet it has beauties that are all its own. The full moon was rising over the eastern shore of the river as I climbed its west bank, lighting up the broad central street of the little town with golden radiance. Here for a moment with the soft sand underfoot and the stately live-oaks arching overhead I might have thought
“Profuse draperies of moss pendant from each branch and twig”
myself in a Cape Cod village. The neat white fences were the same, the sand was the same with sparse grass growing from sidewalk to wheel tracks, and the live-oaks that arched till their limb tips touched and made play of soft shadows and softer light underfoot might well have been the Massachusetts elms. Only the profuse draperies of the moss pendant from every branch and twig were new, informing the place with a golden glamour of grace and mystery.