In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Chapter 3 Q The Swampy South At night the loud, wailing cries of the birds reverberate up and down the river, sending shivers down one’s back. —Arthur A. Allen Florida is another world, its terrain, flora, and fauna exotic. Swampy wetlands— ideal ivory-bill habitat—can be found anywhere in the state. Long before improved roads and automobiles, northern tourists came to the state for sunshine and sightseeing. During the late 1800s, railroads punched into Florida, making it a popular tourist destination. Henry Flagler constructed the Florida East Coast Railway from Jacksonville to Key West and built numerous luxury hotels along the route, including accommodations in St. Augustine and West Palm Beach. The prosperous 1920s saw large areas opening to development, spurring the Florida land boom. The Great Depression slowed the growth, but nevertheless , Florida’s first theme parks soon opened: Cypress Gardens in 1936 near Winter Haven and Marineland in 1938 near St. Augustine. At Herb Stoddard’s suggestion, the Cornell trio drove to Wakulla Springs, fourteen miles south of Tallahassee. The spring itself is an artesian well, a portal to the deepest underwater cave system in the world, noted for the clear blue water that bubbles up from 185 feet below ground. The pristine water forms the Wakulla River that flows south to the Gulf of Mexico. Scenes from the 1954 movie Creature from the Black Lagoon would be filmed there because it looked like the Amazonian jungle where Hollywood’s “Gillman” was supposed to live. The Cornell trio saw no monsters, but as Tanner noted, they did see “monstrous fish” in magnificent numbers. Monday, February 25: The Cornellians recorded a northern mockingbird and made the first sound recordings of a limpkin, a wading bird with a slow, strolling gait that for some resembles a limp—thus the name. Long-necked and lanky, limpkins are secretive birds related to and resembling small cranes; they are found in brushy swamps and marshes in extreme southern Georgia, Florida, and the American tropics. For the Cornell trio this was cause to celebrate: 22 The Swampy South getting a microphone close enough to record the limpkin was a coup, an inkling of good fortune to come. Limpkins are not backyard or city park passerines. Brownish and streaked with white, the Gruiformes are exotic, secretive creatures, hard to find and thus even harder to approach closely with a microphone. Allen had hunted for limpkins before. On an earlier trip to Florida, he had reported, “Yesterday I was fighting my way through the saw-grass marshes of the St. Johns River, hunting for limpkins; I was struggling through the tangled willow roots, waist deep, where the egrets and ibis chose to nest until I could barely put one foot in front of the other.” Needless to say, the leggy birds nest in isolated locations, primarily eating large aquatic snails that are generally nocturnal, as are the limpkins. Also known as “crying birds,” they emit a call described as an anguished, wildsounding wail: kwEEEeeeer, kwEEEEeeeeer. “It would not be difficult even for the most prosaic person to imagine that some lost soul had come back to earth, or at least that some luckless black brother was losing his leg to an alligator,” wrote Doc Allen. After recording the otherworldly wetland bird and enjoying a quick campsite supper, Tanner took a boat and paddled upstream, listening to limpkins and barred owls in the dark. The waning, last-quarter moon rose late. Absorbing the exotic sounds of the Florida night, Jim then drifted quietly downstream through the alien world and back to camp, where he slept in the truck, noting for the first time the presence of bothersome mosquitoes. Ticks, mosquitoes, and late-night paddles on dark, languid water: for young Tanner, his five-year adventure in the swampy South had truly begun. The next morning Stoddard joined them. He and Doc Allen went upstream to construct a blind, hoping to get close-up photographs of a limpkin. “Here, enthralled by the magical scenery which was rendered even more eerie by the hooting and laughing of the barred owls, we spent several days,” recorded Allen. Blending into the background, the group had no problem photographing and recording the limpkin again, as well as ospreys, snakebirds, and Ward’s herons, a southern subspecies of the great blue heron. “When conditions were inauspicious for recording, we spent long hours and covered many miles hunting for ivory-bills,” wrote Allen. Although the Cornell trio intended to record as many...

Share