Ornithologically, the creek was a disappointment.  We pushed into one bay after another, among the dense “bonnets,”—­huge leaves of the common yellow pond lily,—­but found nothing that I had not seen before.  Here and there a Florida gallinule put up its head among the leaves, or took flight as we pressed too closely upon it; but I saw them to no advantage, and with a single exception they were dumb.  One bird, as it dashed into the rushes, uttered two or three cries that sounded familiar.  The Florida gallinule is in general pretty silent, I think; but he has a noisy season; then he is indeed noisy enough.  A swamp containing a single pair might be supposed to be populous with barn-yard fowls, the fellow keeps up such a clatter:  now loud and terror-stricken, “like a hen whose head is just going to be cut off,” as a friend once expressed it; then soft and full of content, as if the aforesaid hen had laid an egg ten minutes before, and were still felicitating herself upon the achievement.  It was vexatious that here, in the very home of Florida gallinules, I should see and hear less of them than I had more than once done in Massachusetts, where they are esteemed a pretty choice rarity, and where, in spite of what I suppose must be called exceptional good luck, my acquaintance with them had been limited to perhaps half a dozen birds.  But in affairs of this kind a direct chase is seldom the best rewarded.  At one point the boatman pulled up to a thicket of small willows, bidding me be prepared to see birds in enormous numbers; but we found only a small company of night herons—­evidently breeding there—­and a green heron.  The latter my boy shot before I knew what he was doing.  He took my reproof in good part, protesting that he had had only a glimpse of the bird, and had taken it for a possible gallinule.  In the course of the trip we saw, besides the species already named, great blue and little blue herons, pied-billed grebes, coots, cormorants, a flock of small sandpipers (on the wing), buzzards, vultures, fish-hawks, and innumerable red-winged blackbirds.

Three days afterward we went up the river.  At the upper end of the lake were many white-billed coots (Fulica americana); so many that we did our best to count them as they rose, flock after flock, dragging their feet over the water behind them with a multitudinous splashing noise.  There were a thousand, at least.  They had an air of being not so very shy, but they were nobody’s fools.  “See there!” my boy would exclaim, as a hundred or two of them dashed past the boat; “see how they keep just out of range!”