Along the Haulover Canal, connecting Mosquito Lagoon with Indian River, Florida, I saw numbers of these birds. They moved with stately grace and paid slight attention to us as the sloop sailed slowly along the narrow cut. Any unusual noise — tap of an oar blade, whistle or shot — drove them aloft in curving flight. I saw none of them along the two hundred miles of Indian River. They reappeared south of Miami, on the shores of Biscayne Bay.
They feed principally on crawfish but also eat large numbers of cutworms, grasshoppers and water moccasins.
NEST — a flat collection of stalks and sticks in bushes of swamps.
EGGS — 4 or 5, blotched with ochre and rufus.
Subtropical North America. Casual to South Dakota, Illinois, Long Island and Vermont.
A round-topt tree, 20 feet high, forming an impenetrable thicket along the shores of Florida, sometimes ascending rivers for many miles.