rom
the attacks of natural enemies; hence the question of guarding them
resolves itself mainly into the question of keeping people from
disturbing the birds {204} during the late spring and summer months.
Painted signs will not do this. Men hired for the purpose constitute
the only adequate means. Some of the protected islands have been
bought or leased by the Audubon Society, but in many cases they are
still under private ownership and the privilege of placing a guard had
to be obtained as a favour from the owner. Probably half a million
breeding water birds now find protection in the Audubon reservations.
On the islands off the Maine coast the principal birds safeguarded by
this means are the Herring Gull, Arctic Tern, Wilson's Tern, Leach's
Petrel, Black Guillemot, and Puffin. There are protected colonies of
Terns on Long Island; of Terns and Laughing Gulls on the New Jersey
coast; of Black Skimmers, and of various Terns, in Virginia and North
Carolina.

One of the greatest struggles the Audubon Society has ever had has been
to raise funds every year for the protection of the colonies of Egrets
and Ibis in the South Atlantic States. The story of this fight is
longer than {205} can be told in one short chapter. The protected
colonies are located mainly in the low swampy regions of North
Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. I have been in many of
these "rookeries" and know that the warden who undertakes to guard one
of them takes his life in his hand. Perhaps a description of one will
answer more or less for the twenty other Heron colonies the Society has
under its care.

_The Corkscrew Rookery._--Some time ago I visited the warden of this
reservation, located in the edge of the "Big Cypress" Swamp thirty-two
miles south of Ft. Myers, Florida. Arriving at the colony late in the
evening, after having travelled thirty miles without seeing a human
being or a human habitation, we killed a rattlesnake and proceeded to
make camp. The shouting of a pair of Sandhill Cranes awakened us at
daylight, and, to quote Greene, the warden, the sun was about "two
hands high" when we started into the rookery. We crossed a glade two
hundred yards wide and then entered the swamp. Progress {206} was
slow, for the footing was uncertain and the tall sawgrass cut our
wrists and faces.

There are many things unspeakably stimulating about a journey in such a
tropical swamp. You work your way through thick, tangled gro