long legs dangling, he lifted himself with swift, strong wing beats into the air.
As he spiraled upward, Sanute surveyed the green salt prairies spread beneath him—the wide sea marshes stretching away northeastward and southwestward as far as his eye could see, bounded on one side by the forest of the distant Low Country mainland and on the other by the semi-tropical woods on the long narrow barrier islands beyond which lay the ocean. Above him, around him and below him he saw other ibises, some of them fishing at the mouths of little gullies opening into the tidal creeks which wound everywhere through the marshes; some sunning themselves in closely bunched flocks on shell mounds or heaps of sedge piled up by the tides; others winging their way lazily, with three or four wing beats, then a long graceful sail, towards the barrier island jungle; still others soaring beautifully on motionless pinions high in the windless upper air under the deep-blue June sky.
He saw also a pair of eagles soaring higher than the highest of the ibises; an osprey poising and hovering over a marsh creek where it opened into a broad shallow sound; scores of herons—great blues, little blues and Louisianas—passing back and forth beneath him with measured wing beats or fishing along the edges of the sinuous waterways; a squadron of brown pelicans floating on the surface of a
