Ward’s heron is the Florida variety of the great blue heron, like him only more so. There is slight difference in the marking, the _Ardea wardi_ having olive instead of black legs, whiter lower parts, and a somewhat darker neck. But Ward’s heron is almost a foot taller than the other, and when you see the two fly side by side you might well think the great blue heron the little blue heron, so much does this peninsular prototype dwarf his compatriot of wider range. There are Ward’s herons in the big lagoon here east of White City mornings that I am confident stand six feet in height. Out there on marshy islands they have a superb dignity of pose, statues of frozen alertness. Taking wing they blanket the landscape with wide pinions and their legs stretch rudder-wise to a great length behind them, while their necks are doubled back on themselves till the head is hunched in between the shoulders and the protruding neck curve looks like a pouch. By this use of the neck you will know them in the distance from the sandhill cranes because the crane flies with neck fully stretched. But the sandhill crane is a foot shorter, anyway. Ward’s heron rarely gets out of Florida, being found most frequently in the lower two-thirds of the State, or from Alachua County down. It was by way of the sandhill cranes that I came to the heron rookery. They have a way of setting up a most prodigious cackling, a sonorous croaking call that outdoes all the barnyard fowls in St. Lucie County. It is quite like the barnyard, too, a cutdarkuting as of husky Plymouth Rock hens that have laid eggs and are proud of it. It carries far. The first time I heard it I hastened cautiously a mile or two through the flat-woods, expecting every minute to come onto the birds. But after I had made my mile or two the birds took flight, writing black Greek letters along the horizon. Most often in the dawn I heard them over toward the big lagoon and traced the sound there to its most conspicuous landmark. This is a tiny island, holding a score or two of cabbage palmettos flanked with odorous myrtles, these in turn standing in a jungle of ferns, osmundas in the main, a picturesquely beautiful spot, standing in the middle of this big, shallow lagoon that stretches thirty miles, north and south, flanking the pineapple-clad ridge from Fort Pierce down. To this shore in the gray of dawn the sound [Illustration: “A superb dignity of pose, statues of frozen alertness”]