Plea

It is not funny if you are an aquatic bird (duck, heron, egret, gallinule, spoonbill, ibis, bittern crane) and, having flown down to Florida for the winter, find your favorite lagoon drained dry. You have worked up a raging appetite flapping your way over New York grain fields, Pennsylvania coal fields, Virginia tobacco fields and Southern cotton fields. You sight the palm-tufted everglades, set your wings to plane down, and what does your watering beak encounter? Minnows, frogs, juicy bulbs, slimy, succulent crawfish? No. There are pipelines, dredges, real estate signs, empty cut-plug tins, discarded overalls, splintered flasks, old shoes, sapling orange, lemon, grapefruit trees, no water. Paradise has gone.

None appreciates this more than Natural Scientist Minnie Moore-Wilson of Kissimmee, Fla., authority on Southern bird life and Seminole Indians. Last week she raised her voice in piteous protest: "There are no great national parks in the East. A 100,000-acre track in the Everglades set aside as a sanctuary for wild life would be a primeval forest appearing almost exactly as it did when Columbus set foot on the North American continent . . . The areas most suitable for the location of a bird sanctuary are worthless for agricultural purposes. To attempt to cut up the Big Cypress Swamp, for instance, would be like turning the Yosemite into an onion garden or Yellowstone Park into a factory town." She advocated, as wardens of such a preserve, the Seminole Indians! "They have a deep sense of the sanctity of an obligation."