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[[image - photograph]] Near Coot Bay, a brown pelican makes a headlong dive into an oyster bed. The remains of a bald eagle's nest sit empty atop a dead mangrove, and irridescent hummingbirds, metallic fragments as small as bees, take refuge from a tropical disturbance somewhere in the Gulf. They wait till the weather clears perched on a manchineel tree, feeding on mosquitoes. (The milky sap of this tree blisters human skin; the Calusa Indians were said to tie their captives beneath it in the rain.) The Anhinga Trail offers a boardwalk and a wooden railing upon which to rest shirted elbows. Inches away a chameleon sits with the dewlap on its throat red and bulging. What appears to be a glossy blue black indigo in the grasses below turns out to be a piece of inner tube. An anhinga, which can turn its head around completely and consequently misses nothing, has just impaled a tiny crustacean on its sharp pointed bill. The bird has been swimming with its body submerged. Since it has no oil glands, it is water-logged, and lights unsteadily on a pine apple to hang its wings out to dry. In the way of all recent converts, man is now a fiercely dedicated guardian of these creatures, determined to preserve the Everglades exactly as it is. Perhaps that is neither possible nor desirable. In the dry season, flora that seem lifeless are just regrouping, part of the natural cycle of renewal. Perhaps the changing Everglades is part of an even greater cycle of renewal. Maybe one form is intended to yield to another, in the way that the white ibis flocks to roost at sunset, trading places with the black-crowned night heron who leaves its perch at sundown to search for crayfish. Or perhaps the lesson of the Everglades is best learned from such denizens as the arrogant orange lubber, poisonous, a relative newcomer, swivelling its eyestalks and hopping with impunity, because its enemies have learned to leave it alone. Evelyn Mayerson's last novel, No Enemy But Time (Doubleday, 1982), set in Miami Beach, was excerpted in the December 1982 MARQUEE. Her new book, tentatively titled Princess in Amber, will be published early in 1985. 40 MARQUEE MARCH 1984