The text ... 'To the white-bodied wood ibis, poking its long black bill around the Florida Everglades for a good place to raise a family, Corkscrew Swamp comes on like the American stork's equivalent of the Garden of Eden before the serpent. The 700- to 1,000-year-old crowns of bald cypress, rising 150 feet above the water on their knobby knees, make fine sites for nests. Fledglings could find no better place to try their black-tipped wings, and there are no waters richer in the small fish on which they live.For every December since alligators can remember, the wood ibis, as many as 4,700 pairs of them in 1960, have been nesting in Corkscrew Swamp, about 140 miles west-northwest of Miami. Since 1954, 6,080 acres of the swamp have been set aside by the National Audubon Society as a sanctuary for the wood ibis and their feathery neighbors -- the herons, egrets, pileated woodpeckers, warblers, redwings, and grackles. From a boardwalk that leads a mile into Corkscrew's hammock, dotted with ferns, mangrove, and orchids, as many as 50 species of birds can be sighted.Raging forest fires, plaguing South Florida since last fall, threatened last week to turn this avian Eden into a charred hell. One blaze, attacking from the north side for two weeks, had devastated about 1,800 acres. Another, from the south, was about 300 acres deep into the sanctuary.It is rugged terrain on which to fight a fire. The fighters, about 25 Forestry Service men and as many volunteer convicts, desperately manned two firebreaks, each more than 2 miles long, and hoped for rain.The virulence of these two monster fires was fed, basically, by two factors: the works of man, and the forces of nature. Man, building new housing developments and farming new land, has been constructing drainage ditches that have slowly been lowering the water level of Corkscrew Swamp. A long drought lowered it still more. Now, besides feeding on the bald cypresses, the fires creep along under the ground, burning the dry peaty soil.Even with a good and early rain to put out the fire, Corkscrew will be a long time recovering as a bird rookery. 'The outlook is bleak right now,' said Ernst T. Christensen, chief naturalist at Everglades National Park.The wood ibises aren't there to see the destruction of their nesting place. They took a quick look at the dried-up swamp last December and flapped away, some to the lakes of Central Florida, perhaps some to Louisiana. As Roland Clement, staff biologist for the Audubon Society put it: 'They seem to have more sense than people. They don't try to raise a family when there's a shortage of food and water.''