January 14-15 2015 Barataria Preserve, Louisiana

A couple of rainy, cool days.

The toilet has been leaking water into the tank. John decided to tighten the seal down. Looks like major plumbing work to me.  After that was taken care of we went to Barataria Preserve which is part of the Jean Lafitte swamp. These are bald cypress trees and Spanish moss. The pointy things around their trunks are called cypress knees. They are part of the trees root system.

 

It is a really beautiful place. We went to do recon for a boating trip there. They have miles of canoe trails here. But we were informed there no longer is any boating on those trails, they are over grown with water hyacinth and impassable.  Above in the right photo is a picture of people boating on the trails, the below part is what it actually looks like now.

 

We decided to hike the 4 miles of boardwalk trails through the swamp instead. Here is John on the winding board walk. This large oak tree is growing on a shell mound. You can kind of see the white shell pieces. When the native Americans lived here they ate a lot of shell fish. They piled the shells, or their garbage in these mounds. The mounds became islands in the swamp.This type of oak tree does not usually grow in the swamp, the theory is that the Indians  threw the acorns in their garbage mound.

 

John on the board walk under some red berries and Spanish moss. We met an English gentleman who asked us what the stuff growing on the trees was. He didn’t know what Spanish moss was. He said it looks kind of spooky, like cobwebs in the trees. John crossing over the hyacinth chocked canal. These canals were dug long ago when they logged the cypress. They floated them out in the canals. This area used to be a pure cypress grove. The cypress were up to 1000 years old, 100 feet tall and 15 feet in diameter. They logged them all out and what is growing now are the young trees growing back.

The diagram shows the topography of the swamp. The high ground is a natural levy, sediment left from when the Mississippi ran down two different channels here.  The channels became bayous when the river again changed course. The high ground or levy crest has hard wood trees, the levy slope has palmettos and hardwoods, lower is the cypress swamp and lower still is the marsh.  This other photo is the marsh.  Much of the marsh is a floating mat of vegetation and roots with water under it. It rises up and down with the tides and floods. These areas blunt the force of hurricanes on the mainland, but they are dying out with development and destruction of the river delta they are  no longer protecting the mainland as well. The trees are on what is called a floatant, which is a thicker mat like an island that can support trees. If you try to walk on the ground it is not solid,  it is like walking on a water bed. 

    

Lichen on a dead tree, fall  red water oak leaves, vines on a tree trunk, red berries with water dripping off,  the oak leaves on the shell mound, fall colored red and yellow  gum tree leaves in front of a palmetto leaf and last a big water drop reflecting more berries in it.

 

A hawk seen in the campground, a great white egret in the campground. It has a long neck, but it is pulled in here, a nutria family- which are large rodents about the size of beavers imported from Argentina for their fur long ago- curled up in a nest of water hyacinths in the middle of a canal, a possum , this fat mocking bird was attacking it’s reflection in the bus , a bald eagle from the swamp and an alligator. We did not see any alligators today, it is too cold, they are reptiles and they hibernate in the mud in the winter, but we saw some here  last time we were here.