So, I think I’ll go a new direction for this blog.  I originally started out hoping this to be a scientific, kind of objective look at the land I love so much… BUUUUUT…it gets tedious always writing facts.  I need to spice it up a bit.  I’ll probably still have pictures of birds and squirrels and things in between big posts, but I got to do what I got to do.

I’ve decided to branch out and just write about whatever I feel like.  It’ll still be as scientifically accurate as I can make it and thematically about the Gulf Coast but the content will be a little more interesting.

This is for one of my friend’s requests based on my Pearl River County hydrology map.   This is a map showing the hydrology and elevation between Louisiana’s St Tammany Parish and Pearl River County in MS

For all my friends and family living in Mississippi during Hurricane Isaac I hope you’re all doing well and get any help you need despite the fact that the nation at large tends to forget Mississippi and focus on New Orleans during these kind of events.

Just right click on the map if you’d like to save the full size photo and take a closer look.

I made a map showing ground elevations, streams and local roads (closures in red).

This map should be useful to determine which areas are more prone to flooding.  Isaac dumped a LOT of rain on this area and with the Gulf being higher from the storm surge all that rainwater had nowhere else to go except to pile up in the lowest areas it could.  A quick side-note, a great community movement to clean up the Hobolochitto Creek has been in progress lately and although I can’t find the link right now, they have a Facebook group where you can volunteer for days to canoe down the creek and clean up trash and cut away fallen trees that can form dams that hinder drainage.

Lower elevations are marked on the map as darker colors while higher elevations are marked as lighter.  Picayune appears to be built on a higher ridge along the Hobolochitto Creek basin.  It’s likely historically dryer than the surrounding land.  People in olden times had a lot more space than we do today, so when they had a choice, they preferred to found their towns up on the high land.

If you have any pictures of the flooding you’d like to share, let me know and I’ll even throw some dots on a map for you so people can put a pic to a place.

PS:  I was interested to find out that Carriere has all the high ground and Picayune is mostly low!  I guess that’s why our mascot is the Maroon Tide!

Beaches are not the first thing most people think of when they think of the Louisiana  coastline.  In fact, besides fishermen and off-shore workers I’d wager most people have never even seen the Louisiana coast.  The Louisiana coast is divided into two distinct regions, the delta plain and the cheniere plain.  The delta plain extends from the Louisiana Mississippi border to Vermillion Bay, south of Lafayette.  The delta plain is mostly made up of saline marsh at the coast, but west of Vermillion Bay is the Cheniere Plain.  Cameron Parish is the most southern and western parish in Louisiana and home to most of the beaches that are accessible by road.
The towns of Creole, Cameron, Holly Beach and Johnson Bayou all allow access to beaches I’ve visited.  Although the water is usually muddy and there are signs that discourage swimming, the beaches are very nice and offer good opportunities for shelling and fishing.  I’ve included a few pictures of my visits as well as some of the shells I was able to collect.

Today, I visited the Rockefeller Wildlife Refuge in Grand Chenier, LA.  I’ve passed by this place quite a few times and read about it in Gay Gomez’s book “A Wetland Biography: Seasons on Louisana’s Chenier Plain“.  The refuge lead a pioneering study on management of the American Alligator in the 70s that brought a new understanding to the animal and surely, helped to save them from extinction.  The site currently serves as a wildlife refuge as well as a research station for marsh and shoreline management where many ongoing research and experiments for marsh restoration are currently in progress.  The refuge serves as a sanctuary to migratory and neotropical species of birds as well as home to many year round residents of the Chenier Plain.

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In early 2012, I started hearing about an area of Louisiana history that I wasn’t really aware of.  Although it is common knowledge that the Spanish were one of the early colonizers in southern Louisiana, what I didn’t know was that some of the earliest Spaniards were originally from the Canary Islands.  Los Isleños is the name given to Spanish citizens of the Canary Islands that immigrated to Louisiana in the late 1700s.  They immigrated to Louisiana before most mainland Spaniards and have had a large impact on the multicultural mix that makes contemporary Louisiana culture so unique.
On March 18, 2012 I visited the Isleño Festival east of New Orleans in the town of St Benard, Louisiana. The festival has many similarities to typical festivals in Louisiana.  There are craft booths, the music stage, the food tents but, being a heritage fest there was more.

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Spotted this one today in Southwest Cameron Parish, LA.

It stays in a culvert under an old road and pops out every time someone drives over. It was surprisingly tolerant of getting its picture taken.

In Iberia Parish, there exists an oddity in the flat landscape of South Louisiana.  Head south out of New Iberia on Hwy 329 and the surrounding marsh and swampland suddenly gives way to a towering forest rising out of the surrounding marsh.  Avery Island is known for its high ground, beautiful gardens and of course, the world famous McIlhenny’s Tabasco Sauce.

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