Pat's Wildways: Bemoaning the Loss of Bayous

I am a big fan of swamps – freshwater swamps in particular. One of my favorite places is the bayous of southern Louisiana. Or should I say “was” one of my favorite places. It has changed, like everything else in the past decades. But in this case, it has changed into a different place entirely.

When I first visited Houma, Louisiana 40-some years ago, it was to visit LeeRoy​ Sevin at his “Bayou Otter Farm.” Well, it wasn’t really a farm, but it was a one-man operation to save North American river otters across the United States. LeeRoy​ developed a way to live trap otters using toe hold traps and trained all his Cajun buddies in the skill. Trapped otters were brought to LeeRoy​. He and his wife Diane kept them in cages in the swamp until any toe damage was healed, and then he sold them to fish and wildlife officials in more than 20 states, where they were introduced back into the wild, to restock the lost otter populations in these areas. I flew to Houma when I worked at Marine World Africa USA outside San Francisco to purchase a couple of baby otters to hand raise. The babies were born to pregnant females that were captured and released again after their cubs were sold, at six weeks of age, to various zoos like mine. It was a great visit with LeeRoy​​, who took my colleagues and me on a two-night journey through the bayous to stay at a luxurious fish camp that he managed for an oil company.

Now, thanks to LeeRoy​​, river otters are thriving in many places in the country, but sadly not in Houma. There are no otters there any more! And no crawfish​, their main food source, either. The area that used to be an expansive freshwater wetland, the Mississippi Delta, has gradually converted to salt marsh where wetlands still exist at all. Coastal erosion has been working for years through combined factors of land subsidence (due to heavy extraction of oil and underlying minerals), deep channels for tankers and other vessels, flood mitigation canals that divert freshwater away from the area, lack of sediment coming down the Mississippi, powerful hurricanes, excessive logging, introduction of vegetation-consuming nutria, sea level rise and other factors. According to recent articles, this area has lost nearly 2000 square miles of wetland in the last century and continues to lose about 25 square miles of wetlands each year. Much of the remaining wetlands have become salt marshes, which no longer support otters, crawfish​​ and other freshwater species.

I only found this out on my recent visit to the bayous south of Houma. I had great plans of seeing otters, eating crawfish​, and maybe even finding some of LeeRoy​​ and Diana’s relatives, but alas, they were gone from the area too. I did manage to find live crawfish​ at the Crawfish​​ House in Houma, but it turns out they had to drive two and a half hours away to Breau​​ Bridges in Western Louisiana to get crawfish​ to sell. My brother and I loaded up on five pounds of fresh boiled crawfish​, at least, but overall it was a sad visit to an area that has had a major ecological shift in the years since I loved it.

A bit later in my journey we drove to Breau​​ Bridges to see the “Crawfish​​ Capital of the World” proclaimed by the Louisiana legislature in 1959, but I didn’t find any crawfish​ there either. Here the reason was weather oriented​ – they are hard to trap in cold weather. One local​​ gal I talked to said that usually the crawfish​ are so abundant you just need to dig a shallow pond and soon there will be crawfish​ all around it. Lots of crawfish​ are also raised in the many rice fields in the area. I was told that most farmers harvest the rice every two years and harvest the crawfish​ in the fields in alternate years. That resonated with me, for sure. Back when I was a Ph.D. student working in the rice fields of Malaysia, my otter subjects there (Asian​​ small-clawed otters) primarily fed on the little crabs that lived in the rice fields, sort of like crawfish​ in Louisiana.

Despite these changes in the environment it is still happily possible to feast on crawfish​ (when you can find them), and oysters and other seafood too when you visit the area. And meeting the people in the bayous was fun too, even if they had never seen an otter.

You just don’t know what you will find when you go back to someplace after 40 years. It almost makes me hesitate to go back, when instead I can just remember the way it was. Sad.

Pat Foster-Turley, Ph.D., is a zoologist on Amelia Island. She welcomes your nature questions and observations. patandbucko@yahoo.com