Bayou Gauche and Beyond

Another beautiful day birding in Louisiana. We got up early and drove through the Bayou Gauche, near the little town of Luling, where we stayed last night. There is water, water everywhere in the state of Louisiana...and in the bayous, only more so. We also got to poke around some Cajun places today, listening to the Cajun accent and sampling the Cajun cuisine. A good time was had by all. We enjoyed ourselves today.

The Bayou Gauche is composed of long stretches of weedy channels intersperced by small islands or peninsulas of solid ground with water on it. We tried to decide whether to call it "bogs" or "swamps" or "wetlands". The local people here live in wet houses and have puddles of water in their front yard. There is no skiing in the lake, because the water is full of brambles and is not deep enough or long enough to ski. Fisherpeople flock to Louisiana and with good reason. There are plenty of fish inside the bayou.

We saw Fish Crows perched on a telephone line. Fish Crows are smaller than the American Crow and something about the beak made it easy to identify. We saw several Red Shouldered Hawks with their beautiful orange breasts and its harsh call which frightened the smaller birds. We saw Meadowlarks on the levee of the Mississippi River. There was a Northern Harrier hawk buzzing just above the ground, to get a surprise attack on any prey item on the ground. The Northern Harrier is easily identified by the spotlight of white feathers on its rump when it flies. We saw an Eastern Wood Pewee on a power line. We usually hear that bird before we see it.

There were plenty of White Ibises in the soggy fields. They use their long, red, curved bills to probe the mud for nibbleables. Gulls are difficult. The one gull which we are very comfortable identifying is the Ring Billed Gull. The Laughing Gull is easy to tell by its laughter, but birds usually do not call out to birds of the other sex until springtime. They stay pretty quiet until then.

All along the western levee of the Mississippi River we saw hundreds of American Kestrel, male and female, and the Loggerhead Shrike. These two hunting birds were stationed one per segment of telephone line, for miles and miles. The kestrels would swoop down from the wire and grab something like a mole or a field mouse on the ground. The Loggerhead Shrike feeds on smaller things like fuzzy caterpillars and has the macabre predilection to impale the cadavers on thorn bushes and the tops of chain link fences. Berry and I have never seen so many Loggerhead Shrikes and American Kestrels.

Robert and Berry

photo courtesy of wikipedia