Rainiest Winter In Over Forty Years

With two weeks left for this season, we are already experiencing the rainiest winter in decades and thank God for more water being trapped in Lake Martin this past autumn, instead of being drained. In order to restore the much needed opportunity for the birds to return to the largest rookery of wading birds in North America in the 1990's, the way they were when the water was at its highest point is very simple. Stop draining it!

Although there was a healthy, growing population of nesting birds in the rookery last year, we still have a long way to go to get to the point where we were in 2001 when the rookery population was peaking.



The wading bird nesting population peaked in coincidence with the highest water levels and declined in conjunction with plant control and lowered water levels.

Of course, I have to mention that human intrusion in the form of swamp tours and poaching is as far as I know, no longer a factor in the mystery of the true causes of the decline of the population of nesting birds.

Along with restoration of water levels, we need to seriously consider the lack of floating aquatic plants that serve as a feeding ground for the nesting wading birds and support the entire food chain in Lake Martin.

Floating mat of aquatic plants in about 5 feet of standing water

The irony here is that the plant control and lower water levels were proposed to improve water quality, and benefit the birds, fisherman, and hunters.

Apparently no one but me was asking the fisherman or duck hunters about management changes affecting their success at fishing and hunting or was observing the birds dismay with these management policies.

I have given up attempting to communicate with corporate or government administrators who sit behind a desk in Baton Rouge, fifty miles from the lake and make bold management decisions and effect changes based upon prideful assumptions that they are fixing the problems at the lake in regard to water and plant management.



My position is that the Lake Martin area should be managed as a swamp with a lake in the middle rather than a lake surrounded by swamp. And on that note a swamp and its interior lakes are supposed to be filled with a variety of seasonal floating plants.



Along with record precipitation, another extreme climate change we are experiencing this winter is the below normal temperatures which has frozen the lake(as seen beow) several times and temporarily killed off the majority of floating plants. This opens up a new window of observation and consideration of the normal natural cycle of checks and balances in nature that we sometimes fail to have the patience and understanding to accept: that nature will control itself if we simply do nothing!

Aquatic plants in two inches of ice

Mallow blossum frosted in ice crystals at waters edge

Bermuda swamp grass frosted on shore

When I first started doing my Louisiana swamp tours twenty-five years ago, I was aware that most people had vague imaginations about swamps or gross inaccuracies as to what a swamp was or how it functioned ecologically in the big picture of the quality of life for its inhabitants, and the surrounding environs, due to Hollywood generated images being most peoples source of perspective for swamps.

I was unaware that the so-called experts were not much better informed about swamps than was the public at large. My view of the experts in the field of wetlands ecology of course has changed after observing the disturbing mismanagement of the water and plants in Lake Martin.

We have for centuries been led to believe that swamps were funky, dirty, dangerous, undesirable and useless real estate unless drained or filled in to improve it.

The reality is that swamps are great purifiers of water and air and are extremely important for a wide variety of species who increasingly struggle to find a place to live and reproduce in peace and thus survive the damage we are doing and have done to this planet and it's wild inhabitants in the last two hundred years.



I am not against progress, but the destruction and genocide of the indigenous people and wildlife species on this continent in the last two hundred years for short term financial gain is unethical and immoral not to mention completely unacceptable in my eyes.