Atchafalaya

In Southern Louisiana, where the people cook with spices hotter than the mid-day sun and speak in a French tongue as bumpy as the rutted country lanes, over 5 and a half thousand square kilometres the Atchafalaya Basin creates the largest swamp area of continental North America. Hard to access in its deepest pockets, the swamp is home to a great array of birds, from the ruby red cardinal dotting the shrubbery like pinpoints on felt to the long-legged, stalking white heron that find their morning catch on water sprinkled by dawn’s first light and the majestic bald eagle.

Like groves planted by an ancient culture, the cypress trees stand row on row, the columns of an edifice whose ceiling is made of branches intertwined, light filtering through to gild the emerald brocade hangings sweeping the jade-coloured marble floor below. Gliding through on a small boat, engine off, there is a calm emanating from the black water whose bottom one can’t see but out of which the scales of an alligator emerge at times, a few air bubbles betraying their presence and a glinting golden eye, soon to disappear again like the splashing catfish and the turtle jumping off a rotting branch.

Deeper into the thicket, moss builds a waving curtain swept aside to open a new chamber and then another yet again, creating a rambling temple that keeps building itself as plants grow until in the very centre, a young tree stands on its own, surrounded by its peers as if it were somehow special. 

A kingfisher darts past like a jester with no reverence to the voodoo priestess that may reign here. 

Where the river turns lake, the thicket becomes less dense and from one blink to the next, the landscape changes. This is where osprey call in alarm to ward off from their chicks, the red-shouldered hawk sits still, considering the geese young chicks as the sun lessens and ibis crisscross high above, their soft white wings rising over the watery wilderness as the setting sun paints the tree-line with abundance.