North on the Wing

by Bruce M. Beehler

Oakley House, in the early Federal style, is handsomely proportioned and clad in white clapboard. Set in a small clearing at the end of the long, winding driveway, it is distinguished by its two floors of porches and its wooden-slat jalousies, set to block the summer sun. The house is bracketed by several large, spreading Live Oaks, and great Southern Magnolias stand guard near the front porch. Oakley’s interior, restored to reflect its appearance at the time when Audubon stayed here, conveys both rural wealth and lived-in practicality. The three-story home contains seventeen rooms, with front and side entrances leading to the landscaped grounds, shaded by oak and Crape Myrtles. It is flanked by formal gardens and several period outbuildings that contribute to the sense of a lost time and place, and a small, understated accompanying museum. The grounds also include a nature trail through the forested reaches of the hundred-acre property. Restoration and maintenance of the estate have been ongoing challenges; Hurricane Katrina blew out many of the upper-story windows and knocked down scores of trees on the grounds in 2005.

  Oakley Plantation, Saint Francisville, Louisiana

  Construction began on the house in 1799 when Ruffin Gray, a successful planter from Natchez, Mississippi, moved here onto land he purchased from the Spanish authorities (yes, this still was part of Spain’s territory at the time). Gray died before his house was finished, and his widow, Lucy Alston, oversaw its completion. She later married James Pirrie, an immigrant from Scotland, and Eliza, their daughter, was born here in 1805. Eliza Pirrie’s educational needs eventually brought Audubon to the household. In the 1820s, Audubon and his family made a living not only through tutoring but also by painting portraits and doing other odd jobs among the wealthy planters of Louisiana and Mississippi, particularly in New Orleans, Saint Francisville, and Natchez. It was in the forests and swamps near the Mississippi that Audubon observed and collected the birds appearing in a number of the color plates of his masterwork, Birds of America. Today the house’s main rooms feature Audubon prints of birds he painted here in West Feliciana Parish.

  In 1821, Audubon took up residence at Oakley as tutor to fifteen-year-old Eliza. His contract required him to spend half of each day tutoring the girl, but the rest of the day he was free to explore the woods and paint the birds he encountered and collected. Audubon’s stay at Oakley House did not last terribly long because of a family misunderstanding (it seems Eliza may have become overly enamored of her dashing tutor). Nonetheless, Audubon spent, on and off, more than eight years based out of West Feliciana Parish, and while he was here he painted as many as eighty species for the double-elephant folio Birds of America. Saint Francisville, then, was one of the most important places for Audubon as he created his magnum opus. Aside from Oakley, he spent time at Beech Woods Plantation, among other places, and it was during this period that Audubon committed to having his great ornithological opus produced in England, with his painted images reproduced by the renowned engraver Robert Havell.

  Bird species illustrated by Audubon in West Feliciana Parish include the Swallow-tailed Kite, Pine Warbler, Pileated Woodpecker, and Red-shouldered Hawk. As highlighted by Mary Durant in On the Road with John James Audubon, Audubon and his assistant, George Mason, also illustrated in the book’s plates many of the more interesting local plants, including Cross Vine, Jessamine, Toadshade, Red Buckeye, Rose Vervain, and Silver Bells. According to Durant, Audubon himself took little interest in the flora except to liven up his bird compositions, and thus Mason did the lion’s share of such work for the master.

  After my tour of Oakley House and its grounds, I understood why Audubon loved this landscape. It includes a diversity of natural environments, both upland and bottomland, and the culture and wealth of the plantation families made for a pleasurable lifestyle, something for which Audubon had a taste. Of course, Audubon was also a wanderer, and he traveled much of the length and breadth of the continent, from Key West north to Newfoundland and west to the upper Missouri River. But certainly he undertook the preponderance of his fieldwork and painting in the Mississippi drainage between Louisville and New Orleans.

  Just as Audubon stopped over in various homes here in West Feliciana Parish, many species of migrant songbird arrive here in late April and either nest in the area or briefly rest and refuel for the next flight northward. This is important songbird country either way; in every direction from where I stood at Oakley Plantation were tracts of forest teeming with birds in passage, at the height of spring.

  STOPOVER ECOLOGY

  A number of the warbler species I was following breed in the Great North Woods, north of the headwaters of the Mississippi. Each spring, to get to that distant boreal breeding habitat, these birds need to make a series of flights up the Mississippi Flyway, each flight followed by a stopover of one or more days of rest and refueling in a patch of woods midcontinent. I myself was stopping at the forested sites used as stopovers by the migrating birds.

  For a forest-dwelling songbird, each stopover lasts several days. First, while still high in the sky, the bird locates a suitable patch of woods at the end of a night’s migration flight. The bird drops into the woods as first light approaches. Once in that patch, it must find a safe roosting place hidden within the trees. It must then find water for drinking and bathing. And, finally, it needs to forage productively by sallying out from its roosting place. Thus the tasks facing the songbird midmigration include predator avoidance, drinking, bathing, feeding, sleeping, and preening. Each stopover may also include competition from resident species as well as other migrants, and there is some indication that stopover patches are sometimes depleted of food resources by the presence of too many feeding birds.

  As we have seen, the availability of rich woodland patches along the Gulf Coast for first landfall stopovers is strictly limited and probably on the decrease because of hurricane impacts and coastal development. This makes the interior sites all that more important, as passage migrants need to make up for energetic losses incurred in the trans-Gulf flight as well as the brief coastal stopover. That is why the birds are in such a hurry to get to the interior, where they can feed aggressively and gain the weight needed for subsequent flights north. Much of the lower Mississippi bottomlands have been cleared over the past century for row-crop agriculture, but large swaths of seasonally flooded swamplands remain wooded, with little likelihood of future development. Some of these economically unproductive lands are now formally protected. The big question is whether these extant bottomland forests provide adequate stopover habitat for the tens of millions of songbirds passing northward each year. Is there a habitat bottleneck between the birds’ wintering and summering sites? That question has not yet been answered fully by conservation biologists.

  LAKE BRUIN AND THE MOUND-BUILDING CULTURES

  Departing Saint Francisville, I drive north across the state line into rural southwestern Mississippi and the low, forested Tunica Hills—the south-westernmost vestiges of the Appalachians and only a couple of miles as the crow flies from the main stem of the Mississippi. I visit Clark’s Creek Natural Area for morning birding and continue northward toward my next camping spot. Passing country churches nearly every mile, I travel through another of Audubon’s stomping grounds—Natchez, Mississippi—before crossing Old Man River back into northeastern Louisiana and into the flat delta lands that hold my next destination, Lake Bruin State Park.

  The Tunica Hills of Mississippi are perfect wood warbler breeding habitat: well-watered foothills with tall forest graced with a rich green understory. From bottom to top, this mature forest provides a lush breeding environment for warblers. Nestled in these hills, Clark’s Creek Natural Area is almost impossibly difficult to locate but well worth the effort. With deep, shaded glens filled with tall oaks, beeches, hickories, and ashes, it reminded me of the woods around Great Falls, Virginia. Spring butterflies—the Questionmark, the Zebra Swallowtail, the Giant Swallowtail—fluttered in the tree openings, and Summer Tanagers and Yellow-throated Vireos sang. Here I located four more quest birds on th
eir breeding habitat: the Louisiana Waterthrush and Worm-eating, Hooded, and Black-and-white Warblers. My tally now stood at six breeding wood warblers.

  Black-and-white Warbler

  The cryptic, sparrow-plumaged Louisiana Waterthrush hunts along the verges of clear-flowing woodland interior streams, wagging its tail as it paces the wet spots in search of insect prey. Its strident and ringing song, which carries far through this environment, starts with clear musical slurs and ends in a jumble of chattering notes. This is the southern species of waterthrush, with a breeding range confined to the eastern United States. It winters from Mexico to Venezuela.

  The plain but handsome Worm-eating Warbler is a foraging specialist, searching inside curled dead leaves in the understory for hidden arthropods. Its black-striped head gives it a distinctive look, and its rattled song signals its presence in mature deciduous forest. Breeding in the eastern United States and wintering from the Caribbean islands to Panama, it is another ground nester. Singing sweetly from the higher interior saplings, the Hooded Warbler male sports a yellow face, black cowl, olive upper parts, and bright-yellow breast, and it too breeds only in the eastern United States, wintering through the Caribbean and into Central America. When one finds a patch of forest with both the Hooded and the Worm-eating on territory, this indicates quality forest habitat.

  Finally, high in large canopy branches, the creeperlike Black-and-white Warbler sings its lisping song while searching bark crevices. The male is crisply patterned in black and white, without the splashes of color found in many warbler plumages. The species breeds as far north as the Northwestern Territory of Canada and winters south as far as Peru. It prefers the canopy of large trees for its foraging, but it nests in leaf litter on the ground.

  It was places such as Clark’s Creek that I was targeting on my journey—gorgeous green spaces with singing warblers tucked away out of sight. From Clark’s Creek, I headed north and west to another such place, Lake Bruin, an oxbow lake of the Mississippi lying about a mile north of the small agricultural town of Saint Joseph, Louisiana. Sixty-four-acre Lake Bruin State Park is tiny but picturesque, sandwiched between the lake and the great river. Here the rich black bottomland earth is spread as flat as a billiard table, waiting to be planted with soybeans, cotton, milo, or corn. Two things break the monotony of the flat land: to the east rises the massive grass-covered earthen levee constructed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to hold the Mississippi within its banks, and a bit north, near Newellton, rise three fifteen-foot Balmoral Indian mounds, remnants of the Mound-Building Native American culture that produced curious earthworks throughout the eastern and central United States a couple of centuries before the arrival of Columbus. Together the structures are an intriguing historical echo: precolonial Native Americans made riverside earthworks that foreshadowed the great earthworks later constructed by the Corps.

  The Native American mounds were built for religious, funeral, or cultural reasons, but the levee was constructed for flood control. The levee is the most prodigious human earthwork ever constructed, spanning thousands of miles. As Alan Lomax wrote: “The levee is unobtrusive, since its slope is green and gradual, but in fact it is immense—higher and longer than the Great Wall of China….It was the principal human response to the titanic power of the great river.”

  Just outside the entrance to Lake Bruin State Park, a small gravel road took me to the levee crest. I drove carefully up to its flat top and found a well-maintained single-lane dirt road that followed the flat top of the berm. From atop the levee I gazed down to the muddy river, running high and flooding the maple-dominated riverbank forest just below me. From here, I appreciated just how big the levee actually is. In this flat land, its summit provides a view far and wide across a mix of river, swamp, forest, and rural agricultural landscape. I could see the church steeples of Saint Joseph a few miles to the south, and I finally understood what Don McLean was talking about in his ballad “American Pie”—a teenager could indeed bring a Chevy up here to hang out on a lazy Saturday afternoon or evening, drinking and passing the time.

  Tall oaks and Sweetgums dominated the state park, a mecca for local bass fisherman because of its access to the blackwater oxbow lake that forms the park’s western boundary. It was an ideal spot to set a tent for several days and gain my bearings in the interior bottomland delta country of the Deep South. A Barred Owl hooted in the afternoon daylight, and a Northern Mockingbird sang from afternoon into the night, illuminated by a full moon.

  THE TENSAS AND THE U.S. ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS

  In the morning, I rise to a cacophony of bird sound—Northern Cardinals, Tufted Titmice, Carolina Wrens, and Mockingbirds, all local resident species. On an early-morning bike ride around the small park’s road network, I encounter flocks of Chipping Sparrows foraging on the ground in clearings among the campsites, readying themselves for their flight to breeding grounds in the Mid-Atlantic states or farther north. A flock of fifteen Indigo Buntings forages in an empty parking lot beside the water. White-throated Sparrows, perhaps on their way to the Adirondacks to nest, scuff in dried leaves under small thickets. Nesting Red-headed Woodpeckers chivvy in the oaks overhead.

  I was in northeastern Louisiana to explore the forests and birdlife of the Tensas (pronounced “TEN-saw”) River. But first I checked out nearby Saint Joseph, an antiquated low-country hamlet with an unusual feature: its little main street comes to an abrupt end where it meets the high levee of the Mississippi. It looks as if the great river has cut off the eastern part of the town. The levee was constructed, one presumes, to keep the rest of town from being gobbled up by the wandering river.

  The levee rising above the eastern verge of Saint Joseph is part of a network of earthworks that seeks to keep the Mississippi within its historical course and to protect floodplain communities such as this one from catastrophic inundations. This earthen structure is about fifty feet high and about twice as wide at its base. More than 3,600 miles of levees have been constructed in the Mississippi drainage by the ever-busy Army Corps of Engineers, and one of the hydrological problems created by such systems is that the confinement of the river between two earthen barriers prevents the river from overflowing and dropping its silt onto floodplains during periods of high water. Instead, the silt sinks to the bottom of the main flow of the river and actually raises the river in its own course. This has most famously happened in the city of New Orleans, which now lies below the level of the flowing river. In fact, this has happened all along the Mississippi wherever there are levees; here at Lake Bruin, the river nearly breached the levee in 1991. Thus, decade after decade, the levees sow the seeds of their own destruction and generate a need for more and bigger fixes by the Corps. Because of its claims of economic necessity and the indisputable vulnerability of riverside communities, the Corps gets its way; congressionally authorized funds for its expensive engineering projects are spent in local districts, so there are many winners, who in turn become noisy boosters for the Corps’ next projects. The losers are, of course, the general public, wild nature, and agriculture, which is deprived of all the fertile topsoil that, without the levees, would be spread back onto farm fields in the floods of spring.

  Founded in 1802, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, with more than thirty-seven thousand civilian and military employees, is the most influential federal government agency overseeing the management of America’s rivers, estuaries, and coastlines. The Corps was responsible for the construction of the Panama Canal, the Bonneville Dam, the Washington Monument, and, of course, the management of the Mississippi as a critical industrial waterway. The Corps owns and operates 609 dams, 257 navigation locks, 75 hydroelectric plants, 12,000 miles of navigation channels, and 926 harbors across North America. It dredges 255 million cubic yards of sedimented muck per annum and stores 329 million acre-feet of water in reservoirs. The Corps, then, following its mandate of improved commerce, flood control, and energy generation, has changed the face of America’s natural waterways and conducted
engineering experiments on some of the most important freshwater ecosystems in North America. To many Americans, the Corps is synonymous with environmentally questionable boondoggles. The levee system that failed in 2005 during Hurricane Katrina, flooding the city of New Orleans, epitomizes the overexpenditure and underperformance of this massive federal bureaucracy. The next big failure is expected to be the Old River Control Structure in central Louisiana, which currently prevents the Mississippi from changing course and following the Atchafalaya to the Gulf. That failure, when it happens, will dwarf the economic impact of Katrina.

  ECHOES OF THE IVORY-BILL

  My tent site at Lake Bruin was about a quarter mile from the big, grassy levee that hems in the west bank of the Mississippi. If I squinted, I could just make out the high green berm through the oaks. But if I drove west about fifteen miles, I would enter the watershed of the Tensas River, the last bastion of a near-mythical bird. Anyone who has read Arthur Cleveland Bent’s Life Histories of North American Woodpeckers or James Tanner’s The Ivory-Billed Woodpecker will recognize the name of the Tensas River, in the heart of delta country. The Tensas is where Tanner studied the last known breeding population of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers, America’s largest and most strikingly patterned woodpecker, from 1937 to 1939. Being a woodpecker fanatic as a preteen, I’d first read Bent and Tanner in the early 1960s. The crisp monochrome images of the magnificent woodpeckers at their nest hole in a big Red Maple, photographed by Arthur Allen and published in the Bent and Tanner volumes, are among the most iconic photos in all of American ornithology.

  Until the late 1930s, the Tensas was still dominated by grand forest and wooded swamps, with remnant populations of Black Bear, Cougar, and Red Wolf as well as the Ivory-bill. President Theodore Roosevelt had hunted swamp-dwelling Black Bear in the Tensas Bayou, just north of Tallulah, in 1907. Guided by Ben Lilly and Holt Collier, the president and his party decamped from their train at Stamboul, Louisiana, a far cry from a tourist destination at the time of their visit. Only a wilderness fanatic like Roosevelt would have had the urge to battle the briars and chiggers and ticks and Cottonmouths in search of a southern swamp bear. At that time, the only other reason to visit here was to search for Ivory-billed Woodpeckers, for this was the last place they lived in numbers. Roosevelt later wrote: