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Noise

Ouchley
K. Ouchley

It is quiet here now on the edge of this swamp, quiter than it has been in many years. Perhaps the level of background noise approached that when my father was a boy here 75 years ago. I live in the woods off a rural parish road and almost two miles from a major highway. Even so, typically a steady barrage of traffic sounds - mainly from log trucks on the highway - filters through the trees to persist as an annonying backdrop.

Kelby was a biologist and manager of National Wildlife Refuges for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for more than 30 years. He has worked with alligators in gulf coast marshes and Canada geese on Hudson Bay tundra. His most recent project was working with his brother Keith of the Louisiana Nature Conservancy on the largest floodplain restoration project in the Mississippi River Basin at the Mollicy Unit of the Upper Ouachita National Wildlife Refuge, reconnecting twenty-five square miles of former floodplain forest back to the Ouachita River.
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