Falling Tree

KEDM Public Radio | By Kelby Ouchley

Published January 8, 2019 at 2:20 PM EST

The days of this tree are numbered and she won't likely last the winter. This prognosis is not arboreal soothsaying but rather the physics involved in supporting upright tons of wood fiber. Already she cants thirty degrees northwest and half her root system is embarrassingly exposed to all. Erosion, that hissing wave of gravity-fueled fluid that drags the main channel of the Mississippi River dozens of lateral miles across its floodplain like a writhing cottonmouth, works 24/7 on Bayou D'Arbonne also. It broke the anchor chains of this overcup oak.

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Kelby Ouchley

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.

See stories by Kelby Ouchley