NPR News, Classical and Music of the Delta
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations
Ouchley

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.

Kelby was instrumental in the the establishment of Black Bayou Lake National Wildlife Refuge and its development as a premier environmental education site. Kelby has an undergraduate degree in Wildlife Biology and a graduate degree in Wildlife and Fisheries Science from Texas A&M University.

In 2011 he collected his essays that have aired on KEDM into the book Bayou-Diversity: Nature and People in the Louisiana Bayou Country. He is also the author of Flora and Fauna of the Civil War: an Environmental Reference Guide, Iron Branch: A Civil War Tale of a Woman In BetweenAmerican Alligator – Ancient Predator in the Modern Worldas well as many scientific and popular articles. Among other honors Kelby recently received the National Wildlife Federation Governor's Conservationist of the Year Award.

He and his wife Amy live in the woods near Rocky Branch, Louisiana, in a cypress house surrounded by white oaks and black hickories. Kelby's website is bayou-diversity.com.

  • Thank you, O Lord, in this bountiful season for the five senses to relish your world.Thank you for the succulent smells of the fruits of the earth in the…
  • Just after daybreak on this unreasonably cool, late August morning we walked to the Wreck, a hike that traversed two ecosystems, and witnessed a bit of…
  • There is obviously some truth in the old adage "out of sight, out of mind." Humans are a visual species with large areas of our brain dedicated to…
  • A boyhood on the edge of Louisiana swamp is fraught with danger, some real but most imagined. An example of the latter occurred when as adolescents my…
  • Connections are a common theme on this program. We've talked about broad connections such as those linking clean water to healthy fish, wildlife, and…
  • Writing of the carnage at Vicksburg during the Civil War, a teenage girl living near what is now West Monroe made an interesting natural history…
  • On this place where we live and that we call Heartwood, Rocky Branch flows intermittently throughout the year. With the shallow water table beneath its…
  • Small steps can make a big difference in retirement planning.Dee Lay and his wife (Fee Lay, of course!) arrive at age 66, trying to figure out if they can…
  • On the surface, it doesn't seem possible. How can we catch all the fish in the seas? Analogies do exist. Bison were once the most numerous single species…
  • During the Yazoo Pass expedition of the Civil War, Union Admiral Porter wrote that his flagship Cincinnati ran into a six-hundred-yard bed of willows…