Balance

KEDM Public Radio | By Kelby Ouchley

Published September 16, 2019 at 1:41 PM EDT

For the last six weeks, I have dwelled in places where the word "bayou" is unfamiliar to most people. Maps of the region are absent the names "D'Arbonne," "de L'Outre." "Teche, and the like. There are no such streams with their characteristic side-dressing of cypress trees and Spanish moss for a thousand miles. No alligators or alligator gar, no accompanying summer humidity to smother the aspirations of even the native-born.

It is not as if those distant places lack surface water. Though scare when compared to our
saturated landscapes, it exists in geologically young channels with tails atop snow-capped
mountains and sweeps downward through sagebrush desert yielding more elevation in a mile
than our bayous in their entirety.

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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