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Family fun awaits you this Saturday at Black Bayou Lake!

A variety of family friendly activities are scheduled 10 a.m. until 2 p.m., including: free fish fry, canoeing, butterfly release, nature hikes, animal exhibits, button making, face painting, GPS activities, birdhouse building… and much more. So come on out and bring the kids and grandkids.

New this year is the 5K Trail Run, which begins at the Lake at 8:30 a.m. You can find out all about it and pre-reigster online here. Please know that this run is open to all ages and abilities, so don’t hesitate to sign up. Your $30 fee includes a t-shirt and other race bling.

Louisiana Master Naturalists will have a table at Fall Celebration, so come on out and learn more about us. It’s a beautiful time of year at Black Bayou!

Fall Celebration is an annual event sponsored by Friends of Black Bayou Lake National Wildlife Refuge.

Dr. Johnny Armstrong and his family own Wafer Creek Ranch, designated by the Louisiana Natural Heritage Program as a Registered Natural Area. Dr. Armstrong is working with The Nature Conservancy to restore the shortleaf pine community (nearly extinct in Louisiana) on the property.

The Nature Conservancy speaks of Wafer Creek Ranch as “a great example of private landowner restoration.” LaTech faculty and students have worked with Dr. Armstrong documenting birds on the property, beginning a plant inventory, conducting a soil lab, and more.

Dr. Armstrong will speak at 5:30 p.m. at the dedication and naming of Lomax Hall Auditorium on the LaTech campus this Thursday, Oct. 5. Dr. Terri Maness, a member of Louisiana Master Naturalists – Northeast and a biology faculty member at La Tech, made sure we got invited. I plan to be there, and hope some of you can be there, too.

The photo above comes from “Road Tripping in Louisiana,” a slideshow on The Nature Conservancy website.

LMN – Northeast Board member Jeff Barnhill took a spin through the Upper Ouachita NWR Mollicy Unit one of our beautiful sunny days last week, and was rewarded by this incredible view.

The Mollicy Unit of the Upper Ouachita NWR is a restoration project. This was a floodplain of the Ouachita River before it was cleared for agriculture. Although soybeans and rice were grown here for a number of years, the land was too low and flooded too readily to be great for agriculture. It is being restored to floodplain by a partnership between the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and The Conservation Fund’s ®Go Zero Fund.

The Mollicy Unit is apparently named for Mollicy Bayou that runs through it, but… that just begs the question for me. Is “Mollicy” a family name of some of the people who settled this area? If you know anything about it, please comment below.

Helianthus is a genus of many species. Perhaps the best way to identify H. angustifolia is by the thread-like leaves.

And then there’s Bidens, a member of the Aster family (Asteraceae), which everyone knows you need a microscope to divide into species. So I’m not going to go there!

Many thanks for the lovely photos, Jeff.

If you’d like to contribute to the LMN – NE blog, send me your quality photos and info, and I’ll shape them into a post.