A very pleasant gathering of 26 people met for our Q2 Member’s meeting events on Saturday May 23 at Black Bayou Lake National Wildlife Refuge’s Conservation Learning Center to embark on a tour with celebrated nature writer and Wildlife Protected Area Manager, Kelby Ouchley. You will likely have heard him read on KDEM radio from his magnificent Bayoudiversity books, or indeed read these and/or his other excellent books and his Facebook posts. Kelby has been recognized and awarded for his remarkable conservation and environmental education work with Caroline Dormon Outstanding Louisiana Naturalist.
I think it’s not an overstatement to regard him as a principal architect of NELA’s Black Bayou Lake, Tensas River and Upper Ouachita National Wildlife Refuges, arguably some of the best in the USA! Formerly a refuge manager for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service he currently manages the Heartwood Natural Area in Rocky Branch. He and his brother Keith planted about 4 million trees in the Upper Ouachita NWR the largest restoration project of it’s kind in the USA!
So, you’ll understand what a massive privilege it was for us then to accompany him as he showed us around the now well-established arboretum at Black Bayou Lake National Wildlife Refuge that he created.
Kelby is a dynamic narrator with a lively, gravelly voice perfectly suited to a raconteur from the red hills of Rocky Branch by Bayou D’Arbonne. He led us out to the Blue Goose weather-vane and under a sunny blue sky began his tour with a brief explanation of an arboretum as a collection of woody plants and trees and shrubs, usually deliberately planted, but sometimes, including naturally occurring plants on the site that is used for education and research purposes, the Missouri Arboretum, the Smithsonian National Arboretum and Hilltop in Baton Rouge are exemplars.
He said we need to understand that all the land around us was cotton fields, “so we had a blank slate to create any kind of educational facilities that we wanted out here. My objective was to at least make an effort to exhibit one of every species of plant native to this part of Louisiana. I soon found out that was a pretty hard thing to do. There are somewhere between 200 and 250 species of woody plant native to this part of Louisiana.”
He bought trees from all over the place, a lot coming from a particular nursery in central Louisiana. He dug up trees with tree spades from other parts of the refuge and located them on the mounds created from the excavation of the pond, and the trails. They knew from the very beginning that not all would survive because they were so far out of their natural habitat – the soil type, the moisture levels etc. that they couldn’t survive, but they wanted to see what would happen. Kelby used about 125 different species of plants, some were very unusual, most of them were associated with this part of the trail, but some others he planted on another trail nearby. They nurtured them and irrigated them, but some died within 3 months. They planted them on several occasions, some of them took, some of them didn’t. They learned as they went on, some of them died. As they expected, some of them weren’t going to make it, others took a lot of care.
He prepared us with the words “Bear in mind as you walk around here, that about 22 years ago you’d be walking through a flat cotton field. These mounds here, came out of the pond… All this land is Federal land, part of the Black Bayou Lake Wildlife Refuge which is a unit of the National Wildlife Refuge System. There are over 500 in the country and in general they’re very special places. I’m not going to spend a lot of time identifying trees when there’s a sign right there with it’s name on it. As we get on this trail here, you’re going to see that a lot of them are all coming to pieces and are a bit neglected.”
The first tree he led us to was a very healthy, lush green, and he drew our attention to its green, base-ball-sized knobbly fruit which he said would grow the same size again in time. He showed us an Ossage Orange fruit from the tree which is known locally as Bodok, Bodark or “Bois d’arc” for native Americans used the wood for bows. He described the wood as an attractive yellow color. It is not originally from the area but from Texas, along stream banks. Native Americans and settlers introduced it for various reasons. It makes very dense hedges and you could plant a dense row of it to corral your cattle. For this it was known as ‘Bull-tight’. He says almost nothing will eat it except squirrels! He warned us to avoid any of the caustic sap that exuded from the fruit. It is also known as “Horse Apple”. One thing you’ll learn about taxonomy he says is that where-ever you go you’ll find a different name for the same plant! There was a discussion of Hagen’s Sphinx caterpillar’s Ceratomia hageni association with the tree.
Next he showed us ‘The Grancy Graybeard’ or Fringe Tree. That he identified as more of a hill-country type of tree, seen more often on the west side of the Ouachita River, that earlier in Spring has a delightful big snowball of frilly flowers on it. Distinguishing characteristics include black petioles (the leaf stems) and opposite leaves. This one has no fruit and it could be a male, but Kelby cautioned that a lot of trees are so stressed-out that they don’t produce fruit. It could be temperature stress, water stress or soil compaction.
We then crossed the road and passed the arboretum sign to stand beside some oak trees. We learned that one of the dominant plants growing in Louisiana historically everywhere in Louisiana, except the marshland in the deep south is the oak. There are about 30 or so species in Louisiana and half a dozen of them are very dominant.
Kelby applied a useful analogy often used in Ecology to think of where oaks like to live as like a mountain, so we begin at the base layer the bottomland, taking for example D’Arbonne swamp, where it’s mostly swampy and the first oak is Overcup (Quercus lyrata). Then the mountain rises about a foot or two in Louisiana (we all chuckled at this) and you have the Willow Oaks (Quercus phellos) and then further up the gradient you’ve got Nuttall’s Oak (Quercus texana) , also known as striped oaks, and Water Oaks (Quercus nigra)and on riverbanks you’ll have Cherrybark Oaks (Quercus nigra). Blackjack Oaks (Quercus marilandica) live at the very driest parts and you can see them in Shreveport and Kisatchie National Forest, they grow on “tops of the Louisiana mountains” hills and ridges.
Kelby showed next showed us the Bitternut Hickory (Carya cordiformis) aka the Swamp Hickory. He reached down and plucked up a couple of nuts from the grass to show us. Wood ducks love these, he smiled at our amazement, duck gizzards can crack them! He’s had a lot of ducks with these in their gizzards.
Next, we moved on to the shade arbor, here he said he planted six grape species to show the local varieties including Muscadine (Vitis rotundifolia) and Summer Grapes (Vitis aestivalis). Since then there’s been some ‘hanky-panky’ and they’ve hybridized and we’ve got some sort of generic grape dominating.
Further along the path where it bends right to enter the woodland we caught a fleeting view of an escaping Western Ribbon Snake. Here Kelby reviewed that he had planted 125 different types of trees and they pretty much immediately lost about 20 and then overtime they lost more with cutbacks of staff and funding over the years. Originally there were more species on the mounds. Some of these losses were inevitable, but most weren’t. Where we once had three types of Locust trees now there’s just one standing.
These trees are at most 25 years old. He cautioned us that we’ll see labels here that don’t match the trees that stand behind them. “The tree that was there has up and died, and a freeloader has come in!”
For example he showed us a sign saying Ti- ti tree, these like wet conditions, and in its place there now stands a Persimmon that seed very freely.
Further down the path he paused by the Cottonwood trees, saying these are an early successional stage tree that might be seen along riverbanks where light seeds of the Cottonwood have blown in and germinated in the sand, likewise with Willow seeds. Eastern Cottonwood’s (Populus deltoides) leaves quake due to their flattened petioles. When the wind catches the leaves they shimmer like a poplar and he gave us a demonstration. The other kind of cottonwood, the Swamp cottonwood’s (P. heterophylla) leaves don’t quake due to their round shape.
Somebody asked Kelby whether the pine trees were planted at the back of the refuge deliberately. He answered no, they didn’t plant any pine. All the seeds came in naturally and it’s amazing how many pines are out there.
At this juncture, we saw classic armadillo rootings in the leaves; it looked like someone had just raked the leaves back in a broad area. Kelby said this looks very different to hog rootlings, which are much deeper and hogs are a serious problem in Louisiana. At this stage, the party surveyed ice storm damage.
Next he paused before a group of Ash trees and identified them as White Ash. Some were bare branched another had few leaves. It was clear they were sick. Only 20% of plants have opposite limbs and twigs, White Ash do. They also have compound leaves with leaflets. There’s a gland at the base of the true leaf.
We looked up into the branches and took in their bare branches.Kelby told us that 95% of all Ash trees in North America have been hit by the Emerald Ash Borer Beetles.
Sassafras trees have suffered similarly. Kelby says it seems like there’s something like this for each tree. Dogwood Anthracnose struck 15 to 20 years ago and wiped out a lot of the dogwood trees. They are coming back now thankfully. Things are attacking hickory, there’s oak decline, Sassafras has gone mostly. Invaders have occurred throughout history, but historically this was over a much longer period. Pathogenic insects couldn’t have lived in some areas where they do now because of the warmer winters.
We moved on to the pine trees. Louisiana has five species of pine, native Loblolly, Short leaf, Long leaf, Spruce, and Slash pine. Longleaf Pines traditionally lived in central Louisiana around Kisatchie and were locally dominant with a special type of ecosystem that was fire dependent.
Slash Pines look sort of like Longleaf, but their needles aren’t as long. They were often planted by timber companies because they were fast growing in the 1960s and 1950s. Across the Ouachita River on the western side in the hills, the predominant pine is Shortlleaf. Driving through the tree farms on the way to Shreveport you’re really looking at pine plantations, Kelby tells us. Many of them are almost as sterile as cotton fields.
People think “there’s a nice forest”, but it’s not ideal for wildlife because people eliminated hardwood. Forest pines are planted in rows and cut down in 14 years then planted again in rows. Where clear-cutting took place forests rich in warblers and herps were cut down. Kelby says when you pass a 1000-yard clear cut, just stop and think how many warbler nests would that have supported, not to mention all the other species that it supported. In the 1970s during the soybean craze, you could have 150 acres of Woodland cleared in a day by rows of caterpillar vehicles, people got up in arms, and so we have refugees like this one.
Shortleaf pines are Kelby’s favorite pine woods. It was native to the area, dispersed with hardwood, very fire tolerant, and tended to thrive with fire.
I asked Kelby if you had a volunteer core of say 5 to 10 people to help work in the Arboretum what would you like them to do? He said it would be great. They could clean up some of the mess, prune, and keep the trails clean.
Next we came to some badly beaten up Beech trees. He said he was very surprised that these grew because they are way off-side. You didn’t see many Beeches on the eastern side of the Ouachita river, there are some on top of the Bastrop ridge, but these are very common in the Upland forest on the western side of the river and made good habitat, offering wildlife food.
When we came to live Oaks, which have suffered from the ice storm, he said these are not native to this part of Louisiana, originally they didn’t occur north of Alexandria.
We moved onto the stretch of Canebreak. Kelby said Canebreaks were historically very important components of bottomland hardwood forest in the lower Mississippi Valley. They were the home of Bachman‘s Warbler. Canebreak is fire dependent. It comes in after fires and provided home for bears amongst other things. Teddy Roosevelt hunted in Canebreaks. It was his favorite habitat.
Canebreak used to be common habitat and valuable for wildlife. What led to the Canebreak’s demise? Forest wasn’t originally considered to be an asset. It was hard to clear for farming. Canebreak tends to grow on slightly higher ridges in the swamp, more desirable real estate. A family coming to settle, where are they going to go? It’s a lot easier to clear Canebrakes than oaks. This needs the trees removed from it.
After this Kelby showed us some flowering Basswood, saying it makes a great carving wood for decoys and such like.
There are two species of Pawpaw in Louisiana. The most common variety, Asima triloba, is larger and has the largest fruit of any plant in North America. They are easy to grow and make a good understory tree in people’s gardens, the fruit is astringent like papaya and has a custard flavor. Dwarf Paw Paws are less common. This is the food plant for Zebra Swallowtail butterfly caterpillars and so is crucial habitat.
When asked about the validity of an adopt-a-trail scheme, Kelby said, please adopt an Arboretum, work through Friends of black Bayou. They have money for benches and things. He said he would be glad to help provide some direction. It doesn’t have to be too labor-intensive once the place has been brought back to a good state. It wouldn’t take much to maintain it. A couple of days a year, probably!
At this point we thanked Kelby heartily and went in to the Conservation Learning Center to learn about Grey Foxes from ULM Postgrad researcher Catrina Weiner.
From Catrina we learned about Grey Foxes (Urocyon cinereoargenteus), about their differing physiology between stubbier Eastern populations and more graceful long-legged Western populations, their life-style, habits, reproduction, denning, and distribution patterns within the Americas and in Louisiana. It was fascinating to learn about the distribution patterns within habitats shared by their predators such as coyotes, and how they use temporal as well as spatial avoidance to minimize contact with Coyotes, Bobcats and domestic dogs.
We were greatly impressed by the extent of her research. She has put Louisiana’s Gray Foxes on the map providing data via camera trapping where before there was none.
Her presentation was so fluent, lucid and interesting that I think it would make a great show for the wider LMNA audience.
Following this we held a brief Q2 Members’ Meeting. You can find it described in this document:
