Louisiana Swamps

On Wednesday last, Frank and I joined the LSU group and to Laplace to take a Swamp Tour at Cajun Pride.  It had been a while since Frank and I had been on that Swamp Tour so we were eager to see the place again.  It had doubled in size and added 4 new buildings and become so very commercial.  LOL, hasn't everything?


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So this was the first thing I saw...…..I wouldn't think to turn my back on a gator, and heaven knows I would never tease one...….look at those tiny legs, your momma was a T-Rex HA HA!  Nope, not into teasing the gators!














Luckily, we all came back with all our limbs.

People here do eat a lot of gator though.  The tail meat is said to, yep, taste like chicken.

This 4 footer was the first one we saw.  Captain Tom said the older ones are already burrowing up into the swamp to wait out winter.

They are cold blooded so they need to soak up the heat of the day.

This one was about 4 feet and said to be 4 years.  I am thinking that they grow about a foot a year.











This is a Louisiana Tri-Colored Heron.  I had never heard of one before.






the plants below are palmetto trees.  They grow everywhere in the swampy or damp areas that have solid ground.  Which is pretty much everywhere.

This is what a 4 foot gator looks like swimming in the water.  Their little t-Rex legs kinda fold up against their bodies and only their tails move.

Silent death.
















This is a white Egret.  We have lots of them in the South.  They probably go further north as well, I think Carol in Vermont has done some photos and quilts with egrets, if I remember correctly.

Nice lunch for a baby gator.


Map.  Gotta have a map somewhere.

The waterway is called a bayou.  However, the logging companies at the turn of the century dug these canals off the bayous to float out the cypress log they cut down.


When I was very young we would drive through this area to Middendorf's Restaurant with my parents.  The huge cypress trees were thick and 50 -60 feet tall.  Now there are so few left.  The canals allowed the salt water to infuse into the bayous and swamps.

Killed all the trees.  Now the swamp water is brackish water, a mix of salt and fresh waters.







Here is another baby gator.  We saw about 20 of them.  you can see him neatly folded up and swimming silently.

Gives me the creepy crawlies to see an alligator.


When the Cajuns who lived in the swamps died, they buried their dead on higher land.  This is the muds that were dredged out to create the canal piled into a levee.

There are also Indian burial sites in the swamps.  The tribes were the Houma, Choctaw, Chousatta and the Chitamacha.  There are also the Tunica-Biloxi tribe but they are generally in mid or north Louisiana.  For reference, Chousatta is pronounced cu-shatta.

And as a personal peeve of mine, Biloxi is pronounced Bill-uxi  not Bi-lox-I, as Northerners want to say it.

















This was an old cabin back on the bayou that they turned into a stop on the tour.  You don't really want to get out, check out the "Louisiana Yard Dog" in the front lawn.  And yes, he is real!  He was about 5-6 feet long.













Oh, wow!  We saw a kingfisher!  WAY COOL!











And a Louisiana Blue Heron. They are a pretty common sight.

Here is Captain Tom explaining Crawfish Sex to a bunch of old people.  He was having a blast freaking out the old ladies.



And he passed around the gator baby, no one wanted to hold her, however several old ladies petted her.



These are turkey vultures.  They were hovering over a dead pig.  Interestingly, there are lots of those wild pigs all through the swamps.  You can shoot them just about any time of the year, there are just so many and they are so destructive.

When my mother lived back there, they would dig the foundations of their house pilings.  The cabin was 16 feet above the land level.

Raccoons are all over back there as well.  Captain Tom tossed some corn out for them, then when they showed up he tossed some marshmallows to them. One marshmallow fell close to the water edge and none of the coons went near it.  Capt Tom explained that when anything gets too close to the water's edge, the silent death gator grabs them.

That is what happened to the pig.  And it was a pretty large pig too.  Capt Tom was telling us that he had a tour boat full of people on a Riverboat tour.  He was puttering down the bayou when a gator grabbed a pig and did his death roll routine.

The tourists were very angry that Captain Tom would allow that to happen and they were yelling at him for being a sadistic  (you fill it in here).

He said he got really negative ratings on the internet that day!







 I think you can see some of the wild pigs here.  Make the photo larger and look in the underbrush in the center.

And this is the sawgrass.  It will cut you to ribbons with the serrated leaves.

if you are wondering where your crawfish live, they are all in those roots under water!

I can taste them now!

But instead of crawfish, we headed to Middendorf's for some Thin Fried Catfish!

And German Beer...…….It is Octoberfest after all.

One Road Through Town

(I am linking up to Freemotion on the River, check out what others are working on too.)

My One Road piece is coming along.  I just need  to do a few more squares and I am going to call it done.  If you remember this is going to be one of my entries into the  CFAL Show this spring.  I forget where it will be. The theme for the year is Journeys and for the first  quarter the sub theme is Entry Ways.




And the challenge for the Fiber Group for December is Doorways.  So I need to pull together a piece for that as well.  I need to add that to my OMG goal for December!  
 
I realized the embroidery looked like it was overwhelmed by the blue jean background.  But as I went on I changed my mind; I thought it might be a good thing.

When you look at the piece, it appears complicated, so that draws the eye to the lines and colors.  But as you look at it, you realize there is so much more.  So it draws you closer as you look for the rest of the town.

You see the alligator in the swamp first.  And you see a house, a factory and a playground. 

The quiet embroidery draws you into the piece.


A sailboat on a lake.

 A playground, 












 A  factory for the moms and dads to go to work. 



I am liking it.  Even though it is not what my mind's eye envisioned in the beginning of the piece, it is OK.

I like the turn it took. 

Sometimes in art, you need to go where where the piece takes you.  Regardless of where you want to go!

Alligators - And Skateboard Quilts

Currently I am working on more boys' quilts for the April 4 wedding.  Thank goodness for negative space!  I have finished one top and have the other to put together this morning.  Here they are.  They will be oriented as such, and even though similar, they will be different.  I only had one child so we had none of the bickering that came with more than one wanting the same thing.  It was nice.  Although, with my low tolerance for anything uselessly ridiculous as that, it would have been fixed in a hurry!

 More photos from the Audubon Zoo in New Orleans.

There are several ways to be an alligator in Louisiana.

We eat them.  Not withstanding the sauteed Alligator Sauce Piquant and the Alligator Over Grits we had at the wedding; which are not my choice of good cuisine.  But if you are here you really should try it.  And we also fry them.

Tastes  like chicken!



We ride alligators.  This is one of the old carousels in the city.  There are two; one is in City Park and the other here in Audubon Park.  We call them Flying Horses.  Actually, I don't really remember all the alligators and leopards on this one at all.  All I remember are the horses.  When I was young, my mother's parents raised me for the first 5 or 6 years of my life.  They lived 2 blocks off the Audubon Park and we would go to the zoo and ride the ponies and play on the Flying Horses.  I have many many many wonderful memories of them and few of my mother.  Less of my father even.  But that was the way it was even then.  I certainly had a lot of love from my grandparents, my mother was their only child and I was their only grandchild for 5 years until my brother came around.  He didn't have the relationship with Ganny and Papa like I did.  I miss them to this day. 

And we look at alligators.  I don't  really like to look at them, they remind me of some prehistoric monster that ate my fellow cave dwellers. 

Look at this fat old tail!  Some would think that would be some good eating!  That actually looks like McGee's fat little short legs!  I wish there was some point of reference to show you how huge these two were.  I would say the one on the bank was a good 15 feet long.

Do you notice something different about these two alligators?  They are albino.  Rare, so they will escape the fry pot.

Unlike the somewhat more common regular albinos, leucistic white alligators have brilliant blue eyes. The first leucistic alligators were discovered in a swamp near Houma, Louisiana in 1987. Their bright coloring makes it impossible for them to survive in the wild since the sun would burn them, so 18 leucistic hatchlings were brought to the Zoo. International media attention quickly turned them into the Zoo’s most enduring symbol. A single female was discovered in 1994, and two more were found in 2009. All have become part of the Audubon family, although some of the gators are eventually transferred to other facilities around the country. These three discoveries are the only documented cases of leucistic alligators in recorded human history.

So you learned something new today!