River World Field Trip, Alton, IL to Lake Charles, LA and back on a working towboat, 1956
October 24, 2015April 16, Monday
All night we navigated the narrow Calcasieu and the Intracoastal Waterway, through the Calcasieu Locks, and in the cold, clear windy dawn the sun rose straight ahead of us down the Waterway, The marshes were simply full of birds. In cypress hammocks, the herons, etc. had not yet flown out for the day. They sat in ranks and masses — Louisiana herons, little blues, American egrets, snowy egrets, great blues, cormorants, brown pelicans, yellow-crowned night herons (these were new to me). Teal and shovellers grebes and coots, American bitterns, swallows, gulls? were in the marshes, and I saw my first cattle egrets wading around with the Brahma cattle. This was east of Little Lake Misere and near Mile 205 and the mouth of the Mermentau.
On the marshy shore I saw several nutrias, like a very large, beaver-sized muskrat, quite surprising.
Bunches of low cypresses were white with white ibises and their immatures, which at first I thought were glossies.
I went up on top of the pilot house for a better view, but the wind was bad and I got dizzy anyway. The barges were too low to see the shores well. The pilothouse area was best, after all, though the vibration was a bother there. We went through the level sea marshes. Arrowhead in bloom.
Roast beef (fat and gristly) and blackberry pie for dinner.
And so we went through those confounded Wiggles again in the afternoon. Homer had them going and coming. The tug BERTHA was up ahead and called back to us:
“Watch out for a mama duck and her little bitty baby,” he said. “They’re up at the next wiggle, on the left. It’s a bad place for ducks. Look like wild ones to me, but I never saw ‘um in the canal before. You watch when you come by so you don’t run over ‘um!
So Homer said he’d watch, and we did, and there was an alarmed mother wood duck and one little fluffy infant, caught in the great surging wash of the boats which race and rush around the hollows of the bank. They climbed up in a hollow as we went by, which was wise. Later the BERTHA called back to see if we had seen them, and talked more about how odd it was to find ducks like that in the Waterway, and he hoped they got out safety.
I rode the barges for miles, noting mockingbirds all along the way, all singing, all singing differently, nicely spaced, about twenty of them after I started counting. As we went through the opened pontoon bridge, trucks were stopped to let us go through. A Cajun put his head out and pointed at me, and yakked a mess of Cajun to his pals, which sounded basically like , “Hey, la moulie, ca!” which probably meant, “Hey, look, a dame!” though I’m not so sure.
A big boat, the L.W.SWEET, very much like the ST.LOUIS ZEPHYR, though even larger. Flocks of redwings on the shores were filling the willows and singing and clattering as if they had just come in from migration. And there was a good deal of traffic on the Waterway. We passed three tows, one after the other. To the Vermilion Locks at 3 pm.
Toward late afternoon we got into splendid bird country, as the marshes should be. There were quantities of herons of many kinds, and ibises, many unidentified waders in flats and around lakes, and killdeer, black-bellied plovers, semi-palmated plovers, least sandpipers, yellowlegs, miscellaneous sandpipers, – ring-billed gulls, royal terms, black vultures, blue-winged teal, nighthawks, black ducks, American and snowy egrets, Louisiana herons, and a whole lot more I couldn’t quite see. At sunset we spotted a deer grazing placidly out in the meadows, quite Wisconsin-like, near Weeks Island.
Strawberry shortcakes of some size for supper.
A half moon shining, and a lot of traffic, and mosquitoes coming in the pilothouse windows, and attacking me while I sat out on the barge. The first and only time this happened on this trip. Traffic on the Weeks Island bend — T. M. NORSEWORTHY, MISS LOU, and tug BERTHA.
We are carrying 7500 tons, more than 2 million gallons