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Monday, August 04, 2003
Bayou Tortue, or turtle, is a small black-watered bayou running off the Vermilion just north of Lafayette Airport. Bayou Tortue and the low area around it act as a flood-relief valve when we get heavy rains around here. When that happens, the coulees in the city fill up and drain into the bayou. (Coulees are the word here for concrete-lined drainage channels) The city, in a very straightforward fashion, has built a lot of coulees in town. They drain the water, more or less, from the city after the torrential rains we get around here. The problem comes when we have more than a day or two of rain: the Vermilion starts to flow north. When it does, it floods in and around Bayou Tortue. The water can flow in pretty fast, and tends to come out slowly. A lot of heavier stuff piles up back there; refrigerators, bathtubs and so forth. There's a lake at the end of Bayou Tortue. The bayou meanders on from there, but I've never been able to go much further back except in high water, and then the channel's hard to find. The lake, Lake Charlo, is nice. Lots of buttonbush for the birds. It's not a major rookery, as far as I can tell, maybe because the lake's only about a foot deep at the best of times. I wonder, because Lake Charlo and Lake Martin form bookends to a large circular area called Cypress Island, which is owned by the Nature Conservancy. Lake Martin is a huge rookery for ibis, roseate spoonbills, egrets, herons and other birds. It's also a very popular tourist destination. Lake Martin is also about a thirty times the size of Lake Charlo.
I went paddling back to Lake Charlo this morning with three other people. One works for the Nature Conservancy, and the other is a history graduate student working on a program with a local Cajun heritage theme park to build a traditional motorboat. They want to take people up and down the river, and were thinking of Lake Charlo. I think the shallow water might cause trouble. Bayou Tortue itself is very nice, with a good diversity of plant species; (swamp red maple, cypress, water oak) and not too much black willow. The water itself was stagnant in spots. The Vermilion's got some nice spots on it, too. Two other options they have are to keep going up the river to a canal that connects the Vermilion to the Teche via Lake Martin, or even farther to The Nature Station, a nice city-run nature trail and RV park on the north end of town.
James 4:11 PM [+]
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