Travel the Creole Nature Trail in Southwest Louisiana
The Creole Nature Trail is a 180-mile road that comes—it’s a loop that goes to Southwest Louisiana passes through to two national wildlife refugees and a host in little communities trough a couple of—. It’s a really nice way for folks to see a unique area of the United States, it’s an all-American road which is one of only 20 in the Untied States and it’s been chosen as an all-American road just for the uniqueness of Southwest Louisiana.
We've got coastal marshes, we have unique migratory birds, we have unique coastal species that only live in this area, we have two merging flyways for water flyways, so we get all kinds of different birds. It’s really a wonderful wildlife area.
What people are really looking for when they come to Southwest Louisiana, they’ll drive the Creole Nature Trail, show up at Sabine Natural Life Refuge and say, “where can I see an alligator?” number question, where can I see an alligator? People that have never seen one in their life or they’ve seen and then bringing their family and they want to show them on so we send them to the wetland walkway which is a mile and a half walking trail we have here at the refuge and it takes people trough a freshwater marsh, it’s an improved sidewalk area with a boardwalk and there's generally alligators, especially in the spring, in the fall, we have nice sunny days they’ll be an alligator, several alligators lying out on higher ground, maybe even up next to the trail.
We have birds here every year round, we have a lot of waiting birds, we have one of these spoonbills, we have great blue herons, many, all different species of waiting type birds. We’ll get seasonal migrations of shore birds and seasonal migrations of the water fowl is winter. We get spring migrations of the near tropical so year round there are birds, there’s different ones that are coming at different seasons but year round we have hundreds of hundreds of birds. If you come to Southwest Louisiana you will see wildlife, I mean there’s no way that you cannot at least see a bird. It doesn’t matter where you are, you at least see a bird in here.
We have white ibis and glossy ibis and white face ibis, so we have two dark, dark versions, the glossy and the white faced or both dark ibis and then we have white ibis so you can see three types ibis here. And they're a unique bird, you can see them feeding in mud flats and in the outgoing tide and they’ll just be probing and putting those long curved bills down and they're looking for invertebrates. Like the rosy spoonbills, they have the special unique bill. They're actually related to the ibis which I learned here recently and they feed by shoveling and filtering little invertebrates and food out of the water and they have that specialized bill just for them, hence the spring bill.
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