Old (very) Boat

Some of the animals that are passing through the BLR area today are noted in the pictures. Last night there were at least three barred owls calling back and forth to each other in our front yard, right in front of the front porch. I’m always impressed with how unafraid those birds are of humans. Last night they were doing the “you cook today, I’ll cook tomorrow” thing, and sometimes the “hoo – aah” thing. The latter sounding like some Marines had climbed the trees. This morning I walked down to the river and heard some chickadees scolding something in a tree just off of the walkway. It didn’t take too long to see that it was a barred owl, just sitting on a branch about 30 feet away and looking disinterestedly at me, and sometimes turning and glancing at the scolding birds. How these big birds have survived the Cajun pastime of shoot first and see if you can eat it later, I don’t know. I did shoot this owl, with my new Canon camera. I’m still testing it but it seems to be at least as good as the old camera that I wore out.

After the owl, the butterfly was waiting for me down at the river on the muddy bank. And then, in one of the shrimp traps was this young crab, asking to be featured in a blog. The crab is proof that bluepoint crabs are up the river as far as Butte La Rose this year. Some people are fishing them with commercial traps and are doing pretty well I hear. I must admit that I never noticed young male crabs had red-tipped claws, but they do because this one does. I thought it was only the females that had claws like that. Live and learn. The double picture is there and that’s all there is to it, if I try to erase one of them, all the pictures disappear. So, they stay like that.

Last Friday my friend Chip asked me to go with him to see an old boat that had been found on Grand Isle. I mean an old boat. Chip is an archaeologist and is guessing that the boat is about 600 years old. It is a dugout canoe made by Native Americans who lived in the marshes along the Gulf Coast. It is about 20 feet long and two feet wide. The story on how these early pre-metal marsh dwellers managed to hollow out a large tree and come up with a boat like this is really something. According to the experts, the Indians used fire to shape the whole boat. They built a fire on the top of the log and when the fire had made char scars deep enough, they scraped the charred wood off with a shell or something, and then built more fires where they needed them. I mean, that was a lot of work! Think about it! This boat is 20 feet long! We really enjoyed the day, and found out that Grand Isle is recovering from the storms, but there are reminders of the damage everywhere you look.

The river is at 2.4 feet on the Butte La Rose gauge, rising to 2.8 by Wednesday. The Ohio and Mississippi are falling pretty hard, and we might see even lower water soon. This would actually be OK because there are some old boats sunk in the Basin that you can’t see unless the water is 1.8 or lower, and we are waiting for that to happen.

Rise and shine, Jim