In 1994, local activist Karin Giger wrote the following impressions about her visit to Breton Sound near the Chandeleur Islands, an area now surrounded by protective booms because of the BP Gulf oil spill.
We glide on into the small natural harbor of Breton Island, southernmost part of the Chandeleur chain of barrier islands. Teddy Roosevelt established them as national wildlife preserves nearly a century ago. Brown pelicans and frigate birds perch atop each channel marker guiding us in.
Breton Sound fishing is hot flat blue blaze. Industrial strength water experience. Sandy and marshy strips thread through the bay. Lots of water, the Gulf of Mexico horizon expanse where sky melds into water and it’s all blue. On small stretches of solid land, there are low dunes covered with scrub grasses, and a succulent vine of creamy white trumpet flowers lined with pure yellow throats. Raccoon and nutria tracks, side shuffling crab claws, occasional gluts of starfish decorate the beach.
Casting for speckled trout, we feel as though we’re in the midst of a nature special for the Discovery Channel. Mammoth schools of black mullet chug across the surface, like
tugboats on the river, smoking in a migratory ritual as they move from inland waters out to deeper bays to spawn. Their colored green/gold heads lean out of the water as thousands of them swim in waves towards and through and with each other. As you stand quietly, they’re just eight or ten feet away, and fully 360 degrees around you. It’s marvelous, awesome. The sound of their movement as they rustle the surface of the water, when they suddenly change direction en masse, is like crinkling aluminum foil in a silent room.
Some evenings, flocks of two or three hundred white pelicans fly overhead. We see the comical reddish egrets, staggering through the shallows, foraging for food and looking for all the world like a drunk lurching home. On nearby Gosier Island, Caspian and Royal terns nest. And everywhere, there are raucous gulls and incredibly agile skimmers, whose orange exaggerated bills swoop down from nowhere as we sort through the detritus of the trawl
net, turning up tiny stingrays, squid, shrimp, flounder and a chorus of croakers. Curiosities like puffer fish, bloating themselves to intimidate predators.
Sunsets are lavender and gray, fiery oranges, aquas, pinks. The wind dies down as the light sinks, and stars smatter the Gulf sky.
As we wait to see to effects of the oil spill on Louisiana’s fragile islands and barrier marshes, the Greater New Orleans Foundation has responded with the Gulf Coast Oil Spill Fund.
