9 October 2018
Birding Around New Orleans:
Bayou Sauvage National Wildlife Area, and Audubon Louisiana Nature Center
After a breakfast at the delightful Café Beignet (fast becoming my morning necessity while I am here) I drove to the Bayou Sauvage National Wildlife Refuge, which lies about 20-30 minutes east of New Orleans. It is a flat marshland that sits between Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi Sound. Even though I expected and got sporadic rain, the birding was good, if not great. I got a life list bird, saw some old southern coastal favorites and learned that I really need to brush up on my Gulls. Gull confusion aside, the day was fun. After my trip to the wildlife refuge, I stopped by the Audubon Louisiana Nature Center. Here is the list from both places.
Mourning Dove lots
White Ibis 2 adults, 1 juvenile
Little Blue Heron 4
Tricolored Heron 2
Great Egret 6
Snowy Egret 6-10
Turkey Vulture 4
Great Blue Heron 2
Double-crested Cormorant 4
Red-winged Blackbird lots
Brown Pelican 15
Northern Harrier 1
Killdeer 2
Blue Jay 9
Northern Mockingbird several
American Crow 5
Hermit Thrush 1
Mallard 1
Purple Gallinule 4
Yellow-rumped Warbler 2-4
Laughing Gull lots
Herring Gull lots
Ring-billed Gull lots
Gull-billed Tern 1
Loggerhead Shrike 1
photo by Greg Homel
via abc birds.com
The Loggerhead Shrike was the big prize for me today though, of course, I thought all the birds were delightful. However, I’ve never seen any representative of the genus Lanius, much less, Lanius ludovicinianus. Louisiana granted me a bird for the life list. The American South is pretty dependable for that. It has been for me anyway. On better days, I’ve gotten 90 + species, but the wind and rain certainly had an effect on today’s numbers. The waters of the Mississippi Sound at the eastern edge of Bayou Sauvage were really choppy, frosting white everywhere. I had hoped to get skimmers there, but alas, no luck. Flooding everywhere, a point on which I will reflect a bit below, prevented a lot of exploration too.
Reflecting on Climate Change
The drive to the refuge functioned as a reminder, as if one were needed, of the region’s precarious position along this coastal landscape in a future that will be defined by rising sea level and an increasing frequency in devastating tropical storms and hurricanes. The roads and many houses along the road way were already experiencing flooding. Route 90 was limited in many places to one lane per direction. The parking lots of many businesses and the streets of a larger neighborhood were all under water. Vacation homes, elevated on stilts, still contended with flooded yards and driveways. While all this water was excellent for my birding excursion I did wonder if we didn’t need to start seriously thinking about the manner in which we deal with climate change and its attendant costs. Should New Orleans be here? Should we continue to rebuild the same structures disaster after disaster? This beautiful city, along with the surrounding communities will get hit again. Soon. As I write this, a tropical storm turned into Hurricane Michael in the Gulf of Mexico and is about to hit the Florida Panhandle. Everyday I’ve been here in New Orleans my Weather Channel app has been alerting me about floods. The oceans are warming and this is fueling stronger storm systems. The 100 Year storm, formerly a once in a lifetime event, now happens several times a year during the hurricane season.
Should we keep building as we have always done in these increasingly treacherous storm zones?
In the October 8th edition of The New York Times there was a thought provoking investigative piece about the costly cycle of ‘damage and repair’ into which FEMA seems irrevocably locked. To summarize “As Storms Keep Coming, FEMA Spends Billions in ‘Cycle’ of Damage and Repair” is to simply note that the federal government covers the cost of storm damage repair, which is dictated by local authority, and by local people, but this repair does little to mitigate future increasingly frequent, and inevitable storm damage. Local leaders want to a quick return to normalcy. This desire certainly makes sense. A community often wants the comforts of its traditional lines, the reestablishment of its rich historical landmarks, they want, and who wouldn’t, the comforts of stability. “Build it the way it was” seems to be a kind of operating principle among the storm devastated. But those billions spent by FEMA don’t come wholly –or even mostly- from those storm wrecked communities. Those billions come from a plurality of taxpayers living from across the country. There is nothing wrong with the helping out our neighbors in need, but I think we probably need to examine the lack of federal oversight as well as the lack of federal say in how FEMA funded projects are used. As we do this we may want to ask deeper and more difficult questions about whether continuing to rebuild in the path of certain disaster is the best thing we can do with our limited resources. Does it make sense to keep operating as if the climate hasn’t changed? Should we start trying to move, democratically, communities out of harm’s way? Failing that, shouldn’t we start considering massive engineering projects that account for our newer more deadly storm systems? Shouldn’t FEMA officials get to say, “We can’t build it that way again, because if we do, we will be back here in five years to do it again?” This cycle of destruction and repair represents a huge waste of limited funds, and it also represents huge opportunity costs. Money that rebuilds some structure over and over again could be used for something else. My day of birding, and a contemplation of a world of increased storms may seem unconnected. I’m not sure it is.
If we let evidence guide us, I wonder if we might not craft a safer, more cost effective path forward by not letting tradition guide our repair and rebuild strategy. Research and experimentation will, or rather could, help us build and devise engineering answers to protect some places. Some places may be so important to trade, and commerce that even very costly strategies and structures might be necessary to protect them. Evidence might sometimes indicate however that wholesale relocation is in order. I don’t know what the answer is exactly and I am broadly thinking out loud here.
Do we really need to rebuild most of Florida every few years? Is it fair to the rest of the country to send these funds to the same places again, and again? Should the rest of the country get a say in how a place like New Orleans, or, say, Savannah Georgia is rebuilt? I wonder if some human retreat from danger zones to safer areas, and cities might not be a reasonable answer, even a more efficient, environmentally friendly and even a highly cost effective answer. I think such a contracted human population distribution might actually be good for both humans and the environments upon which we depend. As I drove down Route 90, I wondered what a Louisiana might look like with a relocated New Orleans. I thought about expanded habitat, and increased buffers against storm surges. I thought of human pollution moved further from our waterways. Could such retreats improve the productivity and recovery of many of the natural resources upon which we, and whole industries depend?
I’m not sure any of this is a good idea. I am sure it wouldn’t be politically feasible. We cannot even get our political leaders to deal with Climate Change and its increasing pace. However, the experts, even the Trump Administration itself, all agree, that climate change is happening, and that our predictions about it were too conservative. This much is clear at least, while we certainly need to continue to think about ways to halt, perhaps even reverse climate change, we also need to think realistically about how we handle the coming effects of an already changed climate.
