2nd Place – Senior Essay
Amanda Wolff
14 yr old, Homeschool
It was 10:30 p.m. at the Rockefeller Wildlife Refuge and there was still activity going on inside our camp. Our group of eight girls and two chaperones, on a trip with our local 4-H group, were cleaning up after our Blue Point Crab dinner in preparation to listen to our evening speaker. We had gone to the refuge to help the wetlands by planting marsh grasses which help prevent saltwater intrusion and erosion to Louisiana’s coastline. We actually ended up pulling and planting “bitter panicum” grass on Holly Beach that day before heading out to the “crabbing docks” to catch dinner (we also had hamburgers in case we did not catch enough crabs). We had stayed at the refuge over the weekend and shared the multi-room camp with some LSU students the second night.
After a hard day of planting grass and crabbing for dinner, we listened to Jonathan, one of the LSU students and our speaker for the night, about his team’s project in the marsh. He told us about how his team was going to survey several species of birds that were thought to be dying off. The main bird they were looking for was the King Rail, often called the secret bird of the marsh. It is a large bird nobody really knows anything about; and it spends most of its time walking on the ground. Last summer they had conducted thousands of surveys for this bird in north Louisiana and only found two of the prized birds. This bird is apparently closer to extinction than anyone thought. He was showing a couple of other students with him how to survey the birds and how all the equipment worked before planning to return to the north to continue his surveying project there.
When Jonathan had finished talking, he mentioned how he had to get up at 5:00 a.m., weather permitting, to conduct more surveys because birds are most active an hour before sunrise and sunset. We then discussed our plans for the following morning. Almost everyone in our group wanted to get up early to see the striking sunrise over the marsh. We planned on seeing it from the observation platform near the camp before leaving for home later that day. We inquired of Jonathan if he knew what time the sun was supposed to rise. He looked it up for us on his GPS and told us it should be at 5:58 a.m. It sounded quite early, but still wanting to see the sunrise, we set our alarms for 5:40 and went to bed imagining what the spectacular sunrise awaiting us in the morning would look like.
Morning seemed to come as soon as we fell asleep, but we all reluctantly rolled out of bed. I anticipated the large bothersome morning mosquitoes and brought my repellant outside under the camp to spray it on myself. Opening the door to the darkened world, I found to my dismay that it was raining! How was the sunrise going to be visible in the damp, dreary rain? Coming outside, Sara, a chaperone, told us it might clear up before the sun shed its rays over the marsh. Suppressing yawns, everyone piled into the van with jackets and cameras in hand and prepared to depart. As the engine was started, Jonathan came over to the open door of the van and told us (at the risk of us being extremely angry with him) that something was wrong with his GPS and it did not reset for daylight savings time. Because it was an hour off, the sunrise was really going to be at 6:58. We stared at him with our mouths gaping for several seconds as he apologized for the inconvenience, and went back inside.
We decided to go anyway. Driving a short way on the asphalt road, we turned to a narrow gravel road with alligator infested marsh on both sides. Imagine what it was like in a fifteen-passenger van driving around in the darkness that only early morning can bring. After we reached the observation deck, we kept traveling down the road to watch the alligator activity as their eyes glistened in our headlights. Driving onto a peninsula over the marsh, we stopped for a while to watch the lightning flash in stunning patterns offshore. The rain finally stopped around 6:40, but the clouds still remained. Our nerves were racking because we could not see out of the back window; there was water on three sides of us on this dead-end road; and we had to turn the van around so we could get back to the observation deck.
Once there, we got out of the van and began cautiously climbing the uneven stairs to the top of the deck, as the first morning light began to show around us. We could hear multitudes of birds calling their charming early morning songs out to one another and could see them flying by. Numerous alligators were pulling themselves onto the banks far below us to catch the first rays of golden sunlight. We could see a small break in the clouds above us and we hoped the sun would rise up into it and create a stunning picture. However, it was now 7:00 and though there was light around us, we could not see the sun because of heavy clouds that obscured our view. We took some great pictures of each other and of the vast marsh stretching out almost endlessly in all directions. After a while, we went back down to the van, having only seen a small pink smudge for our imagined spectacular sunrise.
It was disappointing to not have seen our much anticipated magnificent sunrise, but at least it made for a great adventurous ending memory for our trip to Rockefeller Wildlife Refuge. Though it was fun planting grass to help out the environment, my favorite memory for the weekend was our trip to see the sunrise that we never got to see.
