Louisiana’s coastal marshes support an abundance of plant and animal life and provide us protection from storms
Whenever it’s time to talk about what Louisiana affords its hundreds of thousands of outdoorsmen during the fall and winter months, you must keep one eye on the calendar and the other on the weather — tropical weather.
We had been spared the ravages of a named storm this year, until a tropical wave decided to blow up in the western Gulf of Mexico.
Francine was her name. Rain and destruction were her game, though she didn’t appear to have the same punch as her older sisters Betsy, Camille, Katrina, Rita, Laura and Ida, and don’t leave out Gustav, at least not for the prized 80-year-old green ash tree he deposited on my carport.
Migrating waterfowl
Although most Louisiana locales broke through last year’s devastating drought, any storm’s rains would close the books on last year’s water problems in the southwestern marshes and ag fields. That’s a plus for waterfowl hunters.
What’s unwelcomed is storm surge and the problems any major saltwater push brings to freshwater marshes. That could pose a major headache for November’s duck and goose seasons.
Oh, the water will be there and migrating waterfowl will find water, but it’s what’s under the water that will keep them there. Without submerged aquatic vegetation, ducks and geese have to find somewhere else to get their groceries.
And, that’s what storm surge does. It kills those freshwater-loving plants migrating birds like to eat.
If that was the only problem, well, we could live with that because it doesn’t take our marshes too long to recover from those surges.
Another problem is habitat destruction. Images abound in the wake of those aforementioned hurricanes to show us mounds of marsh grasses piled up against anything that stopped these masses during storm-surge rises. With that comes scouring of the marshes, and where there once were life-supporting marshes there is open water.
And, as odd as it sounds, these once-thriving, shallow water areas that were teeming with marine life become watery deserts — yes, void of life.
We’ve seen this happen in far too many places in our lifetime, and projects to restore these vast open-water areas to productive estuaries have struggled to keep pace with Louisiana’s overall coastal land loss during the last 100 years.
That’s a topic for another day.
Saltwater species
No matter what any other state among our glorious 50 portray, there is no better October-through-January fishing place than our Louisiana marshes.
Speckled trout, redfish, black drum, sheepshead and, this year, flounder will provide not only tight-line action, but also excellent tablefare prepared in any number of five-star dishes.
The hope and prayer is storms don’t take that away. Most of these species can survive a Cat 1 storm, even a Cat 2, but when we have the big sisters come our way, well, fish kills take a toll on our fish numbers.
There have been times when the storm surge leaves our saltwater species high and dry. When surges fill ponds and water falls so rapidly in the storm’s wake that some fish get trapped in places too small to support life.
Thank goodness that doesn’t happen often.
What does happen, and it’s something old salts like Charlie Hardison and Doc Kennedy (God, rest their souls) pointed out years ago. After surviving storms at Fourchon and Grand Isle, they freely admitted to heading out to their favorite deep-sea fishing spots and making record-setting hauls. OK, those were in the days before creel and size limits.
Both men said storms invigorated the food chain, especially around oil and gas platforms, and sent predator species like snapper, amberjack, cobia, mackerels and triggerfish into a feeding frenzy that would last for days, and they were more than ready to take advantage of this bonanza.
Freshwater species
In freshwater, we only have to go back 32 years to Hurricane Andrew to know what devastation a storm can wreak on an ecosystem. Andrew passed directly over the Atchafalaya and Verret basins stirring up the bottom in these shallow waterbodies. Left in Andrew’s wake was an estimated 175 million dead fish, including 5 million bass, in the Atchafalaya and tens of thousands of dead bass, bream, sac-a-lait and catfish in Verret.
It took several years for these areas to recover.
Still, fall heralds the onset of cooler water temperatures across Louisiana, and freshwater species wake up from their summer doldrums.
These freshwater species take full advantage of the spring and summer spawns of shad and other small fish with a time clock clicking down to the colder water periods of January and February. Through instinct, they know it’s time to put on the feed bag, and our reservoirs, rivers, lakes, bayous, canals and marshes are primed to reward even novice anglers.
All we have to pray for is that storms don’t take that away — please.
