Cat Island National Wildlife Refuge

Cat Island is home to a 1,500-year-old Champion Bald Cypress, the largest bald cypress specimen in the United States. At 96-feet tall, 17 feet in diameter, and 56 feet in circumference, it’s the largest tree in North America east of the Sierra Nevada mountains and the sixth-largest tree in the country.

Ponder the euphoria of thirty middle school students as they step from their yellow bus into the first breath of a field trip. Along a dirt trail in Cat Island National Wildlife Refuge, they bounce for several hundred yards before reaching a clearing. There, 18 saplings and an array of shovels await.

This planting, a collaboration between West Feliciana Middle School, Friends of Cat Island, the Louisiana Department of Agriculture and Forestry, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, was scheduled for the middle of January, but got postponed due to freezing temperatures. Now, with six inches of rain predicted in the coming days, there’s an urgency to get the trees into the ground before it’s too late.

“We’re underwater most of the year most years,” says Matt Sieja of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The Mississippi River flows due south near the refuge’s western border before making a 90-degree turn at Morganza, where it darts east across Cat Island’s southern edge. Heavy rainfall can make Refuge Road impassable. In 2016, flash flooding destroyed a portion of Creek Road. Two years passed before the refuge was accessible by car.

“If Creek Road isn’t passable, the refuge is useless,” says William Daniel, president of Friends of Cat Island, a group that works with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to maintain access into the refuge, clears roads and trails for hunters and birders, offers classes in environmental education, and organizes volunteer efforts — all essential work for this unfunded and unstaffed refuge.

Friends of Cat Island board member Jesse Mans and retired plant ecologist Margaret Milling volunteer to help West Feliciana Middle School students on planting day. “The main reason we do this is for education,” says Mans. Cat Island lies west of Bayou Sara. Its floodplains extend from St. Francisville south to the Mississippi River.

“We can’t build structures out here,” says Daniel. “Build it, and it will soon be under water.” In several weeks, he expects this clearing, where students now gather around potted saplings, will be four to six feet underwater. Some years, the refuge floods as much as 12 feet. “Once it floods, we’re in a bowl,” Daniel says. “So we’ve decided to focus on what we can.”

The Friends have made education part of their mission. For the past four years, they’ve worked with West Feliciana Middle School on this annual planting project. One student in each group of three or four takes a turn with the shovel. Most use them like pogo sticks as they dig holes for cypress, green ash, and overcup oak saplings, all suitable species for Cat Island, home of Louisiana’s approximately 1,500-year-old Champion Bald Cypress. “They’ve got to be able to keep their head above water,” says Friends of Cat Island Vice President Don Puckett about the saplings. “And they need to hold their breath for a while.”

In such a volatile environment, tree planting helps to establish clusters of regeneration. “It’s an all-around habitat improvement,” Sieja says. Acorns from oaks provide sustenance for animals. Older trees create canopy for birds, including migratory neotropical species. For Daniel, tree planting efforts began as a hobby. Now, he says, “It’s become an obsession.”

After half an hour, with all eighteen saplings in the ground and watered, the students move to today’s second classroom. A quarter of a mile from the Champion Bald Cypress trailhead, Margaret Milling, retired plant ecologist with thirty years of experience at the U.S. Forest Service, demonstrates how to extract a core of wood with an increment borer. “You take a sample from the middle of the tree, but the middle isn’t always where you think it will be,” she says with the wonder of someone encountering nature’s mysteries for the first time.

Students surround her to receive their own increment borers, and soon they’re taking samples. Milling continues to work with one group while others walk another quarter mile down the trail. They’re hiking toward “the tree.” For anyone who’s ever seen it, the tree needs no other name. The largest tree in the United States east of the Sierra Nevada mountains and the sixth-largest tree in the country, Louisiana’s Champion Bald Cypress has become a pilgrimage for people from around the world. Walk through clusters of cypress, each a highlight on any other trail, and suddenly it’s there, monumental, a tree nearly 1,000 years old when the first English settlers arrived at Jamestown.   

See it for the first time. Gauge your response: gasp or goosebumps? On a wooden observation platform that the Friends have repaired and upgraded, a dozen students work on today’s final project, an 11-line poem, a literary love letter to the tree. They scribble a few words and glance up to behold it. Once finished, they begin another kind of homage. One by one, they ascend the tree, their young bodies touching grace.