being 4160 miles long, the Amazon 3900, and the Mississippi 

 3800. In volume of water that it carries to the sea it is quite 

 paltry, coming thirteenth on the list, after the Yangtze, Congo, 

 Amur, Yellow, Lena, Mekong, Niger, Mackenzie, Ob, Yenesei. 

 Volga, and the Parana-Plata, and just equaling the Nile. In total 

 drainage area it comes third to the Congo and the Amazon; 

 while in number of tributaries it is greatly surpassed by many 

 tropical rivers. In actual size it is small in comparison to dozens 

 of other rivers, its width and depth, where it is finally con- 

 centrated before it debouches onto its delta, being a little less 

 than a mile across (4500 feet) with a navigable channel 300 feet 

 wide. The depth at this point (Cairo on the Mississippi) is only 

 9 feet! The Amazon at a comparable point is over 50 miles wide 

 and over 120 feet deep. 



The matter of confluents or tributaries and of effluents or 

 "mouths" is rather widely misapprehended, and the subject of 

 bayous is downright muddling. Confluents flow into rivers and 

 effluents out of them, but bayous need not flow at all and do 

 not have to be connected to a river. The term "bayou" appears 

 originally to have been applied by the French to old wiggles in 

 the main river that had got lopped off and left aside as C- or S- 

 shaped lakes, called by geologists cutoff lakes. By extension, the 

 name was applied also to the endless meandering little lakes, 

 and then to riverlets, creeks, and natural channels often called 

 "canals," and even to the endless sloughs that dissect this delta. 

 Today the matter is further complicated by a tremendous net- 

 work of man-made canals, drainage ditches, and channels for oil 

 operations, so that the whole is a latticework of waterways. 



THE BATTLE OF THE WATERS 



The battle of the waters along this coast has been closely studied 

 and may be readily observed in an area (facing Arc 1 on the 

 map) in the west of the delta now known as the Rockefeller 

 Wildlife Refuge and Game Preserve. Here almost every type of 

 littoral, coastal, and deltaic structure and vegetation may be 

 seen, ranging from open sea to inland lakes. It consists of 82,000 

 acres of marshland with a coast line of a little over twenty-six 



miles. The only firm ground in the whole region is the beach 

 itself and a few hundred feet or yards back of this, and two 

 small strips inland where old beaches cross the area. The 

 marshes are of three distinct kinds running in parallel belts. 

 The farthest inland is a fresh-water marsh of tall grasses growing 

 in about a foot of water. The middle one is brackish with shorter 

 grasses, which sometimes dries off for a period in the winter but 

 which is really a mat of roots floating on an ocean of liquid 

 mud. The third belt, nearest the sea, is saline. The whole is cut 

 by half a dozen channels which let the fresh water out at low 

 tide and bring salt water in at high. Landward of all this is a 

 string of shallow lakes, and behind them again we enter the 

 true deltaic prairies, which envelop occasional old islands that 

 might be called hummocks and meandering bits of old levees 

 stranded amid the sea of grass. This continues inland until the 

 cypress swamps and the slightly higher lands are reached, and 

 these then continue inland to the delta. Thus we have first coast, 

 then marshlands, then prairies, then the old delta. 



The beach is composed of sand mixed with a great deal of 

 broken shells and some silt, the coarser material being neatly 

 arranged on the upper beach. There are long stretches where the 

 sort of plum pudding of shells known as coquina is found — bits 

 of shells and whole shells, sand, and some small limy con- 

 cretions bound together with calcium carbonate. Since most of 

 the winds blow from the east or southeast, contrary to and 

 athwart the main deep-sea offshore current, there is a steady 

 inshore countercurrent that pushes all this material to the west. 



The marshlands, over which the surface of the water table 

 coincides with the surface of the land, are huge, open, soggy 

 areas covered with grass and everywhere cut into by little in- 

 cipient lakes and meandering channels. It is also crossed by old 

 beaches called "beach-ridges" or cheuiers, which may actually 

 rise over ten feet above the otherwise flat surface, and are left- 

 overs from periods when the sea suddenly retreated. The step up 

 to or onto the prairie is very clear, the short marsh grasses 

 suddenly giving way to the much taller prairie grasses. This 

 latter is a slightly undulating flat plain sloping very gently — 

 only about two feet per mile — toward the coast. Throughout it 

 stand concentrations of trees alongside streams or where streams 

 formerly were. This is the newest or youngest and most seaward- 

 lying of four distinct belts that snake across the whole delta, 

 each of which marks one of the major changes in land level 

 and/or rainfall in the Pleistocene period that we mentioned 

 above. At first, this whole land looks flat and much the same, but 

 when one takes even a little time to look at it, one may see a 

 working model of many of the great geological processes that 

 have built our earth. 



These vast marshlands are, throughout the whole province, a 

 home for a wonderful wildlife for the most part adapted to living 

 on mud. Man has disturbed it not a little with his diggings and 

 ditchings and burnings, and also by extensive trapping which 

 was once quite uncontrolled. He has also made an even more 

 horrible mess of its waters, sometimes by making them look too 

 clean! Industry is now pushing into this whole area and 

 pollution is rampant, but there is still a great deal of the land 

 and of its wildlife to be seen. 



The pre-eminent creature of these prairies and marshlands is 

 the rodent called the Muskrat — or more properly the Musquash, 



The Osprey (Pandion haliaetus) /5 a bird of prey about 

 midway in size between the eagles and the larger hawks. 

 A fish-eater, it descends on its prey vertically with ex- 

 tended legs and talons. It winters around the Gulf. 



