Spartina alterniflora

BEST DAY EVER AHHHH IT WAS AWESOME!



I was really excited and barely slept on Wednesday night, last noticing the clock around midnight... ugh. But, at 4:45 sharp, I was leaving New Orleans, heading to a USDA Service Center in Thibodaux, just over an hour southwest of the city. I found it (remember that time I was stuck in traffic in Raceland? That's how to get there from NO!), and joined two employees of the local soil and water conservation district (not exactly my beloved NRCS, but the local government cooperators) to plant cord grass (not exactly trees, but ok, stay with me here, it was awesome) in Little Lake (not exactly a little lake, more like a half hour boat ride after an hour drive south from Thibodaux, but still, this was awesome) with a team of European hipster volunteers (who were not at all dressed or prepared for the work we were doing) and an alligator (who never came closer than about 20 feet but hung out for the entire afternoon).

None of that sounds especially great, but I assure you, I had a fantastic day.



We were met by a producer who provided us with about 40 sacks of about 50-60 plugs of smooth cord grass each. We launched from a canal at the back of a sugarcane farm in Cut Off. It took a few trips to deliver all of the grass and people to the shoreline where we were planting (if you zoom out, it's down the canal east, then just north about halfway up that curved shore).


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Planting in open water is kind of cool. For the most part, the ground is just soft and mucky, so we just kind of grabbed the little root ball of the grass and punched it into the ground. Even the harder ground, or the areas where more shells had accumulated, it was still pretty easy with the help of a thing called a dibble bar:

We started the morning spread out, dividing and conquering a swath of shore line. I had a really nice time just swimming around planting grass on my own. Shortly before lunch, the girl from Denmark noticed a six foot long alligator spying on her work. We ate lunch together on the boat near that spot, hoping to scare the gator away. It worked, but we decided to work closer together to finish the work. This was a good decision, because the alligator came back. It just sat and watched at a distance for a while, slowly closing that distance and making us all a little nervous. There was much discussion about how quickly alligators can move and what their hunting habits are like. It seemed like it was just hanging out, waiting for us to freak out and abandon our weakest herd member.

But we didn't, and nothing terrible happened, just a beautiful day in a warm lake with a cool breeze, planting cord grass. I love doing conservation. It's been really wonderful talking with people, hearing stories, and dreaming up how we can make a difference, but it's another thing altogether to go out and actually do something. I'm pretty excited that I've been able to do so much in just my first month here. It's hard to believe that I arrived exactly a month ago today!