JUNGLE GARDENS
A short drive from the Tabasco complex, you’ll find Jungle Gardens. A driving route offers a dozen numbered stops for attractions including a palm garden, live oaks and a 900-year-old Buddha statue. Watch where you step: Alligators abound.
But the highlight of Jungle Gardens is Bird City, where on a June day about 1,000 egrets could be seen chattering and calling to one another from raised platforms around a lagoon. Some swooped overhead as an alligator floated by.
The story of how the colony was established is remarkable. In the 1890s, snowy egrets had “almost been wiped out to extinction in the U.S.,” according to Erik Johnson, director of bird conservation for Audubon Louisiana. The birds were hunted for their feathers, which were used in women’s hats.
E.A. McIlhenny, son of Tabasco’s founder, managed to acquire eight snowy egrets, built an aviary for them and handraised them. Then he set them free. When they returned on their seasonal migration, they brought more birds with them, and the numbers grew. By the time former U.S. President Teddy Roosevelt, a champion of environmental conservation, visited Avery Island in 1915, he said 40,000 birds were nesting there.
Snowy egrets have rebounded nationwide since then, and these days several thousand nesting pairs of snowy and great egrets typically arrive on Avery Island in late winter and stay through summer. But McIlhenny’s “legacy goes well beyond egrets,” Johnson said. McIlhenny also helped secure passage of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which was signed into law in 1918.
That means Tabasco’s 150th birthday isn’t the only milestone being marked this year. The Migratory Bird Act, credited with saving many bird species from extinction, marks its centennial this year, too.