Teche Refuge is a St. Mary Parish treasure

Donovan Garcia is an unofficial sentinel of sorts within the Bayou Teche National Wildlife Refuge. He has been a proponent of the refuge in years past and today.
“We use whatever we have,” Garcia said. “Like any time there was an oilfield location or whatever, that man did something wrong to it, we came back and used that area.”
Located in the heart of the “Cajun Coast,” Bayou Teche National Wildlife Refuge, established in 2001, sits along Bayou Teche, an ancient channel of the Mississippi River. The refuge consists of seven noncontiguous management units, ranging in size from 81 to 3,619 acres. The refuge’s primary objective is to support the Louisiana black bear by restoring and managing bottomland hardwood forests, cypress-tupelo swamps, bayous and marshes to ensure high quality, diverse habitat.
The Friends of the Bayou Teche National Wildlife Refuge, a nonprofit group, is committed to community stewardship of the refuge and by extension the entire National Wildlife Refuge System through preservation and restoration of the natural environment as well as increased public awareness, appreciation, education and responsible recreational use.
The Friends of BTNR are dedicated to preserving those lands, swamps, marshes and related waterways that encompass the watersheds of Vermilion, Teche, Atchafalaya and west central Louisiana coast in an effort to conserve future important ecological resources (for instance, protection of an endangered wildlife species) for the state of Louisiana and the North American continent as a whole.
Garcia works in the refuge.
The Palmetto Trail was the first built, Garcia said, pointing out an abandoned metering station that was there previously.
“The reason I know this was oil is because there was a brick wall around it, a containment wall, and further into the woods there’s a pond where all the drip that fell off the oil would drain to the bottom. They put in a little more limestone and made that the designated parking area.”
In the 1930s and 1940s, Sinclair Oil and Gas was active in the area, which was succeeded by other owners over time.
In the refuge itself, there is an abundance of wonder: Palmetto are nearly everywhere; purple irises, the Louisiana state flower, grow resplendent in wet areas that are conducive to their needs. The refuge seems prehistoric in a way. Deep shadows from the canopy of trees give the flora and fauna a decidedly feeling of stepping backwards in time.
Numerous levees wander along with the trails. Certainly the Chitimacha made their homes here, using the palmetto fronds to protect them from Louisiana’s variable weather, having existed in the coast of Louisiana for ages. Eventually, the Cajuns relocated here, and plied the green-black waters in dugout canoes, picking moss, catching crawfish and creating a culture that persists today.
Bamboo grows there, too, small and green.
“What people loved about this is walking through the swamps and in between the cypress knees,” Garcia said. “The whole idea is that it doesn’t take much to maintain this. You can’t use big equipment (in the refuge) because it’s too heavy. The refuge is crisis-crossed with oil and gas pipelines.”
Though surrounded by flowers and other indigenous plant life, Garcia said, "a lot of stuff I just didn’t notice. If it wasn’t in our yards, I didn’t know it. The only things I learned was what my mother and father would teach me.”
He garnered stories and facts.
“Sitting on the back porch with my grandparents ... how they used to go out and kill more rabbits than they could eat and bring it back home and share it with everybody else because they didn’t have a refrigerator.
“My daddy said first time he bought a shotgun he paid $8 and he went out hunting. There were 25 shells in the box, and he’d come back with 25 squirrels, and maybe that’s why there aren’t many squirrels and rabbits left,” he said. “They’d clean then and bring them to everybody in the neighborhood.”
The Friends of the Bayou Teche Refuge recently congregated at a large pond in the refuge, which is already being used by fishermen. There was a planting of native trees and such at the time, which will attract native wildlife to the pond.
“The whole idea is to try to find a way to keep people here overnight,” he said. “The only way I’ve been able to do it so far is with paddle events. The city is missing that.”
He said that prairie grass absorbs more carbon than trees do, because every time a tree dies the decaying part of the dead tree turns into methane and it gives out whatever it collected back in. The same is true for the grass, but the majority of what’s stored in grass is in the roots. As long as the ground is not plowed, the carbon stays in the ground. It will be checked again in the future.
Garcia said the head office is in Lacombe, and “everybody works out of there. Nobody wants to live in Franklin. Even the refuge manager bought a house in New Iberia. We don’t have that marriage between that city of Franklin or the parish of St. Mary and the refuge. What needs to be done is our elected officials who have a say-so should be saying, ‘We want you to be housed in Franklin.’”
There is easy access to the refuge for visitors by taking Alice C road to the pumping station, then following the levee to the boardwalk into the refuge area.
The refuge has its enemies as well. A post on Facebook from Garcia added, “Paddling on the Bayou Teche refuge, and we have new species. The invasive Apple Snail is now here to stay on our refuge. It has been in Louisiana for some time but it is spreading and now on the BTR.
“It is a large fresh water snail native to South America and along with that we have the Limpkin a wetland bird also from South America and its main diet is Apple Snail. This bird has also been in Louisiana a few years. I first saw one on the west protection levee of the Atchafalaya Basin about 2015 but did not know what I was looking at.
"A confirmed siting in Houma La. by a member of the Terrebonne Bird Club a few years ago introduced the bird to us. So today I saw the Apple Snail eggs all over the place and cypress knees may never look the same again. I also saw four different Limpkins.”