Avery Island: Tony and his Gator

Avery Island is a salt dome south-east of Lafayette outside of New Iberia. It is best known for Ed McIlhenny's Tabasco pepper sauce, a sauce he sold commercially, and remains for sale around the world, and is quite popular. I myself love hot sauce, but am not so keen on McIlhenny's Tabasco Sauce.

In any case, McIlhenny married into the Avery clan, a family that still owns and occasionally stays on the island. I wanted to subtitle this post "Animal Kingdom", but Tony had wanted to see a live alligator so badly his entire time living in Louisiana, that it was rather amazing and satisfying when we actually came upon them--not blocked in by any fence--that I had to give Tony his due.

Besides 'gators, we saw herons, turtles, a snake, a gaggle of butterflies, a rabbit, a bright red cardinal, dragonflies, lizards, and a wild algae bloom, and those were just what we photographed. Not all of those pictures were worthy of inclusion here.

The mosquitoes and snappy flies were relentless and annoying. This sign gave us a chuckle, since it was around the sign that we didn't see any gators, and makes you think "Oh, really?":



They must catch the gators once they reach a certain length, since all the ones we saw weren't so big that we were terrified, but big enough to do some damage to ankles and calf meat. Here's Tony enjoying a moment with his first close up.



Here's a picture of a larger alligator, maybe the largest we saw, chilling against the sky's reflection.



This gator, hanging amongst some reeds, is chanting the mantra of all the gators here: "Imalog-imalog-imalog-imalog-you-don't-see-me-'cuz-imalog-imalog-imalog..."



I really like this picture of the heron that Corrie took.



On Avery Island exists a preserve that's called Bird City. We found it near the end of our walk around the island. Many planks have been set up as nesting portals for what turn out to be thousands of herons. The ones in the pictures are the old and weak that didn't migrate for winter. They were majestic and plentiful, which had a calming effect over all that visit and experience it.