Bird City

Plume hunters had killed egrets by the thousands before Edward McIlhenny tried something small. Around 1895 he raised eight young egrets, released them, and watched them come back the next spring. In 1911 and 1912, with Charles Willis Ward, he dedicated more than 57,000 acres of Louisiana marsh as a wildlife refuge. He banded 286,743 birds between 1912 and 1942, and wrote a book called Bird City in 1934. The wildfowl refuge still holds tens of thousands of birds, mostly egrets, each year.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Jungle Gardens and Avery Island — steps away
  A 170-acre garden and wildfowl refuge on a Gulf Coast salt dome, founded by Edward Avery McIlhenny, on an island that was a Marsh sugar plantation worked by enslaved people before Tabasco and the 1862 salt works.
• Shadows-on-the-Teche — 8.8 mi
  A National Trust site in New Iberia built 1831 to 1834 for sugar planters David and Mary Weeks, now interpreted around the 1,112 people the Weeks family enslaved, among them Charity Polk, Amos, Patty, Isaac and Louisa.
• Cypremort Point State Park — 12 mi
  A 185-acre Vermilion Bay park reached by road, with a half-mile man-made beach, a marsh boardwalk, shore fishing and a boat launch, and a Chitimacha tradition of a great cypress here.
• St. Martin de Tours Catholic Church — 16 mi
  The Mother Church of the Acadians, founded in 1765 on St. Martin Square in St. Martinville, with a late 1870s Lourdes grotto and, a block away, the Evangeline Oak on Bayou Teche.

More markers nearby

• McIlhenny — steps away
• The Cleveland Oak — 0.4 mi
• Bayou Petite Anse — 0.4 mi
• Avery Island Salt Dome — 0.5 mi