Carry On Episode 20 - Mandalay Nature Trail

Added: 2026-05-18

[00:00:00]All right, y'all. Welcome to another episode of Carry On. Today, we're here to disconnect for a little bit and explore all of the different birds and vegetation [music] that the Bayou Country region has to offer. So, you ready to hit the trail, Sarah? [music] >> I'm ready. Let's go. Let's go.

[00:00:38]All right, y'all. We are here at one of PMA's [music] bestkept secrets. It's the Mandandalay Nature Trail. And joining me today is Jazelle Aguular. She's with the US Fish and Wildlife Services. So, thanks so much for coming along with us today.

[00:00:51]>> Yeah, thank you so much for visiting.

[00:00:53]Um, this is such a special place. So, Mandalay National Wildlife Refuge, it's such an important place for this [music] area. It's just outside of Homa, and it protects 4,000 acres of beautiful wetland ecosystems. Right now, we're actually walking through a swamp. So, this is a really easy trail. So, you're going to walk about 3/4s of a mile through this beautiful wetland swamp, mostly water, tupelo, and also cypress trees here through the swamp. And then as [music] we keep going, we'll walk into a beautiful wetland overlook.

[00:01:28]It's really cool how you walk through [music] and it's just lush. It's green.

[00:01:33]It's beautiful. Even on a day like today where it's a little cloudy, like you were saying earlier, it just kind of makes the colors pop. So, can you tell us a little bit about what we're seeing to the sides of us?

[00:01:43]>> Yeah. So, we just walked through a pal meadow, which is really cool cuz it kind of feels like you're in this jungly area. And that's native here, right?

[00:01:50]That is very native [music] here. Yeah.

[00:01:52]And all around us, we're seeing a lot of cypress trees. Again, that water tupelo tree, which is very native to this area, specifically in the Homa area. And then as we get out to the [music] wetlands, we have something really special, which is the floating wetlands. It feels so magical because it's also springtime which means we're getting a lot of those neotropical birds coming in [music] when we could just walk through this and immerse yourself in the sound and the lovely trees. I love that. And we do have a large birding community who visits us every year to look for those very unique birds. So do you have any um that you would recommend coming to look for specifically here? Yeah. So, this is actually a bird sanctuary actually home on its own the city since it's surrounding but it's surrounded by so many wetlands. It's a bird sanctuary.

[00:02:46]Um, so what that means is we're going to get a lot of migrating birds. What we're hearing in that right now is [music] sunbirds. Uh, so those neotropical sunbirds like the waddler, the yellow wobbler. We're also going to see blue herand. [music] We're gonna sometimes see eagle soaring through the sky which is really special. Um so it's home to 200 species of bird. Wow. Give or take based on you know whether it's fall or spring when they're migrated. [music] >> That's amazing. And so we talked about birds, we talked about the different plants. What about gators? What about [music] snakes? Um any recommendations on bug spray? That types of thing?

[00:03:27]>> Yeah, we do have both of those. Uhhuh.

[00:03:30]>> We have gators as we do everywhere in uh southeast Louisiana, which I think they're really special, right? They're a part of the ecosystem.

[00:03:38]We obviously don't want to get too close to them. Um you will see them out in the overlook and the wetland area. Um we do have snakes. [music] We have water moccasins as well as copperheads.

[00:03:52]Obviously, we want to stay away from them, but if you stay on trail, you're good to go. you know, you [music] might see them off on the side, but again, um, you know, this is a [music] natural habitat. This is a refuge for these animals. So, we want to make sure we also stay [music] protected by protecting them and leaving them alone.

[00:04:11]Kind of said that. So, I know we have a lot of as it hikers. Um, what would you rate this [music] like this trail, the level of intensity? Is this something that people can bring their family on?

[00:04:21]Um, anyone can do? Yeah, it's definitely a easy 3/4 mile of a trail. So, families, it's so easy for families. Uh you see different diverse ecosystems within this [music] just 3/4 of a mile.

[00:04:36]So, at Oklahoma, we have the cash to crawfish geoour and it's basically a free outdoor [music] scavenger hunt where people bring their families and they use their phone as a GPS to navigate [music] to different caches around our area. I know that there are several here. So, it's perfect opportunity to get your family out, come off the trail and circle those ashes.

[00:05:01]This area is actually the marsh land. Um the you could see some of the floating uh marshes that I was talking about. So, this is a fragile ecosystem that [music] we see throughout this area, southeast Louisiana, right? Fragile because we are losing a lot of wetlands. So, the refuge protects [music] this area. Uh it's protected for species like alligators, species like river otterters. It's protected for turtles um [music] amongst other wildlife. So Manderlay National Wildlife Refuge is actually a part of Bayou Savage Urban National Wildlife Refuge, which is a complex. [music] So Bay Savage itself is in New Orleans and as you drive just an hour and 15 minutes from New Orleans, you are at [music] this beautiful refuge, which is a part of the complex. And so all of these refues are managed by US Fish and Wildlife Services [music] which protects fish wildlife and helps also the public connect [music] to their wildlife refues. We have a lot of environmental education programs. It's [music] just a holistic way to connect to nature, learn more, connect [music] and disconnect. That's what I always say. Connect to nature to disconnect from everything else. Yeah, we're going to tagline that. Connect [music] to disconnect.

[00:06:15]So the great thing about urban refues uh like this one like Bay Savage Urban is that they're also community assets.

[00:06:23]>> So that entails not only providing a special place for people to connect to disconnect [music] and walk the trails and learn all about different species and themselves [music] too. Um but also uh it's a community asset in that it protects this area. So when we're getting hurricanes or big storms, it [music] actually soaks up a lot of that storm surge and protects the city of Hola. That's amazing. [music] >> It's really cool.

[00:06:51]>> All right, so that's all the time that we have for today. Thank you so much for taking the time to come and explain all of this. Feel like I've learned so much and I'm from this area, but it just goes [music] to show what we have in our own backyard that we need to really learn to appreciate. Um, so just to reiterate, [music] the Mandandalay Nature Trail is free and open to the public from sunrise [music] to sunset. So grab your family and come explore.