Birds of a feather will gather for this year’s Piney Woods Picnic Sept. 13-16 at Elks Lake Music Park. In addition to some great music and fellowship, the underlying cause for the event is to raise awareness of the importance of preservation of the Pascagoula River Basin which runs through the Piney Woods as the Leaf and Bouie Rivers.
Nobody knows more about this area than Becky Stowe, a 16-year veteran of the Nature Conservancy in Mississippi where she serves as director of forest programs.
According to Stowe, there are a lot of reasons the Pacagoula River Basin is important, but one of the most may be is that it’s one of the last undammed rivers in the lower 48 states.
“It’s not the only one, but definitely one of the last ones, so that’s really important for a number of reasons,” she said, citing the large fish population that travels up and down the Pascagoula, especially the Gulf Sturgeon.
“This is a great big prehistoric-looking fish, which lives part of its life in saltwater and goes up into the fresh water to spawn,” she said. “They have done a lot of studies on these and have found out that they travel all the way up the Pascagoula, which is 80 miles, just to where the Leaf and Chickasawhay River come together and that’s what forms the Pascagoula. It’s where they go, all the way to the Bouie in Hattiesburg, to lay their eggs. It’s quite a journey and if there was a dam in between it might really throw off their breeding.”
Stowe said researchers have also found dammed rivers to be the cause of a significant sturgeon decline on other rivers. “That’s one of the rivers it’s really important,” Stowe said.
The Chickasawhay goes almost all the way to Meridian and the Leaf River, which flows through Hattiesburg, and flows southward all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.
Stowe said the the Leaf and Chickasawhay come together in a little community in George County called Merril, which used to be a logging town. That’s where the Pascagoula is formed.
The Pascagoula River Basin also drains most of southeast Missisisppi, because the Leaf and the Chickasawhay are the two main tributaries of the Pascagoula, a lot of it which is still in a real natural state.
Stowe said The Nature Conservancy started working on the Pascagoula back in the 1970s and determined it was a priority area, an important place for what they call bio-diversity with lots of different kinds of animals and plants living there.
Following the gifting of more than 30,000 acres to the state and the Pascagoula River Wildlife Management area by the Nature Conservancy, conservationists have been working up and down the river to protect the area which is for a wide range animals like the Louisiana black bear. Stowe said there’s also more than 350 types of birds documented in the basin and a real diversity of fish, more than 119 species at last county.
“So it’s very rich biologically,” she said.
The birds found in this area are called neotropical migratory birds. “Those are birds that spend their summers breeding and nesting up here and their winters in South or Central America or Mexico,” Stowe said. “It’s important for those birds that are migrating in the spring that when they cross the Gulf of Mexico, which is 600 miles and they fly straight on through, to have a protected place to land when they get here.”
While the first landfall they make is sometimes the barrier islands on the first day, Stowe said on the second day you’ll find them up in the Pascagoula River Basin area looking for food and shelter. Some will continue on north while some of them stay locally.
While the river is enjoyed by those floating or kayakig the river, Stowe said it’s the southern part of the basin that gets the most activity.
So far, the only problem they’ve seen is the overuse of sandbars where turtles nest.
“People can disturb the nests and that is a concern because we have what we call an endemic species, which means a species that only lives in the Pascagoula River Basin,” Stowe said. “The yellow blotched sawback turtle is small and found no where else in the world, but this river basin. It’s fairly common there and they nest on the sandbars.”
The Pascagoula ranges in depth, but is not a very deep river.
“It’s pretty shallow and one of our black water rivers,” said Stowe. “That means they have kind of a dark tint, but are clear. The dark tint comes from the tannic acid which is produced by leaves and things decomposing. It makes it really pretty, like the color of Southern ice tea.”
In addition to work along the river, the Nature Conservancy also does land acquisitions as well as conservation easements. This is when a private land owner wants to keep their property but also wants to keep it protected for future generations. Stowe explained that the property owner can put an easement on the property that states there will never be any subdivisions, condos or that sort of thing built on the land.
“That goes with the deed and protects the land,” she said. “They also do several programs where private citizens can work with government agencies to plant native trees and burn their property off, which is pretty important to our ecosystem and creates better wildlife habitats.”
She mentioned that the basic is also important for people, as well as the animals, fish and birds because it helps keep our air clean.
The music featured during the Piney Woods Picnic fits with everything the Nature Conservancy is trying to do, according to Stowe.
“For Mississippians in general, we have a real sense of place. and our roots and the land are very important to us,” Stowe said. “It’s a really good group of folks, laid back and just really appreciative of the world around them. That Americana-style music they play just fits right in.
“The annual Piney Wood Picnic brings an increasing awareness of what we have in our backyard. It helps people understand what we have and its importance of these creeks they’ve been going to all of their lives.”
- Photo by Chad Edwards/MCE Photography
