Kayaking St. Catherine's Creek

There is this tendency to "chat" when out paddling with others, but in so doing a sense of harmony is lost. A certain blindness results, where viewing wildlife is the objective. What lies in plain sight isn’t seen, isn’t observed, in fact cannot be observed when one’s attention has been purchased by another. As a result, I often find it preferable to paddle alone.

Two weeks following the record breaking crest of the Lower Mississippi last spring, I chose to paddle alone in the flooded backwater of St. Catherine’s Creek, which circumscribes the limits of Natchez. I am glad I did. Seldom have I been the beneficiary of such great wildlife watching plunder.

Ordinarily, St. Catherine’s Creek is an intermittent, unnavigable dry bed, though with the floodwaters of the spring of 2011, St. Catherine became an inland watercourse paradise. Backwater from the Mississippi flood transformed shallow, stagnant pools into deep zones of riparian ecstasy for all resident wildlife.

At six in the evening on June 1, beneath a sky still wracked with heat, I lifted my Fenn surfski into the tannic waters of St. Catherine Creek, a mile from my house, and set off upstream for whatever was about. From the point where I launched, at a dusty turnout known as Providence Park, I turned to the east to paddle inland for about three miles, though I hadn't gone so much as a quarter the distance when my paddle struck the back of a medium sized alligator, just beneath the surface.

It is the habit, when startled by an approaching kayak, for adult alligators to turn themselves inside out; to bend their torso into the shape of a horseshoe, lashing with their tails in quick retirement, showering their surroundings with boiling geysers of silvered foam. It is the judicious habit of humans, under such circumstances, to place great distance between the two parties. Onward I stroked.

To a birder, there was no finer place to covet that afternoon. I was besieged with countless little green herons and belted kingfishers, crosshatching the creek amid squawks and churrs of annoyance at my interruption. At one mile, just below the crossing of U.S. 61, an enormous great horned owl pitched from its exposed ledge on the right bank and took four pumps of the wing to clear the open air. Silent flight at its finest.

Shortly thereafter a dark streak shot across the creek, just beneath the surface, with such speed I could only surmise it was as likely a torpedo as an otter, though no detonation followed.

Thereafter I disturbed the willowed secrecy of a pair of ‘woodies’, his-and-her models, then next glimpsed a scarlet tanager and orchard oriole vying for the same weathered snag at water's edge. All across the surface of the water, fish were breaking, breaching, leaping. Surface spiders of a genus with which I was unfamiliar skittered about with the sort of zero gravity born of surface tension.

By my turn around point I had counted more than half a dozen belted kingfishers, which had been all but absent a month earlier. I noted two prothonotary warblers, countless chickadees, several snowy egrets . . .

I saw a mid-sized cottonmouth cruising the shore of a gravel bar, head erect, unaware of my presence. When finally it noticed me, it stopped dead still for an emboldened stare-down. No other serpent is so possessed of the willingness for malevolence.

I saw a beaver, middle-aged, trailing a gnawed willow branch directly across my bow, unconcerned.

I had timed things to make my return before the smell'a vanilla had perspired away. At this time of year, we are besieged with a seasonal pest that in the local vernacular has come to be regarded as the “buffalo gnat”; a form of black fly, of the family Simuliidae. They are an irritating, blood sucking agent, and they descend upon one like Southern Baptists at a post-sermon Sunday smorgasbord. Fortunately, vanilla scented sunblock, in its various forms, seems to be to buffalo gnats what liver, in any form, is to me.

Birds, insects, arthropods, and reptilians of various swimming attitudes continued throughout my return, though it was a surprise beyond any I could have imagined when I saw in the distance some activity I could not readily identify, disturbing the surface into a trailing V from river left to right, at a place where the St. Catherine is a broad bath of perhaps fifty feet. As I drew closer, the creature, which I at first took to be an alligator with a two-foot head, began to show familiar markings. It was unmistakably a canebrake rattlesnake, three feet or more, quietly cruising from shore to opposing shore. He never took note of me, though kept a stern vigil, gazing, coiling, studying his approach to the beachhead, as would any Navy SEAL or Recon Marine, before committing to a potentially hostile landfall. His rattles, six or more, swam silently beneath the surface. I was close enough to see a tongue flick.

I moved onward once more, into the gaining twilight.

Details. Details. Details.

St. Catherine Creek Wildlife Management area is thirteen miles south of Natchez near Sibley, Mississippi, where there’s much to be explored, even when it’s not flooded.

In Natchez, at present a study is being conducted known as The St. Catherine’s Creek Project. Through a $75,000 Mississippi Economic Development grant, the St. Catherine project calls for the future construction of a series of permanent inland lakes within the existing bed of St. Catherine’s Creek. A series of five engineered “weirs” is to be constructed along St. Catherine’s Creek to capture upstream runoff into five permanent pools. Once complete, St. Catherine’s will comprise some 275 acres of surface area, and will be described by a projected 17.25 miles of shoreline with a combined channel length of approximately 8.3 miles.

A photographer since age seven, Keith Benoist is also a former hunting guide, photo editor, and survivor of several near lightning strikes and a rattlesnake bite which earned for him the cognomen, ‘One Fang.’ He lives in Natchez, Mississippi.