C.C. Lockwood
Laughing Gulls settling on Chandeleur Islands marsh at sunset.
To reach Louisiana’s remotest island chain by boat, your best bet is actually to depart from Mississippi—Ocean Springs, to be exact, where, one morning in May 2024, a well-caffeinated group of marine scientists, engineers, geologists, wildlife biologists, photographers, and journalists gathered around a pair of shallow-draft aluminum crew boats at the Ocean Springs Harbor Boat Launch. The group was there at the invitation of Louisiana’s Coastal Protection & Restoration Authority (CPRA) for a site visit to the Chandeleur Islands, the forty-mile-long archipelago of island fragments that mark both the outer boundary of the Chandeleur Sound, and Louisiana’s easternmost point.
The CPRA led this outing to observe sea turtles and bird colony activity on the islands at the height of spring nesting season, and to raise awareness of the Chandeleur Islands Restoration Project. The $350 million engineering effort aims to increase the long-term resiliency and sustainability of the landmasses in the face of rising sea levels and increased storm activity, by rebuilding thirteen miles of beach and marsh along the barrier island chain.
After introductions, group members boarded the launches, which idled out in the harbor, then throttled up into a stiff chop, headed southeast. Spray flew and camera equipment was hastily stowed as the boats crashed through, and a few less seasoned sailors fled the deck for the relative protection of the cabin. For twenty-five miles, the boats butted southeast until the lee of the islands’ northernmost tip blocked the swell. After ninety minutes, the boats swung toward the low-slung shoreline, and a seaplane made a pass overhead. The shallowing water cleared to reveal beds of seagrass passing below. When the boats dropped anchor a quarter mile from shore, the passengers lined up to gingerly climb over the side, dropping into waist-high water for a ten-minute wade through seagrass and skittering mullet. With the outboards silenced, a rising symphony of birdcalls filled the air. “Get ready,” remarked Mike Miner, a coastal geologist with The Water Institute of the Gulf (TWIG), “you’re about to see more birds at one time than you’ve probably ever seen in your life.”
C.C. Lockwood
Scientists and members of the press wade shorewards during a visit to learn about the Chandeleur Islands Restoration Project.
Why the Chandeleur Islands are Unique
The Chandeleur Islands are hard for humans to get to, and that’s what makes them special. In a crowded world, this remote archipelago strung across a crescent of open water is one of the few places in the Gulf South where nature retains the upper hand. In the absence of any anthropogenic threat, the biodiversity that the islands support is staggering. As our group waded shorewards, the sky darkened with wheeling flocks of gulls and terns, while the distant shell ridges and scrub-covered dunes literally shimmered with birds—a noisy, chattering horde. Each year, hundreds of thousands of birds use the Chandeleurs as nesting, foraging, breeding, and roosting habitat; 171 bird species were observed here in 2023 and 2024 alone. Many migratory species, including Piping Plovers, Snowy Plovers, Red Knots, and Redhead Ducks, utilize the islands as nesting locations and as a critical stopover point for rest and refueling. Colonial nesting species, including Black Skimmers, Royal Terns, Sandwich Terns, Reddish Egrets, and Louisiana’s iconic brown pelicans, gather here in such numbers that, during the 1980s and 1990s, the Chandeleur Islands were recognized as supporting the largest colonial nesting bird population in the world. Today, the islands remain one of the largest known bird nesting areas in the Gulf, leading the National Audubon Society to designate the Chandeleurs as a “globally significant bird area.” One species, the Chandeleur Gull, is not known to nest anywhere else.
The birds are just the beginning. The leeward side of the Chandeleurs supports more than five thousand acres of seagrass meadows—the only such meadows in Louisiana and the most expansive in the northern Gulf. That makes the islands essential foraging and nursery habitat for fish and shellfish species such as Red Snapper, Redfish, Spotted Trout, Gulf Sturgeon, Tarpon, Lemon Sharks, Blue Crabs, and several species of shrimp.
Dolphins from all over the Mississippi Delta and the Breton Sound Estuary visit these meadows to feed, as do manatees and no fewer than five species of sea turtles. The Loggerhead Turtle and the Kemp’s Ridley—the smallest and most critically endangered species of sea turtle in the world—both nest here. Taken together, the Chandeleur Islands support seventy-six species considered to be in “greatest conservation need” by Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries, including birds, mammals, fish, reptiles, crustaceans, mollusks, and plants.
C.C. Lockwood
Todd Baker, project manager of the Chandeleur Islands Restoration Project for the CPRA, describes the project's plan and engineering.
That the Chandeleurs serve as a vital link supporting an intricate web of species and processes has been understood for a long time. Neil Lalonde, project leader of the Southeast Louisiana Refuges Complex with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, noted that the Chandeleurs have been part of the Breton Islands National Wildlife Refuge since its establishment by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1904, the second-oldest among the 560 national wildlife refuges in the NWR system.
But isolation alone will not protect the islands, nor the species that rely on them. Natural marine processes continue to shape their structure, and in recent decades, factors like rising sea levels, more intense storms, and ecological disasters, such as the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, have battered the islands and the populations they support.
During the boat ride out, Miner explained that the Chandeleurs are the last remnants of the Mississippi River’s St. Bernard Delta Complex, a delta that remained connected to the river’s main channel until around 1,500 years ago. At that point, Miner said, the river shifted course to the Bayou Lafourche area in present day Terrebonne Parish, abandoning the St. Bernard delta. Starved of river silt, the delta’s main structure detached from the mainland, becoming a barrier island system that today lies around twenty-five miles south of Biloxi and seventy east of New Orleans. These deltaic structures, Miner noted, are less stable than the coastal plain barrier islands like Grand Isle, Deer Island, and Horn Island that lie closer to shore. Built upon a bed of river sand laid down over eons and sculpted by wind and wave action, the Chandeleurs are constantly shifting, migrating shorewards as material erodes from the middle and pushes out towards the ends, creating the crescent arc that the system presents today.
C.C. Lockwood
Sandwich and Royal Tern nesting colony in the Chandeleur Islands, photographed in the 1980s, when biologists counted 30,000 terns in this colony. Since then, the islands have lost 90% of their land area.
[Read this: "Long Live the Queen—At Queen Bess Island, still another second chance"]
They’re also existentially challenged. Blown to bits by hurricanes Georges in 1998 and Katrina in 2005, the Chandeleurs have lost around ninety percent of their land area in the last twenty years, and while natural marine processes have somewhat knitted them back together, much of the sand that would normally replenish them has been pushed off into deep water, where wind and wave action can no longer re-introduce it as building material. “There has to be a sand source to keep building the spit out, otherwise this system is in a late phase of its existence,” Miner explained. “In the last phase, it becomes a submerged shoal. If we want to save it, we’ve got to intervene before it crosses that threshold. But we know where the sand is.”
When our group reached shore, we were greeted by Neil Lalonde, project leader of the Southeast Louisiana Refuges Complex with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service; and Todd Baker, project manager of the Chandeleur Islands Restoration Project for the CPRA—both of whom had arrived in the seaplane. Standing on a beach that seemed to consist entirely of seashells, Baker pointed out that organizers had landed us on the southernmost intact fragment of the original island chain, where the beach is pretty much all shell, no sand, illustrating what larger North Chandeleur will look like in a few decades if no action is taken.
C.C. Lockwood
Now 25 miles from the mainland, the Chandeleur Islands are the last remnants of the Mississippi River's St. Bernard Delta Complex, which the river abandoned 1500 years ago. This photo was taken nearly forty years ago; the lighthouse seen here was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.
Prior to Katrina, Baker observed, South and North Chandeleur Islands were connected, but today South Chandeleur has no dunes, nor any elevation higher than three-and-a-half feet above sea level. He explained that as the sediment-starved system erodes and rolls back, the land masses and seagrass meadows will melt away, with irreversible consequences not only for the Gulf’s avian, terrestrial, and marine species, but also for the human populations along the coast that depend on them for food, biodiversity, and protection from incoming storms.
The Restoration Project
According to the CPRA’s Todd Baker, the Chandeleur Islands Restoration Project aims to arrest that decline by restoring thirteen miles of beach and dune on North Chandeleur, building elevation and facilitating development of marsh on the leeward side, which, in turn, will encourage the growth of seagrass beds.
Additional phases involve adding land back to New Harbor Island—home to the largest brown pelican colony east of the Mississippi—to expand its size from thirty acres (currently only around nineteen acres are habitable), to more than 160. Baker said the project, which is led by CPRA and the Department of Interior and designed in collaboration with geologists, wildlife biologists, and engineers representing Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries, U.S. Fish & Wildlife, The Water Institute of the Gulf, and Coastal Engineering Consultants, will recover nine million cubic yards of sand—enough to fill two Superdomes—from a shoal named Hughes Point that lies to the north, where much of the sand eroded from the island has been deposited in deep water. That sand will be used to build beach and dune along the island’s windward side, and add a marsh complex and sand reserve on the leeward side.
Baker explained that the reserve is essentially a “sand engine,” designed to mimic naturally occurring land-building processes by infusing fine sediment sand into the littoral zone, where it will continue nourishing the beach.
C.C. Lockwood
During nesting season, a brown pelican touches down on New Harbor Island, which will be enlarged by the restoration project.
The idea for the sand engine was developed as a result of Hurricane Katrina, which fragmented the Chandeleurs into thirty small islands. Five to ten years after the storm, researchers noticed the islands beginning to heal themselves back together. Testing revealed that sand reservoirs buried beneath the marsh were supplying the fuel. By reintroducing sand to the system to restart that process, the restoration project has the potential to extend the system’s lifespan by decades, and perhaps as much as a century.
Paying the Price
Baker put the cost for restoration of North Chandeleur and New Harbor at around $355 million, with additional dollars for ongoing monitoring increasing that figure to perhaps $380 million over ten years. Ironically, the funding making the project possible results from the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history—the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, which released some 3.9 million barrels of raw crude into the northern Gulf in 2010.
As one of the land masses closest to the spill site, the Chandeleurs were hit early and repeatedly, leaving its beaches and seagrass beds heavily oiled. The islands’ remote location further complicated cleanup efforts, with long-lasting impacts on terrestrial and aquatic habitats. The resulting settlement for environmental damages totaled $20.8 billion—the largest in U.S. history. Baker explained that most of the money for the project will come through the Deepwater Horizon Natural Resource Damage Assessment (NRDA) fund, which was established to restore damages resulting from the oil spill. NRDA’s Regionwide Trustee Implementation Group (TIG) contributed $8 million to pay for the project’s design and engineering phases.
C.C. Lockwood
A Least Sandpiper, Calidris minutilla, hunting for his lunch.
Construction will be funded from various sources, many of which are also under the NRDA umbrella. Baker said that the lion’s share of construction will be funded with monies from the Louisiana TIG and the Open Ocean TIG; a decision is expected this summer. CPRA is pursuing additional funding from various sources that include Louisiana state surplus dollars and grants from the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration, National Fish & Wildlife Foundation, and Ducks Unlimited. Construction should begin in the spring of 2026 and last around two and a half years.
If successful, the Chandeleur Island Restoration Project stands to preserve not only the bird, fish, and turtle species that nest there, but also a vast network of interconnected systems that extends far beyond the islands themselves, to the mainland and the human communities that call it home. Baker observed that as the eastern boundary of the Breton, Chandeleur, and Pontchartrain sounds, the islands regulate salinity and water flows through the eastern part of Louisiana. “The biodiversity that we have: a lot of it depends on these islands. Oysters, fisheries—they all depend on the regulation of those sounds. And if you live in Orleans, St. Bernard, Plaquemines, these islands are your first line of defense from hurricanes. This is a very rare opportunity to do whole ecosystem restoration. Most people mightn’t know they’re out there, but we’d sure miss them if they were gone.”
