Great Rivers Partnership - LMR Cypress Island

Cypress Island

Located about halfway between the towns of Lafayette and Breaux Bridge in south-central Louisiana, The Nature Conservancy’s 2,800-acre Cypress Island Preserve shelters one of North America’s largest breeding colonies, or rookeries, of wading birds, as well as a population of American alligators. The preserve is part of the largest remaining forested wetland in the Bayou Teche and Vermillion River watersheds, an area totaling about 20,000 acres that has been designated a priority conservation site by the Conservancy’s Lower Mississippi River Program.

Lying near the western edge of the Mississippi’s alluvial plain, the site contains the full range of natural plant communities that historically occurred in the area, including virgin cypress-tupelo swamps and bottomland hardwood forests; water, live and Nuttall oak ridges; and a prairie remnant.

Strategies and Progress

Numerous ecological stresses are being exerted on the Cypress Island site. Past and current forestry practices have altered the structure and composition of its forests. Its natural water flows have been affected by channel dredging in smaller bayous and by changes to the larger watershed, including stream alterations made to the Mississippi for navigation and flood-control purposes. Fragmentation of its wetland woods poses threats to the successful breeding of forest-nesting birds, while public-use pressures and a growing ecotourism trade threaten the long-term survival of the rookery and alligators.

The Cypress Island site exemplifies The Nature Conservancy’s efforts to foster community-based conservation. To bolster its conservation of the Cypress Island Preserve, the Conservancy’s Louisiana chapter, working with partners, established the Cypress Island Advisory Council to produce a blueprint to guide land-use in the vicinity, including flood-control projects and the Conservancy’s own efforts to restore the area’s wetland forests. In addition, Conservancy education and outreach activities are ongoing to enlist public support and action for conserving the site, including minimizing disturbances of the rookery and alligators while accommodating human visitation.

The Conservancy is seeking to reduce fragmentation of the site’s wetland forest through property purchases and the acquisition of conservation easements to preserve forested tracts and by encouraging owners of cleared tracts to participate in forest-restoration programs that offer incentives beneficial to the owners. Other Conservancy strategies at Cypress Island include working in partnership with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to conduct science-based planning and restoration of the area’s natural water-flow patterns and performing inventories and other scientific research of the rookery as a basis for Conservancy protection strategies

What's to Gain?

It has been estimated that between 10,000 and 20,000 pairs of wading birds such as herons, egrets, ibis and roseate spoonbills nest each year at the Cypress Island site, making its conservation essential to a healthy future for such species. Although the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service “de-listed” the American alligator as a threatened species in 1987, the loss of its habitat remains a potential threat to its long-term survival. The Cypress Island site provides proven opportunities for eco-tourism, which, when conducted without undue damage or disturbance of natural features, can yield sustainable benefits for local economies.

Cypress Island2

Once on the endangered list, American alligators now thrive
throughout bottomland forests and swamps along the lower Mississippi River © Byron Jorjorian

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Cypress Island

The Nature Conservancy and its partners work at sites along the entire length of the Mississippi River, from its headwaters in Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico.