Bayou tradition takes it final flight
For fifteen years The TECHE Project has been working to make Bayou Teche a cleaner, more accessible and more deeply appreciated part of St. Martin Parish. Its signature celebration of that work may also be its most colorful.
On Saturday, October 17, Shake Your Trail Feather returns to Bayou Teche for its 15th and final year, sending a flotilla of canoes and kayaks—decorated, feathered and accompanied by live Cajun music—down 4.5 miles of the bayou from Poche Bridge to Breaux Bridge. The paddle parade ends at Parc des Ponts, where the celebration continues with food, children’s activities, a kayak raffle and live music from Chubby Carrier and the Bayou Swamp Band.
The festival is more than a party on the water. It’s a fundraiser for Louisiana’s only National Paddle Trail, completed in 2023 after years of work by The TECHE Project and its volunteers. Today, docks and informational kiosks in fifteen communities make it possible to explore the bayou in a series of manageable trips from one trailhead to the next.
With Shake Your Trail Feather approaching, I sat down with Patti Holland, executive director, to talk about her path to The TECHE Project, her career working with wetlands and migratory birds, the ecology of Bayou Teche, and the long community effort to keep the bayou clean, navigable and wild.
How did you first get involved with The TECHE Project?
In my former life I worked for U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service. I worked there in Lafayette for thirty-one years in the ecological services office as a wildlife biologist. I moved to Arnaudville toward the end of my career and fell in with a group of people that were cleaning the Teche, and from there it grew into the nonprofit of The TECHE Project.
Have you found a lot of overlap between your career interests and The TECHE Project?
Definitely. The TECHE Project is an acronym that stands for Teche Ecology, Culture and History Education. So, ecologically, I’m kind of like the point person. We have a lot of ecological programs with The TECHE Project. We do a wood duck workshop, teaching people how to rear wood ducks on the bayou, and we do bankline stabilization and bank-line restoration projects.
What was your area of interest as a biologist?
As a biologist, I was in wetland regulatory, for the most part. I did a lot of migratory bird work as well. The big coastal restoration projects down on the beaches, they impact nesting shorebirds and seabirds, so we developed hazing plans with the CPRA (Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority) so that the birds wouldn’t nest there while they’re doing the project, and because their projects are beneficial. They’re creating beach, but in the short term, they’re gonna take out the nesting habitat, so the birds go someplace else to nest that season, and then they’ll come back and nest there the next year.
What is the importance of bank-line stabilization?
There’s a lot of erosion. People like to have grass all the way down to the bayou, and then they wonder why their bank-line is falling into the bayou. It’s because grass roots have little ability to hold soil together. So we try and teach them that you can do restoration techniques and still have your view of the bayou. We do things like, we make sure your slope’s right, and you avoid putting bulkheads in. Bulkheads are bad, because they cause deflection and increase erosion in other places. It might be good for your yard, but it’s not gonna be good for the bayou across the way or your neighbors.
What’s special about Bayou Teche compared to other waterways?
What I like about Bayou Teche, is that you can get into a boat, and do a short little trip down to the next town, get out in that town, and enjoy the culture and the ambiance of that town. We’ve got jewels of little towns up and down the bayou, St. Martinville, Parks, Breaux Bridge. You just pop on down the bayou, and it’s short little trips. If you’re paddling, you can do it with kids. You can put in at Poché Bridge, and in two hours, you’re in Breaux Bridge. There’s a current in the upper part of the bayou, so it’s easy to just float on down.
Tell me about the Shake Your Trail Feather event that’s coming up.
For The TECHE Project, it’s a celebration of the paddle trail that we built. The paddle trail took us eight years to put in, several grants with the federal highways department, and then administered through the Department of Transportation and Development and the state parks. So we got three or four grants along the way to enable us to put in the floating docks. Now that the paddle trail is built, we’re trying to do what we can to promote it. It’s 135 miles long. It goes from Port Barre to Patterson with docks, and then actually goes down to Berwick with a kiosk.
So Shake Your Trail Feather is a portion of the larger trail?
Right. That’s our celebration of the paddle trail. We do it every fall. This year, it’s Saturday, October 17th. We start in Poché Bridge, and we do a paddle parade. We have floating barges with Cajun musicians playing, and we encourage all the paddlers to come and dress colorfully and wacky. Every year we have a theme bird, and this year, our theme bird is the redbellied woodpecker, which is the most common woodpecker that people see and hear along the waterway and in their backyards, for that matter. And when you buy a ticket to paddle, you get a bird pin, and you also get a membership to The TECHE Project. It’s thirty dollars on Eventbrite to get your ticket. Kids paddle for free, fourteen and under, because we want to bring families out. And we tell everybody to dress up like the bird of the year, and then we give away prizes for the costumed people afterwards. But they paddle for two hours down the bayou from Poché Bridge to Parc des Ponts in Breaux Bridge, here at St. Bernard School. That’s from ten to twelve, and then at twelve o’clock we have a band kicking off. This year it’s Chubby Carrier and the Bayou Swamp Band at Parc des Ponts. And it’s free. So even if you don’t paddle, and you live in the area, and you want to come down to the park and enjoy some music, we’ll have food vendors and activities for the kids.
Sponsored by St. Martin Parish Tourism Commission More at experienceatchafalaya.
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