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Tanner's Cottonwood

KEDM Public Radio | By Kelby Ouchley

Published May 16, 2016 at 9:00 AM EDT

A saddled horse standing beside a giant eastern cottonwood is the subject of a nitrate-based cellulose negative given to me by the man who took the shot in 1938 while prowling about for ivory-billed woodpeckers in Louisiana's vast Tensas Swamp. The tree appears to be nearly as wide as James Tanner's sorrel gelding is long. Even in what then was the closest thing remaining to a large, old-growth bottomland hardwood forest in America, the tree in its size was an anomaly.

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Kelby Ouchley

Kelby was a biologist and manager of National Wildlife Refuges for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for more than 30 years. He has worked with alligators in gulf coast marshes and Canada geese on Hudson Bay tundra. His most recent project was working with his brother Keith of the Louisiana Nature Conservancy on the largest floodplain restoration project in the Mississippi River Basin at the Mollicy Unit of the Upper Ouachita National Wildlife Refuge, reconnecting twenty-five square miles of former floodplain forest back to the Ouachita River.

See stories by Kelby Ouchley