For most people, Avery Island means very little, but for those to whom it means anything, it will probably be as the home of Tabasco sauce. I like Tabasco – I had some on cheese on toast for lunch. Mmmmm!
See! – Avery Island is named on the label on the front of the sauce bottle. Had you ever noticed that? I didn’t for a long time but of course when I did it stuck in my mind.
And the reason it stuck in my mind was ornithological. Avery Island was, and still is, a bird sanctuary which played a part in the conservation efforts to stop the plumage trade driving species like Snowy Egrets in America (and Little Egrets in Europe) to extinction. At the same time, and for the same reasons, as the RSPB was founded and was growing in the UK, similar conservation efforts were growing in the USA. So, perhaps you can see why I feel a bond with Avery Island.
But now, rising sea levels caused by climate change, are threatening the low-lying Louisiana coast and nibbling away at the protective saltmarsh around the island. And of course this is happening up and down the Louisiana coast and across many coastlines all over the world.
The birthplace of Tabasco and a birthplace of American bird cnservation is threatened. Which will coint for most in people’s minds, I wonder?
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I have never knowingly had Tabasco sauce. But as an engineering mathematician, and ESA (and NASA) space scientist, concerned with four space missions devoted entirely to monitoring Climate Change on Earth, I am deeply involved with sea-level rise. Therefore, for me, Avery island will be associated with the gravest human folly we have ever knowingly perpetrated. And then with Mark, of course, who is the greatest fighter against the slaughter of our wildlife I have known:-)
I have been to Avery island – and its incredible story should make any Avery proud !
And it was absolutely fantastic back in 1973 – a joy of swirling Egrets.
The one question i’d pose, though, is that I understood that Avery island itself was a (salt ?) dome poking up out of the surrounding marshes, so it might be protected by a bit of height – not, of course, the surrounding marshes where the egrets feed.