Probably no section of North America in its primitive state was richer in bird life through the years than southern Louisiana. Encompassing four million acres, Louisiana's coastal marshes and swamps represent over 40 percent of the estuarine wetlands in the contiguous United States. Millions of people relied directly on the marshes for their livelihood and for protection against hurricanes and storms. This land was the heart of the unique Cajun culture.

Located at the southern end of the Mississippi and Central Flyways, the low-lying coasts, where stretched great vistas of marsh and shallow lagoon, gave food and shelter to seventy per cent of the waterfowl of the United States and Canada. Wild geese and ducks of all kinds and species, shorebirds such as yellowlegs, plovers, willets, snipe, and woodcock migrated to these natural feeding grounds to escape the rigors and barren bleakness of northern winters.

So, if one were asked the best state for duck hunting in the olden days in the United States, one would find it extremely difficult not to say it was Louisiana. For the migratory game birds of the Mississippi Valley, Louisiana was the “Grand Central Depot” with terminal facilities that were unsurpassed. Her reedy shores, her vast marshes, her long coastline, and abundance of food furnished what was not only a haven but a heaven for waterfowl and shorebirds.

If asked the best area for duck hunting, one would say it was somewhere on the coastal region, which was one vast waterfowling Garden of Eden. Most would say it was a sixty-mile stretch eastward through a series of canals, bordered with marshes, that spanned the sometimes overflowed prairies from bayou to bayou, from Terrebonne to Lafourche, Lafourche to Des Allemands, on through Lake Salvador into and up Bartaria, again crossing the prairie and at length, leaving Lake Cataouatche through cypress swamp to the Mississippi River, opposite New Orleans.

Furthermore, Lake Salvador, 12 miles south of New Orleans, in the southern part of St. Charles Parish, would most likely be mentioned as being the best spot of that sixty-mile stretch. It had been a famous ducking ground ever since the beginning of European settlement in Louisiana.