We met at the Butte LaRose Welcome Center so that everyone could follow me to our destination parking area for the nature trails. As we started to assemble and walk away from our cars, it was noticed that not everyone that was following us on the gravel levee road had managed to make the turn into the parking area. I called the missing persons and sure enough, they had passed us up and were at the next parking area just up the road a bit.
We birded while we waited and saw female indigo and painted buntings but not the spectacular males. We heard both of these calls at the forest edge along the levee road. This is a great place to see both buntings and if you have never seen the males, it is worth a trip with binoculars and a little patience. 
The Indigo Bunting is a deep, rich jewel-like blue coloration overall and the Painted Bunting has a deep-blue head, orangish-red throat, belly and rump with a touch of greenish-yellow behind its head with yellowish-green wings. They are both spectacular. We identified many bird song and calls; I could pull up songs, range map, photos and description of these birds on my Sibley Guide to Birds iPhone app.
We also saw my two favorite flowers, lead weed and mist flower. One is a deep, dark purple and other is a dark lavender, lovely flowers. We hiked the longer hiking trail with is multi-use and ran into a squirrel hunter. They can use the trail to get from place to place but are supposed to only shoot at least 100 feet from the trail. I was wearing a bright orange shirt for this reason. When the hunter reached the pipeline, he got on his bicycle and rode away. That was something to see… a camouflaged hunter with a shotgun on a bicycle.
When we completed the larger loop, we took the short nature trail to finish up our wonderful morning of hiking. The mosquitoes were there but weren’t bad. I never used any repellent and only got bitten once, I suppose if we had stopped for longer periods of time, I could have gotten more. It was quite chilly in the morning but once we got moving everyone was comfortable. We had a nice lunch in the parking area and made some new friends with loads of laughter.
Check out all of the photos from this from the trip, follow this link: https://packpaddle.com/events-and-trips/recent-trips-photos/?album=IndianBayouHikeOctober2011
-Stacey Scarce, Trip Leader