Jungle Gardens Store marks the entrance to the Gardens on Avery Island.

Jungle Gardens, today a 170-acre park located on Avery Island, Louisiana, was originally the home of E.A. McIlhenny, the third president of McIlhenny Company, and a well known naturalist. Jungle Gardens is known for its majestic Southern Live Oaks, often draped with Spanish Moss or Resurrection Fern, and for its Azaleas, Camellias, Alligators, migratory birds, and many other unique species.

These Southern Live Oaks in Avery Island's Jungle Gardens, photographed the morning after a July rainstorm, are draped with Spanish Moss and Resurrection Fern. Resurrection Fern is so named because it can survive long periods of drought, during which it curls up, turns brown and dry, and looks dead. But within 24 hours of one good rain it can revive to the lush green shown here.

Azaleas at the base of a Southern Live Oak in Jungle Gardens.

E. A. McIlhenny first planted "Elegance" Azaleas like these in Jungle Gardens in 1932. They are difficult to purchase commercially today.

Around 1895, E. A. McIlhenny helped save the Snowy Egrets by going out into the marsh, finding eight young egrets, and raising them in captivity in a flying cage he built over an area he called Willow Pond. McIlhenny described Willow Pond as follows: "Where Bird City is now was a wet area known as the Willow Pond. The spot was covered with buttonwood trees, willows and marsh grasses and a few green herons nested there each spring. I built a small dam around a spring in the middle of the wet spot over which I built a cage fifty feet square covered with poultry netting." In the fall he released the grown Snowy Egrets from the flying cage, and they flew south across the Gulf of Mexico. The following spring the birds returned to Avery Island with others of their species -- a migration that continues to this day. Theodore Roosevelt, the father of American conservationism, called Bird City, "the most noteworthy reserve in the country." See http://www.TABASCO.com and http://www.junglegardens.org and The History of Jungle Gardens by Lisa B. Osborn, Shane K. Bernard, and Scott Carroll.

Snowy Egret on Avery Island, Louisiana.

The Egrets feel safe nesting over the water at Bird City, partly because the alligators swimming in the swamp below keep predators, like raccoons, away.

Alligators that swim in the water below the nests protect the egrets at Bird City from predators.

Snowy Egret with several light blue eggs in its nest.

Snowy Egret.

Misty morning in Jungle Gardens.

Snowy Egret wtih chicks on Avery Island.

Morning shot of Bird City on Avery Island.

Great Egret preparing to land at Avery Island's Bird City.

Azalea in Jungle Gardens.

Southern Live Oak shading a welcome bench on the walk back up from the Bird City lookout.

March brings mating season for the Great Egrets, who are the first Egrets to migrate back to Bird City each spring.

Great Egrets are monogamous, and both parents incubate their eggs.

Azaleas blooming in a cathedral of Southern Live Oaks in Avery Island's Jungle Gardens.

Alligators have the strongest laboratory-measured bite of any animal--equivalent to the force of a medium sized sedan falling on someone.