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At the bird's-foot tip of the Mississippi River, Delta National Wildlife Refuge is building new marsh and losing old marsh at the same time. This deep dive explains how crevasses, the spring flood pulse, roseau cane die-back, and hurricanes shape the ducks, geese, shorebirds, and pelicans at the bottom of the flyway.

Louisiana's coastal marsh is among the most important wintering grounds for ducks in North America, and it is disappearing. This is the ecology of a landscape-scale crisis: what land loss and saltwater intrusion mean for gadwall, pintail, and the non-migratory mottled duck, and for the Mississippi Flyway that depends on this coast.

In the ACE Basin's rice-field impoundments and tidal marshes, feral hogs are a long-established presence, rooting through Gullah-Geechee-built levees, tidal flats, and barrier island turtle nests in one of the Southeast's great conservation landscapes.

North Carolina's coastal plain sits at the northern edge of the Southeast's feral hog range, where pocosin peatlands, Carolina bays, and the Albemarle-Pamlico estuary meet an expanding invasive population. It is a case study in what an early-stage invasion looks like -- and what a narrowing window to stop it might still accomplish.

The spartina marshes threading the Cooper, Ashley, Stono, and Wando rivers run on the tide, and so does the redfish fishing built on top of them. This report covers the ecology behind Charleston and Beaufort's inshore tradition, the tide-driven species clock, and why the region's most saturated fishing market still has room for a better story.

From the tannin-stained peat waters of the Okefenokee to the marsh-fringed barrier islands of the Golden Isles, southeast Georgia runs on two engines: a blackwater swamp that feeds three river systems, and a tidewater coast built on rice-field history and open estuary. This report maps the ecology and the operator landscape connecting them.

From the rice levees of Vermilion Parish to the fraying marsh edges of Cameron Parish, feral hogs occupy the seam between farmland and wetland. Their rooting threatens both a rice economy that feeds millions of wintering waterfowl and a coastline already losing ground to the Gulf.

Hyde County holds one of the highest black bear densities in the eastern United States, a product of pocosin wetlands and agricultural edge rather than remote wilderness. This report covers the ecology behind that density, the small outfitter community built around it, and the bear-waterfowl overlap that defines a Mattamuskeet-area trip.

Behind the Mississippi barrier islands lies a sheltered inland sea, the Mississippi Sound, and behind that, the redfish-rich Biloxi Marsh on the Louisiana line. With the free-flowing Pascagoula River, they make one of the most productive and quietest inshore fisheries on the Gulf. This report walks the coast, the trout and redfish, and the operators between Mobile and the marsh.

In Georgia's lower Coastal Plain, the wild hog has reached one of North America's great wetlands: the Okefenokee, a vast rain-fed peat swamp, and the blackwater rivers around it. This synthesis follows the hog onto the swamp's tree islands, into its alligator nests, and down the bottomland corridors: what rooting does to the peat, the alligators, and the swamp's rare wildlife, and why a federal Wilderness is such hard ground to defend.

Louisiana's coastal marsh is the working heart of the Sportsman's Paradise, roughly three million acres of estuary that grows excellent redfish and is one of the continent's most important duck-wintering grounds, even as it dissolves into the Gulf. This field report walks the disappearing marsh: the estuary behind the redfish and trout, the land-loss crisis and restoration fight, the flyway ducks, and the operators who work it.

Off Cape Hatteras the warm Gulf Stream peels away from the continent and meets cold water sliding down from the north. That collision, plus the great estuary behind the islands, stacks billfish, red drum, and false albacore onto one thin ribbon of barrier sand. This field report walks the Outer Banks: the current confluence and the short run to blue water, Pamlico Sound, the surf and the sounds, the season-by-season fishery, and the fleet that works it.

At the head of Mobile Bay sits America's Amazon - the Mobile-Tensaw Delta, the second-largest river delta in the country, where six rivers braid through 260,000 acres of swamp into a shallow, brackish bay. That estuary feeds one of the richest inshore fisheries on the Gulf and stages the jubilee, the dawn low-oxygen event that drives flounder and crab to the shallows. This field report walks the delta, the bay, the jubilee, and the inshore fishery, plus the operators who work

The same rich soil that made the Alabama Black Belt the antebellum cotton kingdom now feeds a serious wild hog invasion, and the vast Mobile-Tensaw Delta gives the hogs a near-impenetrable refuge. This synthesis applies the invasion-biology lens to one landscape: why the Black Belt's chalk-soil farmland and river bottoms are so vulnerable, how the delta's swamp defeats control, and what the hogs do to the forests, the cane, the mast, and the native wildlife.

The Atchafalaya is the largest river-swamp in North America — 1.4 million acres of cypress, bottomland hardwood, and moving water where the Mississippi is forever trying to change course. This Louisiana field report walks the pulse-driven floodplain: the Old River Control Structure holding the river in place, the spring flood that grows the crawfish, the summer drawdown that stacks the bass, the fall low water that stages the ducks, and the Cajun guide economy that works it a

Look past the shooting stations and a sporting clays course is often something else: a working landscape. Many Southern clays venues - especially those tied to plantations and preserves - sit on land managed with prescribed fire, native grasses, and longleaf pine. This synthesis reads the upland ecology beneath them: the fire-built longleaf savanna, the bunchgrass fields, the bobwhite and turkey they hold, and the working-lands conservation that shooting helps fund.

The water a kayak can reach - ankle-deep tidal creeks, grass flats, and cypress backwaters - is some of the most ecologically important in the Southeast. The shallows are the nursery for young redfish, seatrout, and flounder, the refuge from bigger predators, and the marsh edge where the food web turns over. This synthesis covers the shallow-water ecology of the region's most accessible waters: the habitats, the fish, and why these zones are first lost to bulkheads, boat wake

Off the Southeast's beaches the water turns blue, and a different ecosystem takes over. This synthesis covers the offshore and bluewater habitats of the Gulf of Mexico and South Atlantic: the Loop Current and Gulf Stream that act as warm-water highways, the Sargassum weed lines that nurse young fish, the oil platforms and artificial reefs that concentrate life, and the billfish, tuna, mahi, and reef fish that live there - plus the fishery management that governs them.

No animal is remaking the Southeast faster than the wild hog. Descended from Spanish colonial livestock and Eurasian wild boar stocked for hunting, feral Sus scrofa now numbers in the millions — rooting up farmland and forest, eating the eggs of ground-nesting birds, and carrying disease. This synthesis covers the invasion biology: where the hogs came from, why their breeding makes them impossible to remove, the damage they do, and the choice between eradication and endless c

The Southeast holds cold water in a warm region two ways: in the high Appalachian headwaters where native brook trout survive, and in the artificial tailwaters below big dams, where cold bottom-release water grows rainbow and brown trout far south of their natural range. This synthesis covers both coldwater worlds - the engineered tailwater, the imperiled native brook char, the introduced trout that displaced it, the invertebrate food base, and the restoration holding the lin