Peveto Woods Bird & Butterfly Sanctuary

Forty-one acres of trees in a parish where trees do not grow. That's what makes Peveto Woods matter—not the acreage, but the fact that it exists at all on the treeless Cameron Parish coast. The sanctuary is a chenier woodland, a rare island of forest on land that everywhere else offers nothing to break a horizon. Over two million migratory birds pass through here annually. Peak migration runs April through May. They arrive exhausted from their Gulf crossing and fill every branch—warblers, tanagers, buntings, orioles. The sanctuary is one of the most important trans-Gulf migratory bird stopover sites in North America. Lake Charles sits thirty miles inland from the Gulf on a level plain. The city has been battered: the Great Fire of 1910, Hurricane Rita in 2005, Category 4 Hurricane Laura and Hurricane Delta in 2020. A National Weather Service warning called Laura's storm surge "unsurvivable." The city rebuilt each time. What survives here survives hard weather. Peveto Woods is managed by the Baton Rouge Audubon Society. Open dawn to dusk, free. Go in late April when the migrants are desperate and the branches are full.