by Linda Aksomitis

Hiking Pine Beach Trail in Bon Secour

Sound filled the early morning-a loud hiss that was beyond my range of experience. The closer I came to the lush growth of the park, the more it grew until it was the buzzing of thousands. "What is that noise?" I asked, amazed that everyone else seemed unperturbed by what I found to be an ear-piercing noise. It hurt. "What?" said Andrew Hoffman, our guide from the US fish and Wildlife Service, "oh, you mean those locusts."

Locusts? I'd always heard they were like grasshoppers, which I had plenty of experience with, but no grasshopper I'd ever run into made this kind of hum! About then I realized it was going to be an interesting hike through the Bon Secour National Wildlife Refuge in Gulf Shores, Alabama.

Locusts, as it turns out, are large grasshoppers, with density-dependent polymorphism, or some of their behaviors change when the swarm grows in number. Instead of being quiet, well-behaved little insects eating everything in site, they become gregarious and conspicuous, more like a group of teenage boys whose objective is to be noticed on a Saturday night. Well, notice them I did!

The morning was hot, 90 plus degrees, but I was full of energy for the hike. My favorite trees, the live oaks, shaded the Pine Beach Trail with their twisting, gnarly limbs and lush green foliage. Their name comes from the fact that their leaves persist until new ones appear, so they are never leafless as other oaks.

In the first mile on my way to Gator Lake, I encountered lots of incredible species of plants and trees, many of them new to me. The Magnolias were just starting to bloom, so their fragrant white flowers hid among the long branches of these stately trees. The Red Basil, which attracts hummingbirds in the fall, was a small shrub that caught my eye even though the red flowers weren't blooming yet. Pignut hickory and Wild Olive were more new species for me, along with the muscadine, a wild grape vine.

While the terrain was flat, the heat and high humidity made hiking a challenging enough experience that several of our group slowed and fell behind. At Gator Lake the water was filled with tall grasses-a heron stood perfectly still long enough for me to take several photos. A ghost crab scurried through the shrubs, its white body disappearing before I could focus on it.

Overhead the osprey swooped through the sky, dropping down to feed their nestlings. Great blue heron and cattle egret were also active with newborn chicks. As we left the lush foliage of the early part of the trail behind, the sounds of locusts diminished and were replaced with more the more familiar songs of birds for the second mile of the trek. (CONTINUED...)