In early April of 1837, John James Audubon and his fellow explorers aboard the Campbell and Crusader sought cover from a storm along the coast of Louisiana at Ile de Barataria. The island is guarded on the south by Grand Isle and Isle Grande Terre. To the north lies a maze of marshes, swamps, bays, inlets, and streams that is best known for being the hideout for Jean Lafitte (c. 1780 – year of death not known). Jean Lafitte and his brother, Pierre, managed a pirating operation that the British worked to shut down during the War of 1812. Lafitte then allegedly assisted the Americans in the defeat of the British at the Battle of New Orleans on January 8, 1815. With British ships gone from the Gulf of Mexico, Lafitte had to settle for pirating from the Spanish. The lawlessness and colonial fighting that once prevailed around Barataria Bay and the Ile de Barataria has since been replaced mostly by rising seas and a “superport” for oil tankers, oil wells, pipelines, and chemical and oil contamination.
John James Audubon noted also “some hundreds” of Cerulean warblers trying to race out the storm and find cover in the bushes and trees at Ile de Barataria. Alexander Wilson (1766-1813) was the first to document for science the Cerulean warbler. The taxonomic name that he gave the Cerulean warbler was Sylvia cærulea. The Cerulean warbler is currently classified as Setophaga cerulea and has yet to be listed on Cornell’s e-Bird system in “some hundreds” that Audubon saw at Ile de Barataria.