So far, both banks of Bayou Petite Anse have been restored, as have dozens of oil and gas canals. “Miles and miles and miles of it,” Rogers says. “And acres and acres of oxbows.” As we motor down the bayou, Romero steers into a building chop—an outgoing tide falls against a stiff south breeze, and egrets flush from stretches of restored marsh, birds most likely destined to overnight at Bird City. Romero slows the boat as he approaches another skiff, locals with rods out, fishing the falling tide. “All this work,” he says, nodding toward the anglers, “it’s not just for Avery Island. It doesn’t matter to us if it’s our property or not. We look at this as everybody’s marsh. It’s all a part of our landscape, so we just take care of it.”

Nor is this about the marsh alone. Keeping the marsh intact helps keep alive a way of life that has defined southern Louisiana for centuries. “This is really an artisan culture here—the fur trapping, the alligator trapping and skinning and egg collecting, the fishing and making a living off the land,” explains McIlhenny, draining the last of a can of Diet Coke, his near-constant companion. “It’s not just about Tabasco sauce, not just about our families. We’re doing everything we can to keep this way of life alive in Iberia Parish.”

We watch in silence as Romero brings the skiff on plane and the boat flies past mile after mile of marsh—the tawny yellow of the smooth cordgrass, the darker greens of the bullwhip, the wax myrtles sprouting along oxbows that were open water a few years before. From the shoreline of Vermilion Bay, all along Bayou Petite Anse, to the Avery Island docks, restored wetlands had replaced the exposed, eroding mudbanks.

Any visit to Avery Island is likely to set a handful of memories in detailed relief—the way a certain live oak leans over the narrow roads that run by the workers’ trim wooden cottages, the pungent smell of fermenting pepper mash. But the sight of restored wetlands stretching for acres upon acres reminds me of a scene I witnessed the previous night, back at Bird City. At the end of the day the shadows were creeping across Willow Pond and the breeze had freshened, quieting the songbirds in the pondside trees, ruffling the aigrettes of the birds on the racks. It was cool and shady on the observation tower, and I put aside the binoculars and turned my eyes to the sky. As the sun fell, the birds’ white wings took on the changing colors of the sky—yellow birds now, now orange, now pink—and the sun dipped below the tops of the live oaks. The sun slipped away completely, the sky brightened by a dimmer and dimmer illumination. But still the birds soared in from the marsh, as they had for 115 years. Still the birds came.