When one goes to New Orleans, there are a handful of activities that everyone recommends that you do. One of these top activities is a swamp tour. Louisiana is made up of thousands of acres of bayou, which is home to over 200 species of birds, wild pigs, raccoons, and alligators.

When we were planning our trip to NOLA, I definitely wanted to take a Swamp Tour. I knew we were going pretty early in the season, so we might not see too many animals, but I was willing to risk it. After some research, I decided to go with Cajun Encounters. They offer a Swamp Tour that features a two-hour boat ride down the Honey Island Swamp led by local, certified boat captains aboard a custom-built 22-passenger flat bottomed boat.

Honey Island Swamp earned its name from the honeybees that once lived on a nearby isle. It is over 20 miles long, with almost half of its acres government sanctioned as a permanently protected wildlife area.

We saw three gators, but two of them were pretty standoffish to us. Our boat captain, Ed, explained that Cajun Encounters does not feed the gators anything else besides chicken protein pellets, so the gators aren’t usually super interested in us if another tour company had come by with marshmallows. We also learned that although the gators live there all year around, they do “hibernate” of sorts during the winter months, where they’re sleeping the entire time. March and April are when they start to wake up and are more active.

We also saw a bunch of swamp raccoons and various birds. The raccoons in the swamp are actually not nocturnal, like their city cousins, because of the tours that feed them.

We also learned about all the people that own property on the side of the swamp, where the land has been in the family for generations. It’s amazing to see some of the houses, some of which sit pretty high on concrete stilts to keep it from flooding.

Ed was very knowledgeable about the wildlife and the plants in the swamp. We learned a lot during our tour and I would definitely recommend Cajun Encounters.