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 Audubon Swamp Garden
| TIMES: |
Daily, 365 days a year. 8 AM to 5:30 PM. However, once you have purchased your ticket, you can stay and enjoy the Audubon Garden until dusk. Allow 1 hour for the self-guided walk. |
| COST: |
Adults are $7.00: Children aged 6-12 - $6.00; Children under 6 are free. Tickets are purchased at the admissions gate. You may visit the Audubon Garden without first buying an admissions ticket to Magnolia. |
| HIGHLIGHTS: |
Your visit will be a self-guided walk on boardwalks, bridges, and dikes, through an otherwise inaccessible landscape. This allows you to intimately experience nature while watching and photographing wildlife at your own pace. Interpretive signage describes important flora and fauna. |
The Audubon Swamp Garden is a unique world where trees grow from the water, islands float, and everywhere wild creatures go about their secret lives. It boasts a diversity of living things almost unequaled anywhere else in America. Thousands of plant and animal species coexist amongst the cypress and tupelo gum trees, surrounded by blackwater. Each year, hundreds of egrets, herons, and other waterfowl nest within feet of the walking path.
A swamp is essentially a flooded forest, with its own specialized flora and fauna perfectly adapted to its unique conditions. Great blue herons, snowy, and great egrets use their long legs and beaks to stalk and spear prey in shallow waters. Ducks, gallinules, and coots feed on surface and underwater vegetation. Other species browse the numerous berries and seeds seasonally available. More than 224 species of birds have been documented in a single year. Be sure to keep your eyes open for turtles, frogs, and alligators (fear not, they won’t bother you!). You might even glimpse the rarely-seen river otter.
You can explore this wild and otherwise inaccessible landscape on boardwalks, bridges, and dikes. You will follow in historic footsteps: 150 years ago, the famous wildlife painter, John James Audubon, came to observe waterfowl. More recently, Wes Craven found it the perfect location for his movie “The Swamp Thing.” This exotic water-world has fascinated visitors for over a hundred years. . If you appreciate nature’s beauty, you’ll love the Audubon Swamp Garden.
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