What to look for in nature in Louisiana this December

Right about now. Louisiana’s bald eagles run on a calendar that surprises visitors from the north: they court and repair nests in the early fall, and the eggs, usually two or three, go into the nest in November and December. By February most of the chicks have hatched. LDWF’s ornithologist calls them fall-winter-spring nesters, which suits the biologists, because a nest in a bare cypress is easy to spot from the air before the trees leaf out.

The department times its aerial nest survey for the weeks when eggs are in the nests, then flies the same nests again in spring to learn how many young made it. The most recent survey it has published, flown in 2017–18 over the band of coastal parishes from the New Orleans area west past Morgan City where most of the state’s eagles live, found 264 active nests, and nesting success was close to 100 percent. Terrebonne and St. Mary parishes held some of the densest clusters, with many nests packed around Lake Palourde and Lake Verret. In the early 1970s, after DDT, the state had only five to seven active nests.

To see one, scan the tallest cypress and pine snags along big open water in the southeastern parishes, or the lakes of the Atchafalaya Basin’s eastern edge, and look for a white head sitting low and still in a bulky stick nest. Keep well back. LDWF counts disturbance at nests among the threats eagles face, and federal law still protects the birds and their nests. Once the chicks are about ten weeks old the biologists count a nest as a success; they can fly at about twelve weeks, which puts first flights in this year’s nests in the spring. For the Kincaid Lake eagle camera near Alexandria, see the Louisiana November guide.

Since 1900 Audubon’s Christmas Bird Count has asked volunteers to spend one winter day counting birds, and Louisiana gives them more to count than most states. On a single day chosen by each circle’s organizer, inside the official window (this winter, from Monday, December 14, until Tuesday, January 5), volunteers spread out across a fixed circle 15 miles wide and record every bird they can find. Audubon’s compiler list for the 2024–25 count names more than two dozen Louisiana circles, spread from the hills to the Gulf, among them:

• North: Shreveport, Claiborne, D’Arbonne, Red River National Wildlife Refuge, Natchitoches and Franklin.
• Central: Catahoula National Wildlife Refuge, Cheneyville-Lecompte, Fort Polk and Pine Prairie.
• Southwest and the Chenier Plain: Lake Charles, Johnsons Bayou, Sabine National Wildlife Refuge, Sweet Lake-Cameron Prairie National Wildlife Refuge, Lacassine National Wildlife Refuge-Thornwell, White Lake and Crowley.
• Acadiana: Lafayette and Palmetto Island.
• Baton Rouge, the Northshore and the southeast: Baton Rouge, St. Tammany Parish, Northshore-Slidell, Reserve-Bonnet Carre Spillway, New Orleans, Thibodaux, Grand Isle and Venice.

The state’s winter mix is what makes these counts so rich: northern ducks and sparrows share the marsh edges with lingering warblers, western hummingbirds and wading birds that never leave. The table below shows the leaders from Audubon’s Louisiana summary of the 2020–21 count; that winter the state’s counts together found 250 species. In the 2024–25 count, Audubon’s list of the season’s top tallies credits Louisiana with the national high count for 18 species, including 51,001 canvasbacks on the Catahoula National Wildlife Refuge count, 13,165 white-faced ibis on Lacassine NWR-Thornwell, ten yellow rails on Sweet Lake-Cameron Prairie and 1,100 Sandwich terns at Venice.

You do not need to be an expert. Organizers team newcomers with seasoned birders, and a person whose yard lies inside a circle can often help by counting the feeder. Each circle’s 2026 date and its compiler appear on Audubon’s Christmas Bird Count map as compilers register them, so check it from late November and reach out early, because some circles assign territories weeks ahead.

If a count circle covers your yard, a winter hummingbird at your feeder can become part of the official tally.

Because for a handful of Louisiana frogs, winter is the breeding season. Step outside on a mild, rainy December night near a flooded ditch, a pasture puddle or a woods pond and you may hear a din that sounds more like April. Louisiana’s volunteer frog survey, the Louisiana Amphibian Monitoring Program, listened along roadside routes three times a year from 1997 to 2017, and its scientists sorted the state’s frogs into winter, spring and summer callers. Five species belonged to the winter round:

• Cajun chorus frog, a small, striped frog whose call sounds like a thumbnail run along the teeth of a comb.
• Spring peeper, a thumb-sized treefrog marked with a dark X, whose single rising peep carries a long way.
• Southern leopard frog, the spotted green-and-brown frog of ditches, with a chuckling, clucking call.
• Crawfish frog, a stocky frog that hides in crawfish burrows and snores; the survey found it in south Louisiana.
• Pickerel frog, a square-spotted cousin of the leopard frog.

Three of them, the leopard frog, the Cajun chorus frog and the spring peeper, made up more than 95 percent of all the winter-round records in every part of the state. Leopard frogs were the frog most often heard in south Louisiana overall; peepers led in the north and in the Florida Parishes. The researchers set the winter listening window in north Louisiana, above about 31°41′ N (a line just south of Natchitoches), about a month later than in the south, because frogs there start calling later in colder winters.

To listen, pick a still, mild night after rain, stand quietly by water for five minutes, and note what you hear and how loud it is. Stay well off rural roads and wear something reflective.

Daylight reaches its low point at the solstice, which arrives at 2:50 in the afternoon, Central Standard Time, on December 21. The earliest sunset does not: it comes nearly three weeks earlier, centered on December 2 to 4 depending on the city, at about 5:00 p.m. in New Orleans and 5:09 in Shreveport, because the sun’s noon position keeps drifting later on the clock through December. That is why evenings start to stretch again well before Christmas while mornings keep darkening into January. On the solstice itself, daylight bottoms out at 10 hours 1 minute in Shreveport and Monroe and 10 hours 14 minutes in Houma.

Use the sunrise and sunset calculator to find the exact minute for your own parish, along with how long twilight lasts after the sun drops.

Climate records file December 1 as Louisiana’s first winter day, because December, January and February form the coldest three-month block on average, three weeks ahead of the solstice that calendars use. In Louisiana the season arrives as a parade of cold fronts, each followed by a few crisp, blue days and then a swing back to mild, damp Gulf air. In NOAA’s 1991–2020 normals, December highs average about 60 °F at Shreveport and Monroe and 64 to 65 °F from Baton Rouge to Lake Charles, and the north sees eight to ten freezing nights in a typical December while New Orleans International Airport sees about one. December is a wet month everywhere, around 4.5 to 5.3 inches.

December is also when the coast finally freezes, in a typical year. NOAA’s freeze-date medians fall on December 4 at Lafayette, December 7 at Lake Charles, December 17 at Houma and December 31 at New Orleans International Airport; the Louisiana frost and freeze table lists every station in the state. Cover tender plants and citrus whenever a hard front is forecast.

The Pacific may tip the odds toward a soggy winter. Odds above nine in ten for an exceptionally powerful Pacific warm event this winter: that was the mid-September verdict in the Climate Prediction Center’s monthly ENSO discussion, which calls it a very strong El Niño. Forecasters at the National Weather Service in Lake Charles once studied six strong El Niño events between 1957 and 1992 and found that Lake Charles averaged about 14 percent more rain than normal over the two years of each event, and that in the twelve months starting each September, as the events peaked, every month ran 5 to 80 percent wetter than normal. They cautioned that it was a study of just two stations and that other places may behave differently, and they noted that El Niño winters tend to run slightly cooler than normal across the southern states.

The New Orleans office points to a vivid example: during the moderate El Niño of 2009–10, a run of Gulf lows made December 2009 the wettest month ever recorded at New Orleans International Airport, breaking the record on December 18, and Baton Rouge had its second wettest December. The government’s seasonal winter forecast is scheduled for October 15; read it on the Climate Prediction Center’s outlook page once it is posted.

Snow is rare, and December snow rarer still, but it happens. A few storms stand out in National Weather Service records: on Christmas Day 2004, Chalmette got 1 to 3 inches, enough for snowmen; on December 11, 2008, a band of 6 to 8 inches fell from lower Livingston Parish across Tangipahoa into St. Tammany and Washington parishes, with 3 inches at Baton Rouge; snow on December 4–5, 2009, was the earliest the New Orleans and Baton Rouge office had ever recorded; and on December 8, 2017, snow fell from Alexandria to Acadiana and the southwest.

The Lake Charles office of the National Weather Service keeps a list of every measurable snowfall at its main stations back to 1895. December accounts for only a handful, and not one of these stations has ever measured snow in November.

The truly big snows in this list came later in the winter: 22 inches at Lake Charles on February 14–15, 1895, and, on January 21, 2025, 5.5 inches at Lake Charles and 9 inches at Lafayette. When a hard front is due, keep an eye on the current conditions and forecast; a rare white morning starts there.

Winter fronts can leave the clearest skies of the year behind them. Check the cloud cover forecast before heading out, and the moon phase page for moonrise in your town.

1. Cajun Christmas, Saturday, December 12, from 2 until 4 in the afternoon. The refuge complex for southeast Louisiana hosts a free holiday afternoon at the Bayou Lacombe Visitor Center in Lacombe with Santa, nature crafts, cookies and the refuge’s wildlife displays. The trails and the camellias of the old Bayou Gardens are open to explore. The same visitor center runs Nature Explorers, a free 45-minute program for children up to age 6, on the first and third Fridays of each month (December 4 and 18).
2. Swamp walks at Barataria Preserve. Jean Lafitte National Historical Park and Preserve rangers lead a free hour-long walk on the Wetland Trace boardwalk at 1 p.m. on December 2, 3, 9, 10, 16, 17, 23, 24, 30 and 31. On Thursday, December 3, at 11 a.m., Read with a Ranger brings a story hour and craft to the Lafitte library.
3. Bayou Lafourche by boat. From the Wetlands Acadian Cultural Center in Thibodaux, park rangers take visitors out on the bayou for two hours, starting at 10 a.m. on December 4, 5, 11, 12, 18, 19 and 26. Reservations are needed.
4. First Saturday bird walk, December 5, 7 a.m. Baton Rouge Audubon Society’s monthly walk at BREC’s Bluebonnet Swamp Nature Center needs no registration; bring binoculars and the $3 admission. The society lists it as a standing first-Saturday walk, so confirm on its calendar nearer the date.
5. Count birds. Join a Christmas Bird Count circle between December 14 and January 5, and keep your Project FeederWatch counts going through the holidays.
6. First Day Hikes on Friday, January 1, 2027. Louisiana State Parks takes part in the national First Day Hikes program; last New Year’s the parks waived admission on January 1 and 2 and pointed hikers to trails from Bogue Chitto to Poverty Point. Check the state parks’ site in late December for this year’s list.

We checked these dates against each organizer’s calendar on October 2; programs can change or cancel in bad weather, so confirm before you go. The full set of state and month guides lives on the nature calendar, and a page of the Naturalist’s Field Journal is a good place to keep each outing.

• Deer seasons with dogs. In LDWF’s 2026–27 schedule, deer hunting with or without dogs is already open in Areas 3, 7 and 8 (from November 30) and opens December 10 in Area 2, the northwest; Areas 1, 4, 5, 6 and 9 follow on December 12. Areas 5 and 9 are bucks-only December 14–18 and again from December 21. In Area 10, the coastal prairie parishes, still-hunting runs through January 3. Wildlife management areas and Kisatchie National Forest set their own days, so check before walking public land.
• Birds: duck seasons close December 6 and reopen December 19 in both zones; the light-goose conservation order runs December 7–18; doves reopen December 12 in the South Zone and December 19 in the North Zone; woodcock opens December 18.
• Hunter Orange or Blaze Pink. As long as any firearms deer season is open, a hunter of any species who carries buckshot, slugs, a muzzleloader or other primitive firearm, or a centerfire rifle or pistol must show at least 400 square inches, combined, of orange or pink on head, chest or back. On private property, a cap of either color can substitute, and deer hunters in elevated stands on private land may go without once in the stand, though not on the walk in or out. On WMAs every hunter except waterfowl and dove hunters needs the 400 square inches and an orange or pink hat or cap; quail and woodcock hunters there need at least the hat. Birders and hikers are not required to wear it, but a bright vest and cap on public land this month cost nothing.
• Cold water and fog. A fall into December lake or marsh water can trigger cold shock, the involuntary gasp that drowns people; wear a life jacket in a canoe or kayak. Dense fog forms on calm winter mornings over the Atchafalaya and the coastal parishes, so slow down on bridges.
• Ice and freezing rain. Louisiana roads and bridges are not built for ice. When a hard freeze or freezing rain is forecast, postpone the trip, and protect pipes, pets and plants.
• Short days. With sunset near 5 p.m., start afternoon hikes early and carry a light. Cane burning continues in sugar country into January; slow down and use headlights in smoke.