As I have expressed on other occasions, we have always wanted to go on a professional swamp tour.
Not knowing which might be the best, we decided to go with Zam’s Swamp Tours. Yes, this is the dude(Diego) who was on Trading Spouses when they swapped moms with a California Vegan family. Hijinks ensued.
When we got there, Diego greeted us and told us to take a look around. There are animals all over the place: giant roosters, snakes, turtles, exotic birds, and about 10 thousand dead mullet on the surface of the bayou.
Seriously, the swamp was littered with tens of thousands of floating dead fish, most of them mullet. According to the folks at Zam’s, their deaths had something to do with oxygen depletion when the swamp water recedes, but I didn’t really understand. They admitted it was a rare phenomenon, but since we were 60 miles inland, I knew it had nothing to do with oil spills.
Make sure to get there early so you can chat with Diego and ZZ. Here was the dining room shack on the bayou where we ate lunch. Fried gator, shrimp poboys, and crawfish pies. Tasty. They say this shack gets 2 feet of flooding every year when the bayou gets high. That’s pretty annoying.
While waiting for our tour to begin, I perused the gift shop…
We went back on the porch and noticed that Diego had left his keys, a bottle of germ-x, and an unattended backpack on a picnic table with a live python in it.
Diego saw us eyeballing the snake and yelled across the road that it was ok for us to handle it.
“Go ahead and pick it up.”
Beckers did a little animal wrangling of her own.
These little guys are easy to handle and don’t hurt if they snap down on your finger.
We only saw a couple of small wild gators on the boat ride, but they had some serious monsters in a small pond on their property.
The guy told us this gator was over 100 years old. Apparently, the gator gets curious when a hose is sprayed on the water. Another technique to get him to come out is to try and swing at him with a stick. Listen in the video below when I tell the guy at 0:23, “Yeah, I think you should hit him again.” Awesome.
NO Adventure 
The place I grew up looks like that. I even had a wee little gator like that as a pet (we named him Wally because we said we’d make a wallet out of him when he grew up). But we set him free when he got about 3 feet long 🙂
Anyway, if they said the fish dying like that is rare it *could* be because of the oil spill since the oil is the reason the oxygen is low in the water. All over the gulf, fish are moving further inland, and many dead fish are washing ashore from oxygen depletion: http://www.wdsu.com/news/24323278/detail.html
By: Pistolette on July 27, 2010
at 9:39 am
What they said is true. I was born and raised about 3 miles from Zam’s. I grew up fishing and on the water my whole life.
Diego is correct. Every time the water levels get high and plenty water enters the swamps, when the water drops again there is always a fish kill. What happens the organic rich water smothers the fish. Oxygen levels go down and plenty of time an algea bloom happens. i fish there every week and there is no oil there. Way to far inland for oil. Fish kills are a natural part of the bayous.
By: Lance on September 7, 2010
at 9:56 am
I also went on the Zams Swamp tour it was awsome !!!!!! We got there a day after gator season started and we got to see alot of wild gators in the swamp and alot of other wildlife .I highly recommend this place . Its a good place I rate it ***** stars !!!!!
By: greg on September 3, 2013
at 8:36 am