Ballyhoo Festival

We stopped at this little festival after seeing tents below the Intercoastal Waterway Bridge near the Waterway Village restaurants. There were vendors selling art and crafts, live music on an entertainment stage, a cow-train for kids, petting zoo for kids, several food stands by local seafood restaurants, and performances by the Poarch Creek Indian Tribe.




The Poarch Band Indians out of Atmore, AL are descendants of a segment of the original Creek Indian Nation which once covered almost all of Alabama and Georgia. Although they had occupied lands here for hundreds of years, the people of the Creek Nation were driven west by the U.S Army in 1836-1837.

The 1814 Treaty of Fort Jackson was imposed on the nation and stripped vast areas of Alabama and Georgia from the Creeks. Other treaties  pressured the Creek people to abandon their Alabama homes ad move to present-day Oklahoma.

U.S. soldiers and state militia troops rounded up thousands of Creek men, women and children, herding them into concentration camps and driving them west on the Trail of Tears. At Fort Gibson, OK, each family was given one blanket and abandoned on lands reserved for them in the West. Most of the survivors were deprived of almost everything they owned.

The wholesale removal of tens of thousands of Creek, Cherokee, Chotaw, Chickasaw and Seminole Indians at the same time is one of the greatest tragedies in American history.

Laughing with a Kookaburra

"Kookaburra sits on the old gum tree, Merry merry king of the bush is he. laugh,Kookaburra, laugh, Kookaburra, Gay your life must be!"

If that was not enough, I got to touch a Bearded Dragoon. The little horns along his side felt like rubber and its skin was rough.

Another Australian Creature

And to add to our nature experience, we saw an Eurasian Eagle Owl. It is one of the largest species of owl and nocturnal.  It feeds on small mammals and birds, reptiles, fish and large insects. It typically breeds on cliff ledges, gullies, among rocks and other concealed locations. Its nest is a scrape which averages two eggs laid at intervals to hatch at different times. Parental care is provided by both adults for five months or so.

It was a fun day.  Do you Ballyhoo?