...We meet our companions at Huck’s Cove, a restaurant near the mouth of the Pascagoula’s western branch. Our guides are two seasoned hands, Mark LaSalle and Jay Mengel, both steeped in the river’s natural history.

Mengel, a stocky redhead who answers to "Captain Jay," has his 23-foot Caribiana Sea Skiff tied to the pier. After graduating with a biology degree from Pennsylvania’s Lebanon Valley College in 1968, he flew for the U.S. Air Force. Upon retirement from the service, he and his wife spent two years cruising in a big boat before settling on the Pascagoula at Gautier. He gives nature tours and is director of the Pascagoula River Alliance, which formed two years ago to promote preservation within the basin.

LaSalle, a lanky Cajun with an irrepressible enthusiasm for nature, has lived in the area since 1991, where he is a specialist with the Mississippi State University Coastal Research and Extension Center in Biloxi. Although he does not like for people to address him with the title, he holds a doctorate in biology from Mississippi State. Every year he trains a class of master naturalists, many of them school teachers, by taking them into the field. In particular, he wants people to grasp the importance of protecting entire watersheds from pollution and other degradation.

Under power from a 90-horse Honda engine, Mengel’s white boat lifts its bow over the waves as we head north into the salt marshes. Many of his clients are bird-watchers attracted by the 327 species that live or pass through the Pascagoula basin. After their long journeys, migrants replenish their energy by eating nuts, berries, fruit and insects they find in the hardwood bottoms.

Others visitors come to see some of the 17 endangered or threatened species that find room to survive in the 50,000 acres of protected lands along the free-flowing river. Among them are the bald eagle and the yellow-blotched sawback turtle, which is found only in the Pascagoula or its tributaries. As with other members of the genus, this turtle, typically about five inches long, has been driven close to extinction from demand for it by collectors.

The area’s wildness causes Mengel to speculate that the French must have seen a similar landscape when they arrived at the mouth of the Pascagoula in 1669. "It’s a special river," he says. "If everybody who lived along the river felt the way I do, we wouldn’t have to worry. But of course, they don’t."