Scout Island sits at the center of New Orleans City Park, enclosed on all sides by the park’s network of bayous and accessible by foot from a pedestrian bridge near Magnolia Drive. The name comes from a specific historical allowance: Boy Scout troops were once permitted to camp overnight on the island, a privilege that was rare for any park guests at the time. Long before that, the land was part of the plantation belt that once covered what is now City Park’s 1,300 acres, with 13 sugar and indigo operations running across the property and roughly 300 enslaved people living on the grounds. The island carries that layered history quietly, without markers or interpretation, in the way that most of New Orleans does.
The perimeter trail is 0.66 miles of mulch path that hugs the waterline on the island’s eastern and western edges, reestablished after Katrina in 2007. It begins at the pedestrian bridge near Magnolia Drive and ends on the eastern side of the soccer fields, with a short gravel service road connecting the two mulch segments along the interior. The path stays close to the water for most of its length, moving through live oak canopy and brushy understory growth with lagoon views opening up at irregular intervals. A small fishing pier and picnic area sit about midway along the eastern edge, and the tree cover is dense enough that the surrounding park mostly disappears behind it.
The combination of wooded edge habitat and open water makes Scout Island a reliable spot for wading birds, and the lagoon edges hold herons and egrets throughout the year. Rabbits work the interior brush, and the mulch surface is soft enough to move quietly, which matters when the canopy is active with migrants in spring and fall. The island sits just south of Harrison Avenue, which puts it in the same migratory corridor as Couturie Forest and the Wisner Tract to the north and east, and birds moving through that stretch of urban green space tend to filter through all three sites in sequence…