Cat Island is a National Wildlife Refuge near St. Francisville in south central Louisiana. It’s a wonderfully primitive refuge. It has one road with a turn-around at the end of it somewhere in the middle of the refuge. You drive in, you drive out; you do not drive through. The road to the entrance of the refuge runs along a bayou and is interesting in its own right for wildlife observation. But the dominant feature is “the big tree,” a Bald Cypress (Taxodium distichum) estimated to be 1500 years old. It is 96 feet tall, has a diameter of 17…