This is a Tricolored Heron, walking through th Pluff Mud. I have seen birds, bigger than a Tricolored, get stuck in it. This is thick stuff.
People say Pluff is unique to the Lowcountry marshes. I can believe it. Think the worse low tide ever… not even close.

Pluff is hundreds of years of swamp / marsh ‘stuff’ sitting on the bottom of swamp water. Whew !!!
A bayou perfume.
Mmmmmm…..I can almost smell it! Can’t help lovin’ a good swamp smell, lol. At the least, it’ll open up your sinuses! 😉
There are swamp smell and then there’s Pluff Mud. When the southern rice plantations burned during the civil war the planters actually dug up Pluff and dried it. Thousands of years of sediment turned into phosphate and was sold for fertilizer. Can’t imagine digging that, bugs, poison snakes, and of course Alligators. Many people died doing that.