The Catfish Diaries

Catfish Country has gone big-time COUNTRY!

A diary about life at Newbern’s Prairie View Farm is featured in the October/November issue of Country Magazine. Some of you farm girls or country girls-at-heart might subscribe to it…or perhaps to its sister publications: Country Woman, Reminisce, Birds & Blooms and Taste of Home.

Jean Watson, the catfish farm girl whose photos are featured in Where Eagles Fly, shares events for the week beginning July 22. She writes about life in Newbern and the ups and downs of farming 200 acres of catfish ponds. She did the photographs as well, and they are wonderful depictions of typical farm tasks such as harvesting fish and working on paddlewheels.

She just happened to be writing the diary during the middle of this year’s extreme drought, so she describes how paddlewheels must keep turning to stir extra oxygen into the water. If oxygen gets too low, fish can get sick, and sometimes whole ponds of them can be lost. Then, there’s the day that the well for their house and shop ran dry!

She also mentions food safety, an issue that has been in the news concerning some imported foreign products, including catfish. She assures readers that domestic catfish production is closely monitored by our government, meaning we don‘t have to worry about banned medications, carcinogens or other pollutants in U.S. fish. Whatever goes into the pond is USDA, EPA or FDA approved. Prior to harvest, samples of the fish are tested by the processor, and that prevents us from having to swig a quart of sweet tea to drown out off flavor!

While the Watsons have a farm manager and two other employees these days, they started their farm without any extra help…just themselves and their two sons. If the fish needed oxygen during the night, the whole family pitched in to save the crop.

Jean and her husband, Byron, say that producing catfish is a “dream come true.” Their boys are grown now, but Jean told me that coming home to the farm “is like heaven to them. They can come home and all their cares go away.”

Photo: The low water level on the drain pipe in this Prairie View Farm pond shows the severity of this year's drought.

Where Eagles Fly

I first knew Jean in high school as my best friend’s big sister. Just like her little sister, she could do anything.

She still can.

Years ago, I marveled at how she cut out some paisley-print fabric and stitched up a tent dress one Saturday, finished and hemmed just in time for her date that night.

The other day, I marveled at pictures she took on a recent photography safari to Africa and hundreds she has taken on the Newbern catfish farm that she and her husband, Byron, own.

A retired biology teacher, Jean has put the nature she loves into pictures that she prints and frames herself or makes into note cards, a business known as Nana’s Nature Photos. Some have been published in Country Magazine, and some are sold in gift shops and galleries throughout the Black Belt and as far south as Orange Beach. I would say her prints rival those of Abraham Lincoln over at the Brookville, Ohio, Daily Photo Blog.

Among my farm favorites is one she took of an eagle, wings widespread, tiptoeing to take flight right there by a fish pond! She has a treasure trove of macros — viceroy butterflies, frogs in a pond, hummingbirds in flight and flowers galore.

Using a tripod to stabilize her camera, “Nana” may spend the day on her front porch, accompanied by two Labrador retrievers and her telephoto lenses, shooting maybe 200 pictures “to get six really good ones.”

With her science background, she looks beyond the crispy clear photograph. “I love the mechanics of all these animals,” she told me, and she’s talking not just about the fauna out the front door but about the African species she “shot.” That would include everything from flamingoes to elephants and leopards to giraffes.

She’s living a biologist’s dream…on a farm…close to nature…sharing her knack for capturing creation with her grandchildren, her community and folks who appreciate pictures that just can’t be described with words.