Avery Island is a 2,200 acre salt dome in coastal Iberia Parish whose elevation supports habitats not found in the surrounding marshes, swamps, and parishes. Rising 163 feet above the low-lying plain, it was formed when the weight of younger sediment pushed up a column of salt deposited more than 165 million years ago. One of the "Five Island Trend" salt domes, along with Jefferson Island, Weeks Island, Côte Blanche Island, and Belle Isle, it creates a topographic rise close enough to the surface to appear as an "island" above neighboring land. Surrounded by a salt marsh, a cypress swamp, and bayous including Bayou Petite Anse, it was known as Île Petite Anse from the early to mid-nineteenth century. Its resources encouraged settlement first by prehistoric Native Americans and later by European pioneers in the late eighteenth century. The island supports live oaks, magnolias, pecans, camellias, irises, bamboo, and wisteria, and wildlife including alligators, deer, bobcats, coyotes, snakes, turtles, and many bird species. Salt extraction began in prehistoric times when Native Americans boiled briny spring water, continued with American settlers in the early nineteenth century, and after the Civil War shifted to mining rock salt through shafts, tunnels, and galleries; today the mine extends about 2,000 feet down. Oil was discovered there in commercially viable amounts in 1942 and continues to be extracted with care for the local environment. In the mid-1860s Edmund McIlhenny began growing Capsicum frutescens peppers there from seeds believed to be from Mexico or Central America, and around 1868 he created the first bottles of TABASCO brand Pepper Sauce. His son Edward Avery "Ned" McIlhenny studied the island's plants and animals, founded the private Bird City sanctuary in 1895 to restore snowy egrets, and developed a semi-tropical garden later opened to the public in 1935 as Jungle Gardens, which includes a rookery that is a seasonal home for thousands of egrets and other migratory birds.