Looking For Flame Chubs Around Wheeler, AL

Today we went out to three spots in the NE corner of Lawrence County, south of the Tennessee.

We started out at Mallard Creek in Lovettvile where it's crossed by the highway, Alt-72. The highway is now a four-lane road, and the bridge spans are much larger than the last time this site was sampled in 1980. We found fairly deep water over soft mud at the bridge, but worked downstream and found a surprisingly nice stream over gravel. Sampling downstream about 200 meters we found longear sunfish (nesting), green sunfish, stonerollers, striped shiners, and the most eyepopping scarlet shiners I've seen in a while. But we found no flame chubs in what seemed to be good habitat.

The second spot was Wheeler Spring, along Highway Alt-72 and behind the historic Wheeler House owned by Confederate General Joseph Wheeler. The site is closed for repairs, but the curator Melissa kindly let us on to the property and showed us what she thought was the best way to access the spring. This is a "blue hole" spring, with two deep, deep, deep holes in the sand with cold water gushing up. Her and the maintenance man were also adamant about how many cottonmouths are on the property. We decided to access the spring run by parking along the highway and crossing the rail tracks. The run looked great, but we only found lots of Gambusia in it. The spring was largely inaccessible there because some beavers had built a dam at the run outlet against the railroad tracks, raising water level by almost a meter. So we couldn't really sample in that area. The railroad is supposed to come by and clear out the beaver dam, so hopefully we can visit again within a month.

And, as a thunderstorm system was closing in on us, we went to Wheeler Branch, several kilometers downstream from Wheeler Spring. This is an obscure site surrounded by corn fields on a County Road, with what is a very engineered bridge crossing the creek which is set down about 5 meters from the road at the bottom of a steep embankment. We crawled/slid down the embankment and found an odd creek; I'm sure that this stretch has been channelized in the past, with a very even bottom carrying waist-deep water. The creek was also full of the kind of trash that gets tossed into creeks around here, like microwave ovens and tires. We mucked around pulling the net but didn't catch a single fish; I'm not certain that any were in the creek. As we scrambled up the embankment thunder was cracking overhead and we could feel air pressure drop. Just as I finished doing my GPS reading where we were parked rain started falling and lightning was flashing very close to us. The drive home was through tropical downpours.

So we didn't find any flame chubs today. Next Friday I think we'll head into Lauderdale County in the NW corner of the state, where there are many flame chub records especially in the Cypress and Shoal Creek systems.