Species Count Update From Hurricane Creek, and Off To The Southern Edge of the Tennessee Valley Tomorrow

I finally had a chance to sit down this afternoon and look through the preserved specimens of fish that I kept from Hurricane Creek at the Walls of Jericho last Friday. One of these fish turned out to be a rosyside dace, Clinostomus funduloides, a locally common species that I had expected to find. The fish is an adult female, with more of a rosy blush on the side than the eyepopping coloration of a breeding male. With this species, we found 14 species of fish in a 250 meter stretch of Hurricane Creek. I'm still sure that we missed upwards of another 20 species, but a reasonable start under the circumstances.

Tomorrow we go back out to visit historic flame chub collection sites, heading south of Huntsville for the first time. Our first stop should be a place called Eudy Cave in Marshall County, AL, near the town of Arab. It's on a small dirt road called Apple Grove Road, and the site is described as a spring-fed pool 7 meters across. We'll also visit the only known site in Blount County at Big Spring Creek, and then turn around to the west into Morgan County. One site in Morgan County is the most obscure on my list, I think; it's a fork of West Cotaco Creek flowing off of Brindley Mountain that was reached on what was described on the museum record as a "jeep road". We'll at least try to get close to that point along the creek. Brindly Mountain is a long east-west ridge that defines the Tennessee River Divide, with creeks draining into the Tennessee to the north of it and creeks flowing to the south being part of the Mobile drainage. So we'll be visiting sites along the north edge of Brindley Mountain, where there was historically good habitat for flame chubs but few collections have been made.