Looking For Flame Chubs In Creeks Without Water...

We went out yesterday to visit the western edge of the Cypress Creek system in Lauderdale County, AL, WNW of Florence. I had five sites mapped out, usually an ambitious day for us, but they were all close together. It turns out that was a good thing, because of a total of six sites we visited, three were bone dry with no water visible for at least hundreds of meters. The other three sites had water, but as disconnected pools packed with what fishes were still alive. This isn't too surprising, since we've had little rain in north 'bama in the last two months. The good news is that we found flame chubs at one of the sites, the last we visited, in the North Fork of Cypress Creek where it crosses the Natchez Trace Parkway. With those results, my total is 47 historic collecting sites visited across north Alabama, and flame chubs have been found in 18 of them, plus I've found flame chubs in 4 previously unreported sites.

Below is a shot of Burcham Creek at County Road 106. In the distance you can see tire tracks, as someone has taken to using the creek bed as a road. This site produced flame chubs in 1974 and 1976.

North Fork of Cypress Creek wasn't a whole lot better, as you can see in the photo below. It was a series of elongated pools, 4-5 meters long and maybe 1 meter wide, with 20-50 meters between pools.

My next task is to sit down and fully compile the list of places I've been and what happened. Another student has been working on a map project so that we can easily display the status of the project. Once I have my list written out we'll have a GIS-based map that we can print at huge size on the plotters of the consulting company where this student works. I think that'll be the core of a poster project at next year's ASIH meeting in St. Louis. And hopefully I could post a version here, too, I'll let you know.