A Visit To Marshall County, AL, Yesterday

I visited a large private property along the southern bank of the Tennessee River in Marshall County, AL, to develop a quote for doing a mussel survey in a creek on the property. The owner wants to develop a marina on the creek just above where it runs into the Tennessee, as part of an upscale housing development (not too, too bad from what I can tell). The property is currently used for hunting, with a house available for rental. The creek is too muddy to hold many mussels, both in number of species and total count, in my opinion. But I got to drive around some of the property with a contact and see some interesting sights. There's a red oak on the property that has a measured circumference of 22 feet at chest height, nearly a state record I'm told.

The first picture is looking across the Tennessee, to a rock formation known as Paint Rock. The Paint Rock River is named after this formation; the river runs into the Tennessee to the east (right) of this broken-off mountain. For this view you either have to be on the Tennessee, or straight across the river from it.

The property contains a number of diked "ponds" that are seasonally flooded for duck hunting. A number of natural spring seeps run through them, including the messy-looking one below. If I can visit this property again I'd like to run a pushnet through some of these seeps and see what fishes, if any, are there (including flame chubs as a prime suspect). There is apparently at least one sink hole that drains some of these seeps. Yesterday it had a wad of mud blocking the hole.

One problem this property seems to have is a healthy population of beavers. They're fine with me, but beavers are very insistent on building dams and lodges where they want. There is lots of evidence of beavers in these ponds, such as the gnawed tree below which is still alive but losing lots of sap.