Choccolocco Creek Update

On Monday I sat down with the Choccolocco Creek fish we collected and did my IDs. We kept 7 silverstripe shiners and 6 tricolor shiners, along with two stonerollers, an Alabama hogsucker, 4 southern studfish and a golden redhorse (sucker). The redhorse threw me, just because I've rarely caught them seining and so wasn't expecting to see one. I know we threw back a good number of them, so they turn out to be surprisingly common in this stretch of creek. And, of course, we found no flame chubs.

Looking at our collection area on Mapquest over the last several days I realize that we were within 500 meters of the GPS coordinates I had for the Mayden flame chub collection of 2001. I think one could approach this site from the west, instead of the south like we did, by driving up an ungated dirt road. That's a dicey thing to do out in the country if you don't know anyone, so I didn't. And I also suspect that even in the past 6 years this area has become more heavily settled, since many of the houses we saw in the vicinity were obviously new. That's the typical story, expanding human population alters habitats in a variety of ways and some species start to drop out. I hope that there are still flame chubs in this creek but I'm doubtful.