We Found A Flame Chub In A New Location Today

I went out on a creek survey with Allison, Jennifer and Dewey today for the Flint River Conservation Association slackwater darter project. The first place we went to is Brier Fork of the Flint River along a large farm property owned by Alabama A&M University north of Huntsville. We netted huge numbers of scarlet shiners (many in peak breeding color), along with some striped shiners and stonerollers and two species of darter, rainbow and black. The big find was a single flame chub. I went out to several sites along Brier Fork two years ago and didn't find a single flame chub. But today we hit the right microhabitat, a shallow backwater off of the main flow, and there he was. We also found no slackwater darters. This area was right in general, with low hardwood bottomland. But the creek showed clear evidence of erosional sedimentation such as puffs of clay from the substrate as you walk along, and the banks were obviously badly affected by flood pulses.

Then we headed north and sampled Banyan Swamp Creek. It really is a tupelo swamp, but the water flowing through it is clear and mostly over sand and cobble. The site is even better as a slackwater site than Brier Fork with backwaters and pockets of leaf litter. We quickly caught a large warmouth sunfish along with lots of smaller bluegills and green sunfish. Again, we found no slackwater darters, but we did find stripetail darters which if I remember correctly are stream associates of slackwaters. And, we found no black or rainbow darters. As an odd rule, if you find darters with red body color like blacks or rainbows, you won't find slackwaters in that stream. But stripetails have no red, and we hoped we'd find a slackwater. No such luck. The good news is that this stream is probably a good candidate for reintroducing captive-bred slackwaters.

Tomorrow it's back to the Tallapoosa drainage in Elmore County, AL. The sites we're visiting are all off of paved state highways, so I hope we can avoid any adventures with my truck getting stuck in a wall of mud.