Another Successful Trip To Estill Fork, With Good Weather

I went to Estill Fork with Andrew and Brittany yesterday. We netted 37 telescope shiners, and 2 scarlet shiners. Water was a little bit higher than on Jan. 31 but not enough to be a problem. We installed my custom driftnet for about 45 minutes, and the steel-core tomato stakes I bought at Lowe's held in a reasonably strong water chute. We kept the take, and when we examined it at the lab found some material we wouldn't have found otherwise such as juvenile springtail instars. So I'm psyched about that, Ruth is willing to make more bags if she can see this one again to remind her what she did.

Here are a few photos from the trip. The first one is a downstream view of the riffle system we collected the telescopes in. The driftnet was placed in a flowing chute just to the left of where this photo was taken.

Here are Andrew and Brittany at the site where we installed the driftnet, although the chute isn't really apparent.

And here's some real science in action, Andrew doing the simple water chemistry tests we routinely carry out--pH, total dissolved solids, temperature.

I think we'll go back in mid-April.