The Flint At Winchester Road Looks Good

I've been reconsidering the use of Lick Fork of the Paint Rock as a second site to study darter habitat partitioning. The site might be too low flow, and not "riffley" enough, as well as flowing through more disturbed farm lands than I had thought. And then I drove out Winchester Road from Huntsville two weeks ago, into the NE corner of the county, crossing the Flint River. When I saw that site I realized that it would probably be good for our purposes. It's accessible from the bridges over the Flint and Brier Fork, and it's also very much a riffle system. The latter makes sense since roads historically crossed rivers at shallow fords, and that's what this site was historically. What iced the deal in my mind today was talking to Brian. He said that some years ago he was there with his uncle Charles collecting fish and they caught some banded darters, Etheostoma zonale. This species is at the southern edge of its range here, and is found in high energy riffle systems with clean water. So, this means we can study the two different rivers, close to each other, and compare how the same basic group of darter species utilize available riffle habitats. The Flint is a bigger stream, but that might be an interesting variable for comparative purposes.