A Beautiful Day To Go To Estill Fork

We spent most of the day at Estill Fork in NE Alabama doing field work for Brian's transect research. The weather was mostly sunny, and in the 70s F. The darters were all in color today, including rainbows, tennessee snubnoses, fantails, stripetails, johnnys, redlines, greensides and the next two species:

These are two blueside darters, male and female. We usually only net a few on these trips, but today we found about a dozen. Males retain some of that electric blue year-round but it's certainly peaking now.


We found a male and an even larger female blotchside darter. This is the male in a storage bag. He was released about two minutes later. It's a species that should probably be listed as Threatened under the Endangered Species Act.


Here's the crew soon after arrival: Alex, Brian's brother, Brian, Robert and Doug (l-r). Water temp was 14 deg. C, so some of us waded without waders.


The banks on both sides of the stream had patches of Virginia Bluebells in flower. The wildflower season has just started. What's impressive about the Bluebells being in bloom is that Estill Fork had a major flood last week that obviously scoured the banks heavily. I guess the plants like that kind of high energy.