Re: NANFA-L-- Ohio Eye Candy...


Subject: Re: NANFA-L-- Ohio Eye Candy...
From: Todd Crail (farmertodd-in-buckeye-express.com)
Date: Sun Aug 22 2004 - 09:27:50 CDT


----- Original Message -----
From: "Bruce Stallsmith" <fundulus-in-hotmail.com>
> And what you say about bank erosion in the Big Darby sounds a lot
> like the Cahaba River in Bibb and Perry Counties of Alabama. The banks are
> being cut-in-a scary rate, with 20 meter trees leaning towards the stream
at
> crazy angles. The expansion of the southern suburbs of Birmingham has had
> bad effects on pulses of water entering the Cahaba and its tribs.

Yes, it's just plain scary how fast it can change. There were a few things
I left out and most of it had to deal with habitat degredation.

Downstream from this bend last fall, there were wonderfully diverse gravel
bars (the stones were diverse, ergo, the biology was too) that had been cut
into a tremendous amount of habitat... Shallow gravelly riffles, sandy 2'
deep pools below.

It's all been turned into ONE big gravelly FAST SHALLOW run now, with some
"riffleage". Of course, that's supporting a lot of imperilled fish still.
But I found a good number of gravel chubs last fall in those sandy pools,
along with a host of juvenile suckers, along side the mainstem where I was
also seeing the other imperilled fish. We didn't see ANY gravel chubs this
time, and that was with two people, instead of me muscling the seine by
myself!

Diversity has definately been relocated in this segment.

The other thing that I now had contrast on is how DEVOID of fish and
critters Ohio root wads are, even if they're of a quality size. We were
looking-in-the same sycamore and maple fine filament rootwads as we saw on
the Tippecanoe in Indiana, and they were plain loaded with life. However,
all the clayey sediments and stream bottom scouring that's going on has
totally killed this habitat in the places we sampled. Because the bottom
was recently scoured and moved so much, now the roots are suspended a fair
portion above the normal water pool where the fine silts could be removed.
It was really quite disgusting.

Let's look-in-early October for a trip to the Darby, Deer and Paint Creeks
(fall colors too). There are a couple nice state parks there in the area,
we'll do a whole weekend of it. I had planned on the Little Muskingham, but
these streams are far more central to Ohio folks, and it's not a bad drive
from the northern South either <wink> <wink> <wink> :) I'll start to
organize this, see if we can't get some of the OSU gang participating, maybe
even some Agencies and any interested people from the region (a little
outreach never hurt anyone :)

Oh, and I'm sure there may be a group of people who were like "I kinda would
have liked to have gone" last week. Please don't take my non-announcement
the wrong way. We literally decided to do it-in-4:45pm Wednesday, when Jeff
asked his boss last minute if it was a possibility and didn't finalize until
about 11:00pm. It was just going to be a Blanchard trip today, but Jeff
really wanted to do this, so he took the day off so I wouldn't be draggin my
butt around when I start school tomorrow :)

I'll get to the camera stuff here in a bit... I need to get up in the attic
before it gets too hot and get my canopy together on my new 100 gallon
"Ultimate Reefle (tm)". I can't wait to see these caddisfly hatch :)

Todd
The Muddy Maumee Madness, Toledo, OH

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: Wed Sep 29 2004 - 12:24:21 CDT