June 16, 2015
I
woke up at 6:00AM refreshed and ready to start the day. We left the hotel around 7:00AM to pick up the
rest of the team over in Hamilton where we me up last night. We got there around 7:30AM and assembled our
team. There were three people from Fish
and Wildlife Service: Jeff, Drew (who is in charge of the GIS database for our
office) and myself. The other two
members of our team were from the Geological Survey of Alabama (GSA) and their
names were Rebecca (Becca) Bearden and Anne Wynn. Jeff, our fish identifier, was happy to have Becca
on our team because she works under Dr. Patrick O’Neil so she also knew her
fish and could help him out. We got
everything in order and headed out to our first site.
Once we were there I offered to carry the back
pack shocker. This site was better than the one yesterday. We got a higher number of fish species and
higher abundances but this creek still showed damage from 4-wheler activity. I had a good time using the shocker and because
I was wearing waders, I did not get shocked by it at all. At this site we also encountered a landowner
and Jeff talked to him. He was curious
about what we were doing but completely OK with having us out there, which was
good. At this site Jeff was glad Becca
was there not only because of her skills in identifying fish, but also because
she decided to call me Dee when she had trouble pronouncing my name. I don’t mind that much when people
mispronounce my name but he was feeling bad about messing it up. He was very relieved that I was alright with
the nick name.
At
the second site we switched up some jobs. Jeff, who had been on the seine team, took the
shocker and I worked the seine with Anne who had been using a dip net. Becca
took notes and both she and Drew were on dip nets. This site was worse than the first one. There were not very many fish and as we went
up stream the habitat was not very good. It got hard for us to continue to move forward
so we went back down stream of where we started. This part of the stream was only marginally
better because we could not see what was in the water due to the sediment we had
kicked up. This was a real problem
because if the fish did get stunned by the shocker, we could not really see
them before they got a hold of themselves and swam away. There was not much
tree cover at this sight either so we were really ready to get out of there by
the time we had finished the thirty efforts and two shorelines.
When
we arrived at our third site I offered to take the back pack shocker again. This site was not very good either but I still
had a fun time. Because of the lack of
habitat, we mostly did shore line shocking with the dip nets. We mainly caught madtoms, only a few darters,
and not much else. My thumb actually
started to hurt from using the shocker in so many of the efforts. Efforts are attempts to get fish; anything from
shocking them into the seine, hauling the seine across the bottom of the
stream, to shocking in an area and dip netting, counts as an effort. It was a lot of thumb work which I was
completely unprepared for— I should have played more video games beforehand.
When
we were done with our third site we still had plenty of time to spare so Jeff
decided that we should go for a fourth site. Becca took the shocker for this one and I was
on the seine with Jeff. Working the seine
was harder in this stream because it was deep with slick rocks and had a strong
current which really pulled on the net. This
was a nicer site and we surprisingly did not get many fish but we kept on going
even though it was rough against that strong current. The site ended up taking about two hours to
get it done. When we got back to the
hotel we were told that there was a mix-up and someone had already completed
that site (hence the lack of fish), but it’s always good to have more data to
compare. It was a long day so right
after eating dinner at the hotel I went back to my room and went to sleep.
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