For the past several years, we have enjoyed helping the Friends of Shades Creek make an annual visit to the confluence of Shades Creek with the Cahaba River. On previous trips, the Friends of Shades Creek were both pleased to find some good indicators of healthy conditions in the lowest reach of Shades Creek and less pleased to find a significant hazard for paddlers.

The hazard is a half dozen upside-down railroad boxcars more or less embedded in the stream channel. Those were probably placed there as the base for a stream crossing.

When water levels are a bit higher than shown here, these boxcars could present a real danger to an unwitting paddler. The Friends of Shades Creek have been exploring ways to have these boxcars removed.

On the brighter side, we have found a pretty good variety of fishes and aquatic insect larvae in this lowest reach of Shades Creek. While that is encouraging, no one had found any federally endangered or threatened fish or mollusk species in Shades Creek. That is, until recently……..

Heath Howell and Micah Bennett are undergraduate researchers at The University of Alabama with Dr. Bernie Kuhajda (Dr. Kuhajda is the Collection Manager for the University of Alabama Icthyological Collection). Heath has been concentrating on fishes of the Cahaba River basin and has recently discovered some endangered, threatened, and rare fish species in Shades Creek. They found the endangered Cahaba shiner, the threatened Goldline darter, and the very rare (but not federally listed) Coal darter.

However, that good news presents us with a delimma: Would the removal of the boxcars be detrimental to these rare fishes?

To evaluate that question, the Friends of Shades Creek invited Dan Drennon and Ted Martin with the US Fish & Wildlife Service, Paul Freeman, a stream ecologist with The Nature Conservancy, and Dr. Kuhajda and Heath Howell with UA, to join us on our annual visit for a first hand look.

Our goals were to determine if the rare fishes were still there and to evaluate the risks to those fishes associated with removal of the boxcars. Happily, we found a fair number of Goldline darters and Coal darters and even a very few Cahaba shiners both upstream and downstream from the boxcars.

As we balance the risks of removing the boxcars to the fishes found immediately below the boxcars against the benefits of probably reconnecting presently disconnected breeding populations of the these rare animals, having more populations in more places would incline us toward removing the boxcars. That would both diminish the risk to paddlers and to restore the connection between potentially breeding populations of these darters and shiners in Shades Creek.

The following photos are from the "Outdoor Alabama" website at

http://www.outdooralabama.com/

Cahaba shiner Coal darter

Goldline darter

These are photos of "pickled specimens" that don’t do justice to the live animals. The live critters are more colorful and, well, more lifelike.

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