The Trispot Darter does not look like a fish worth building a summer around. It is small, secretive, and spends most of the year in the mainstem of larger rivers and creeks. But every winter, it migrates upstream into narrow, groundwater-fed tributaries to spawn, sometimes turning up in puddles barely big enough to hold it. If a culvert along the way is too small, too perched, or too old, the fish simply cannot get where it needs to go.
Finding out which culverts are blocking that migration, across an entire watershed, is not a job for one person. This summer, it was the job of a team of summer interns.
Summer interns with a fish sample during the 2026 field season.
Training ran May 18 through 20. The first day was virtual, a webinar on inland stream crossing surveys. The next two were spent in the field with Dr. Lugthart of Dalton State College, learning to identify a scour pool from a reference reach, and how to properly use a range finder and stadia rod. From June 1 through July 30, the team worked their way through the Armuchee Creek watershed, pulling candidate sites from the Southeast Aquatic Resources Partnership database and checking each one by hand: waders on, tablet out, recording power lines, electric fences, and habitat quality at every crossing.
By the end of the season, they had surveyed 334 sites. Twenty of those were new discoveries, added to the shared map for the first time. Thirteen stood out as strong candidates for replacement: structures in poor enough condition, and with good enough Trispot habitat, to be worth Limestone Valley's limited construction dollars.
Aquatic barriers assessed in the Upper Coosa so far: 1,003 in 2024, 690 in 2025, and 334 in 2026 (2,027 to date). Yellow triangles mark restored fish passage sites. Map: Kaylee Blackburn, Georgia DNR.
Then came Camp Creek, a tributary to the Oostanaula, and something better than a bad culvert. In January 2026, on a last-minute stop on the way to other survey sites, Kaylee Blackburn and a colleague netted 19 Trispot Darters within ten minutes. The team kept monitoring through the year, but doubted they would find the fish again in summer. On July 17, interns joined DNR staff to check likely summer habitat. It was extremely hot and humid, and the first stretches turned up nothing, but they kept going and found three adults together in a cooler, deeper pool with leaf litter. Fish that spawn in winter and are still there in July are not just winter visitors passing through; they appear to live there. It is exactly the kind of data point that turns a prioritization spreadsheet into a real decision about where to spend the next construction dollar. Sampling of this federally threatened species is done under appropriate USFWS permits.
A Trispot Darter in Camp Creek. Photo: Kaylee Blackburn, Georgia DNR.
This year marked the third straight summer of the internship program under Limestone Valley's America the Beautiful cooperative agreement with Georgia DNR (now called American Ecosystem Restoration), and the first year the interns came from Dalton State College. Last year's interns came from the University of North Georgia, under a cooperative agreement led by Prof. Andrew Taylor. Along the way, the team sampled fish, mussels, and crayfish alongside DNR staff, and again with The Nature Conservancy during Paddle GA, an annual multi-day paddle down a section of river that doubles as educational outreach. At that Paddle GA float, two interns canoed the entire day with a single paddle between them after the other paddles went missing between the trucks. They got stuck a few times and nearly flipped, but they were carried to their destination with some work, currents of the river, and good humor.
In their own write-up of the season, the interns didn't dwell on the heat or the poison ivy. They wrote about the skills: teamwork, road safety, adaptability, and a better understanding of local watersheds and aquatic species. They wrote about the people: "Kaylee was a great mentor throughout the internship and always had answers to our questions and taught us all things biology and conservation." And they wrote about wanting more of it, saying they wouldn't have minded if the internship ran longer.
That appetite is the point. It's why Limestone Valley is not just about repairing culverts and restoring streams, but about building people who can skillfully care about the land out their back doors in ways that impact the community and beyond.
