Bayou Pierre is the only river system in the world where the bayou darter lives, and the Natchez Trace Parkway bridges it near milepost 49, within the fish's range. The darter was described to science in 1966 from the Highway 18 crossing of Bayou Pierre, was listed as federally threatened in October 1975, and is ranked critically imperiled worldwide. It lives on riffles, in water under six inches deep running moderately to swiftly over firm gravel or sandstone. A Soil Conservation Service biologist surveying the system in the 1970s called it the only vertebrate then known to be endemic to Mississippi, and found the crystal darter in the mainstem as well, in one of that fish's last strongholds.
The bayou runs about ninety miles from near Brookhaven to Port Gibson, and its channel is moving. NatureServe describes rapid channel and bank erosion, with headcuts working upstream through the system from causes that may include meander cutoffs, channelization and gravel mining, and records the darter's numbers holding steady through the 1980s and 1990s while its distribution shifted upstream. A federal watershed project that, as first proposed, would have dredged and dammed away most of the habitat in the streams it touched was modified after consultation over the fish.
The water has its own problem. Bayou Pierre came off the state's impaired list in 2007 and went back on in 2012 for low pH; only 73 percent of the readings in the Park Service's assessment fell within state limits. Petrified palm wood has been reported from its bed in Claiborne County, though the county's 1966 geology judged that it had washed out of terrace gravels rather than the Catahoula Formation.
Getting there
32.0146, -90.8518
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
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