Little Bayou Pierre

Little Bayou Pierre rises southeast of Pattison and runs northwest across Jefferson, Copiah and Claiborne counties to join Bayou Pierre near Port Gibson, and the Natchez Trace Parkway crosses it just east of Port Gibson near milepost 40. It is best known for a fish it lacks. Its middle and upper reaches have numerous gravel and sandstone riffles and several small waterfalls over sandstone outcrops, much like the stretches of Bayou Pierre where the threatened bayou darter lives, yet a Soil Conservation Service survey of the whole system in 1974 and 1975 found no bayou darters in it at all.

The likely reason is the ground both streams cross before they meet. Their lower courses run through thick loess, where the bed turns to sand and riffles become rare. The survey found the darter growing scarcer downstream toward Port Gibson, where the channel deepens over sand and offers little or no habitat, and suggested that this sandy reach works as a barrier keeping the fish out of the good water upstream. Later surveys found self-sustaining populations in Bayou Pierre at least as far down as the Little Bayou Pierre confluence, while NatureServe's range for the fish names only White Oak, Foster and Turkey creeks among its tributaries.

Little Bayou Pierre first went on Mississippi's impaired-waters list in 1996 and was relisted for biological impairment in 2002, with sediment later named the likely cause. A 2018 state watershed plan describes its upper basin as three-quarters forest, with white sandbars popular for picnics. At the Park Service's monitoring station on the stream, readings have exceeded the state temperature limit and fallen below its pH minimum, once each, and E. coli has run above the state standard.