Little Swan Creek

The state of Tennessee uses Little Swan Creek as a yardstick. In refusing a permit to dam one of its tributaries in 2022, the state's water division listed the creek and its tributaries as Exceptional Tennessee Waters and named an ecoregion reference stream for the Western Highland Rim among the grounds, meaning its chemistry and its life are a standard a healthy stream of this kind is measured against. Two rare species were named too: the saddled madtom, a small catfish listed as threatened by the state, and Tennessee yellow-eyed grass, a federally endangered plant of calcareous seeps.

That plant is close to a Lewis County speciality. It was described to science in 1978. The state's natural areas division counts fourteen populations in the world and seven in Tennessee, every one of them in this county. The Park Service's 2014 assessment records it lost from at least three places on parkway land, and about twenty plants put back beside Little Swan Creek, where it had grown before a large flood in 1997; the state was then monitoring that planting every year.

The habitat is smaller than the word seep suggests. At Auntney Hollow, a 26-acre natural area near a tributary of the creek, the protected seep covers less than a tenth of an acre at the foot of a west-facing slope, a semi-open patch of willow, alder and swamp dogwood inside closed oak and hickory forest, shared with grass-of-Parnassus. The Park Service lists two water-quality stations on the creek.