The Duck is the longest river lying wholly inside Tennessee, about 284 miles from a spring in Coffee County to the Tennessee River in Humphreys County, and the parkway bridges it in Hickman County just below John Gordon's house, where it already drains 1,705 square miles. It carries 151 species of fish, more than 60 of freshwater mussel and 22 of snail. The mussel figure is the remarkable one: more than three times as many species as the whole of Europe. The reach under the bridge lies inside federal critical habitat designated in 2013 for the fluted kidneyshell and the slabside pearlymussel, 216 river miles of the Duck across six counties.
The famous beds are upstream. The core of the diversity sits in about fifty river miles between Columbia and Lillard Mill, less than a fifth of the river's length. A state survey in 2020 sampled 80 quadrats at Lillard Mill and recorded 39 species, still more than any other monitored site on the river, though down from 57, with 33 of them showing young. Federal reviewers call the lower Duck under-surveyed, and the nearest long-term station below the parkway may have declined sharply.
What is certain is what has gone. The last turgid blossom anywhere was a freshly dead shell taken from the Duck at Normandy in 1972, a hundred yards above an old iron bridge. The field record adds that the water at a bridge a mile upstream was very muddy, presumably from the dam then going up. The species was declared extinct and removed from the endangered list in 2023.
Getting there
35.7176, -87.2635
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
Hear it from the road
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