UNICOI COUNTY, Tenn. (WJHL) — Nearly one year after Hurricane Helene caused regionwide flooding on an unprecedented scale, the fish population in Northeast Tennessee’s waterways has proven to be resilient.

Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency (TWRA) Public Information Officer Matthew Cameron said in an interview on WJHL+ that the floods washed thousands of fish downstream to Douglas Lake.

“Fish got displaced, I guess, is the first thing that happened,” Cameron said during an interview on the show Outdoors Appalachia. “So Douglas Lake probably got stocked pretty heavily with a lot of fish that aren’t normally there, more of a river-type fish.”

However, the fish were largely able to return home after the floods.

“Fish will try to go back where they came from. There’s some barriers in their way, the Nolichucky Dam, they would not be able to get past it. There are places they could not return to.

“But by and large, they will try to go back to where they want to be.”

There was some immediate loss of aquatic life in the midst of the hurricane, Cameron said. Several fish, along with sediment, were redeposited above the shorelines and left there when the water receded.

“You go to the beach, you see the tide come in, stuff gets trapped in these pools, water goes back out – kind of a similar type circumstance along the rivers,” Cameron said. “So it did directly kill a lot of animals.”

However, the number of fish and animal casualties was nowhere near as high as the TWRA expected.

“But, by and large, it didn’t wipe them out like we’d be afraid that it would just kill everything, that much sediment, that much volume of water. It didn’t. We did a survey since then, and our biologists tell me that, by and large, fish species were unaffected.”

TWRA surveys found crappie, trout and other species of fish have been found in healthy numbers in waterways affected by the hurricane.

“It didn’t spell doomsday for animals like we thought it would, but it did impact them.”

According to Cameron, the TWRA did not need to restock any fish populations as a result of the hurricane.

One type of waterfowl, though, was extremely affected by Helene. Cameron said wood ducks lost a multitude of nesting places due to the floods.

“A wood duck is a tree cavity nesting bird. They can’t make their own cavities, so a woodpecker makes a hole in a tree, a dead tree has limbs that rot and fall off, creating these cavities. Anyway, the wood duck will go inside and build her nest.”

The raging floodwaters swept away a multitude of the trees that would have made for ideal wood duck homes. Even more were removed by cleanup crews doing necessary work in the wake of the floods.

“So we have seen a decrease in the number of nesting wood ducks in our region,” Cameron said. “Not to say that it killed the wood duck directly, but they’re moving upstream further or going somewhere else to nest.”

The TWRA is installing nesting boxes for the wood ducks in the region in an attempt to draw more of the birds back.

You can watch new episodes of Outdoors Appalachia every Thursday at 3 p.m. on the free WJHL+ streaming app or watch episodes on demand at any time.