DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "Fishes of Chautauqua, Cowley and Elk Counties, Kansas" by Artie L. Metcalf. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

Nearly a decade ago I began planning this book with the goal of summarizing the existing body of knowledge on ecology of freshwater fishes in a way similar to that of H. B. N. Hynes' comprehensive treatise Ecology of Running Waters for streams. The time seemed appropriate, as there had been several recent volumes that synthesized much information on a range of topics important in fish ecology, from biogeographic to local scales. For example, the "Fish Atlas" (Lee et aI. , 1980) had provided range maps and basic entry to the original literature for all freshwater fishes in North America, and in 1986 Hocutt and Wiley's Zoogeography of North American Fishes provided a detailed synthesis of virtually everything known about distributional ecology of fishes on that continent. Tim Berra (1981) had summarized in convenient map form the worldwide distribution of all freshwater fish families, and Joe Nelson's 1976 and 1984 editions of Fishes of the World had appeared. To complement these "big picture" views of fish distributions, the volume on Community and Evolutionary Ecology of North American Freshwater Fishes, edited by David Heins and myself (Matthews and Heins, 1987), had provided an opportunity for more than 30 individuals or groups to summarize their work on stream fishes (albeit mostly for warmwater systems).

This informational report examines the ability of fish populations in the Neosho and Marais des Cygnes rivers in Kansas to readjust to constant stream flow following irregular conditions resulting from the severest drought in the state's history. Content includes: Introduction Description of Neosho River Description of Marais des Cygnes River Methods Annotated List of Species Fish-fauna of the Upper Neosho River Comparison of the Fish-faunas of the Neosho and Marais des Cygnes Rivers Faunal Changes, 1957 Through 1959 Conclusions Acknowledgments Literature Cited