Little Tonawanda Creek begins in the low hills north of Warsaw and flows generally northward to join Tonawanda Creek about a mile downstream of Old Creek Road near Batavia. Averaging about 12 to 15 feet in width, this stream has a silt, clay, and gravel bottom and good water quality. Surrounded by woodlands, open fields, and swamps, the largely intact riparian corridor provides a lot of bank cover and tree canopy along this stream.

Sections of Little Tonawanda Creek and several of its tributaries flow through the Carlton Hill Multiple Use Area (MUA). The public has fishing rights on waters in the MUA, and obtaining access to other sections of this stream is usually not a problem as "Fishing Allowed" signs are posted at several road crossing (see photos). 

In the spring, Little Tonawanda Creek is stocked with brown trout from Pflaum Road downstream 5 miles to West Middlebury Road, encompassing all sections of the stream that flow through the MUA. (The map pin is located on the crossing of Pflaum Road.) This is essentially an early season stocked trout fishery, but there are some cool, surprisingly deep pools in this stream, especially where it flows through the MUA, that provide refuge for stocked and, occasionally, wild brown trout through the summer. Downstream of the MUA, in Genesee County, the brown trout are far fewer in number, but fish up to 14 inches have been handled during studies conducted by the DEC.

At one time, Little Tonawanda Creek and several of its tributaries held wild brown trout, but beavers have made a mess of much of this stream, and the ability of the stream to support wild trout has declined greatly. However, a few wild browns can still be found in Little Tonawanda Creek, especially in the Wyoming County section.

In 2019, I hiked through much of the Carlton Hill MUA, doing a general photo survey. While walking up Little Tonawanda Creek, I encountered several very large pools that looked out of place: there were no beaver dams or large woody debris that could have created the pools, so I suspected that spring seeps may have been their cause. In 2024, Kyle Glenn, a fisheries technician working for the New York State Council of Trout Unlimited, and I decided to test this possibility. We hiked and bushwhacked our way to the stream from the DEC parking area off Dale Road. When we got to the stream, the air temperature was near 90 degrees, and the water temperature in flowing parts of the stream were in the mid-70s. But when Kyle inserted a temperature probe into two of the pools that I'd seen in 2019, the water registered a cool 55 degrees in one pool and 52 degrees in the other. Kyle also spotted what looked to be a large brown trout darting away from the edge of one pool, and he could feel large fish (suckers, brown trout?) hitting his probe near the bottom of the pool.       

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Links to associated resources (Tonawanda Creek - Middle Section, and the Carlton Hill Multiple Use Area) will be added soon.