BirdTrout
Needmore Game Land, North Carolina
5,087 acres of public ground in Swain, Macon counties, managed by Owner not recorded. 25 named streams run through it, of which 8 are designated trout water — 27.1 miles of it. It is in the state's huntable-land layer.
Open in BirdTrout50°F and colder is cold, through cold-transitional and cool, to warm above 70°F — the same four bands the app paints. The colour is NC Wildlife Resources Commission's own classification of the stream, not a measurement, except at the gauge dots, which read live. Grey is water NC Wildlife Resources Commission has not typed.
The unit in numbers
Assembled from the state huntable public-land layer and PAD-US ownership records, dissolved into one block: the section lines a state forest is surveyed in are not a fact about access, so they are not drawn and not counted twice.
Getting on it
Open to the public without a permit, as PAD-US records it. State licence and season rules still apply.
This unit is 45 separate blocks of ground rather than one, which is normal for public land held in surveyed sections: the blocks are not contiguous. The map above draws every one of them, and the ground between two of them belongs to somebody else.
Trout streams on this ground
Every named stream whose reaches touch this unit, longest first. 5 of them have a page of their own and are linked; the rest are in the app. The class column is NC Wildlife Resources Commission's designation of that stream, over the reaches it has classified. "Now" is the live USGS reading where a gauge stands in that stream.
| Stream | Miles | Class | Now | Designation |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Little Tennessee River | 85.5 | untyped | — | — |
| Burningtown Creek | 11.9 | untyped | — | Hatchery Supported Trout Waters, Wild Trout Waters |
| Brush Creek | 10.9 | untyped | — | Wild Trout Waters |
| Long Branch | 8.9 | untyped | — | Wild Trout Waters |
| Tellico Creek | 6.0 | untyped | — | Wild Trout Waters |
| Coweeta Creek | 4.7 | untyped | — | — |
| Cowee Creek | 4.0 | untyped | — | — |
| Sawmill Creek | 3.3 | untyped | — | — |
| Stillhouse Branch | 3.3 | untyped | — | Wild Trout Waters |
| Licklog Creek | 3.1 | untyped | — | — |
| Rattlesnake Creek | 2.9 | untyped | — | Wild Trout Waters |
| DeHart Creek | 2.1 | untyped | — | — |
| Wiggins Creek | 2.1 | untyped | — | — |
| Caler Cove Branch | 1.9 | untyped | — | — |
| Rose Creek | 1.6 | untyped | — | — |
| Painter Branch | 1.5 | untyped | — | — |
| Tarkiln Branch | 1.5 | untyped | — | — |
| Loudermilk Creek | 1.1 | untyped | — | Wild Trout Waters |
| Charley Branch | 1.0 | untyped | — | Wild Trout Waters |
| Cabe Branch | 0.9 | untyped | — | — |
| Wikle Branch | 0.8 | untyped | — | — |
| Ledbetter Branch | 0.7 | untyped | — | — |
| Bird Branch | 0.6 | untyped | — | — |
| Short Branch | 0.6 | untyped | — | — |
| Simon Branch | 0.5 | untyped | — | — |
The miles are the whole stream's, not the miles inside this boundary: a river does not stop at a property line and neither does its page.
Hunting
This ground is in North Carolina's huntable public-land layer as state game land, managed by Owner not recorded — 100% of the unit is covered by it. The seasons below are the 2026–2027 small-game seasons as the state's own digest publishes them; they are statewide except where a species is zoned, and the bars run 1 September to 31 August.
North Carolina requires hunter orange — a cap or hat, or an outer garment visible from all sides — for anyone hunting grouse, pheasant or quail with a firearm. Turkey is not on that list and woodcock is not either. NCWRC does not publish a bag limit on its season-dates sheet and we could not confirm one elsewhere, so none is shown — check the Regulations Digest. The season is statewide because NCWRC writes it statewide. The bird is not: ruffed grouse in North Carolina are a western mountain species, in and around the Blue Ridge and the Nantahala and Pisgah forests, and the population there has fallen hard with the loss of young forest.
North Carolina requires hunter orange — a cap or hat, or an outer garment visible from all sides — for anyone hunting grouse, pheasant or quail with a firearm. Turkey is not on that list and woodcock is not either. NCWRC does not publish a bag limit on its season-dates sheet and we could not confirm one elsewhere, so none is shown — check the Regulations Digest. The Piedmont and the coastal plain are the quail ground, and NCWRC runs an active restoration programme on it — the CURE co-operative and its focal landscapes are the reason North Carolina's bobwhite story is not simply the decline it is elsewhere.
Daily bag 3, possession 9. Migratory bird: HIP certification is required in addition to the hunting licence. North Carolina sits near the southern end of the Atlantic flyway, so the season opens late — the birds arrive on hard cold fronts in December rather than living here in October. Not on NCWRC's hunter-orange list, which names grouse, pheasant and quail. The possession limit is three times the daily bag.
NCWRC does not publish a bag limit on its season-dates sheet and we could not confirm one elsewhere, so none is shown — check the Regulations Digest. North Carolina has no fall turkey season. This is the state's only one, and unlike Michigan's and Virginia's fall hunts it takes male or bearded birds only. Turkey is not on NCWRC's hunter-orange list. A youth season runs the weekend before the general opener.
Zoned — North Carolina publishes this season by zone, and this page does not place this unit in one, so no season bar is drawn. Seasons by zone — Remainder of the state: 5 Sep – 28 Feb; Barrier islands of Carteret, Dare and Hyde counties: 21 Nov – 28 Feb. North Carolina requires hunter orange — a cap or hat, or an outer garment visible from all sides — for anyone hunting grouse, pheasant or quail with a firearm. Turkey is not on that list and woodcock is not either. NCWRC does not publish a bag limit on its season-dates sheet and we could not confirm one elsewhere, so none is shown — check the Regulations Digest. Two seasons, and the short one is the real one. The barrier islands of Carteret, Dare and Hyde carry a naturalised population hunted as a wild bird, male only. The statewide either-sex season is long and permissive because the mainland birds being shot under it are released ones. Neither boundary is drawn in this app.
Hunter orange: Anyone hunting bear, feral swine, rabbit, squirrel, grouse, pheasant or quail with a firearm must wear a cap or hat of hunter orange, or an outer garment of hunter orange visible from all sides. It applies to hunting grouse, pheasant or quail with a firearm, except when hunting wild turkey, woodcock and waterfowl.
North Carolina allows Sunday hunting on private land with some limits, and restricts it on many public game lands. The per-game-land rule is not carried in this app — check the game land before you go.
Access sites and amenities
No public access site we have on record stands on this unit. We hold no trail or campground data at all, so what is here is what the state publishes as launches and walk-in access, and none of it falls on this ground.
When to come
The hatch calendar for the North Carolina mountains, which is the region this unit's centre falls in — the same regions the app's hatch panel uses. It is a regional record, not a survey of this ground: nobody has counted insects unit by unit. Year-round records (midges, scuds, sculpins) are left out. The seasons above are the other half of this calendar: the water is best before the ground is.
January
May
- Blue-Winged Olive
- Blackfly
- Blue Quill
- Cranefly
- +17 more
June
July
- Caterpillar
- Crayfish
- Green Sedge
- Light Cahill
- +18 more
August
September
October
November
December
Nothing seasonal on the water.
What makes this unit distinctive
Needmore is 5,087 acres in 45 parts strung along the Little Tennessee River between Franklin and Fontana, in Swain and Macon counties, and it exists to hold that river's banks: the Little Tennessee runs 85.5 miles through the subbasin and is undesignated as trout water, while the designated fishing here is the tributaries coming off the Nantahala side. Burningtown Creek runs 11.9 miles with Hatchery Supported and Wild Trout water, Brush Creek 10.9 and Long Branch 8.9 as Wild Trout, and Tellico Creek 6.0. Twenty-five named streams touch the unit and eight are designated. Forty-five parts for five thousand acres is a riverbank corridor rather than a block. PAD-US records it open access.
Regulations
Nothing on this page is a regulation. The fishing rules that apply to the water on this ground — the types, the seasons, the size limits and the gear restrictions — are on the North Carolina fishing regulations page, built from the agency's own columns. The hunting seasons above come from the state's hunting digest, read against the 2026 licence year.
Watersheds it lies in
The subbasins this ground drains into. Each one has the whole basin's water on it.
Public land nearby
The nearest other blocks of public ground, centre to centre. Public land does not tile a state the way watersheds do, so this is nearness rather than adjacency.
- Nantahala National Forest 9.4 mi
- Southern Nantahala Wilderness 20.2 mi
- Great Smoky Mountains National Park 23.8 mi
- William H Silver Game Land 25.3 mi
- Nantahala Purchase Unit 25.6 mi
Plan a weekend around it
The trip pages whose range reaches this ground — the water in the same drive, what is hatching, and a three-day plan built from it.