Thousands of old Christmas trees will be mulched or taken to the landfill in the weeks ahead. A program from the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources aims to give our old decorations new life in local lakes and reservoirs.
With the holiday season come and gone, thousands of Christmas trees will be mulched or taken to the landfill. A program from the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources aims to give our old decorations new life in local lakes and reservoirs. Dustin Smith, fisheries biologist with the DNR told reporter Chris Schulz about the program and why old Christmas trees might be the perfect place for anglers to look for their next catch.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Schulz: When people think of waterway conservation or habitat restoration, they don’t necessarily think of trees. Why are trees and getting those into our waterways so important?
Smith: Well, in terms of specifically our Christmas tree habitat enhancement project, it’s just an easy opportunity to use something which is going to be thrown away. But we can utilize them in some of our reservoirs, specifically to add woody habitat. Most of our reservoirs and some of our impoundments before they were filled the trees, the standing timber, the habitat, were often cleared off because those places weren’t filled with that in mind. Usually, they were made for flood control or hydropower, whatever it may be, important purposes, but fishing wasn’t really top of mind when they were made. We have an opportunity when people are done with their live trees, and we can get those, and we can turn those into quality habitat for fish in our lakes and reservoirs. And it does a couple of things, I think it adds, certainly, cover and shelter and a place for different species of fish to forage and hide in those lakes and reservoirs. But it also gives anglers a place to target those fish.
Schulz: This work is primarily or exclusively done in reservoirs? This isn’t being done in the Ohio (River) or moving bodies of water, is it?
Smith: Yeah, this is almost exclusively done in our reservoirs and smaller impoundments. The trouble you get into with moving bodies of water is, you put habitat in there that’s not anchored appropriately it’s going to get moved, and you don’t know where it’s going to be. So for our purposes, we’re almost entirely doing this in reservoirs and impoundments, where we have a little bit more control on where we’re placing those.
Schulz: Can you walk me through the process a little bit? How do you actually get the trees into the water?
Smith: It depends, really, on the water body. Some of our flood control reservoirs, like Tygart Lake in the winter time, those are drawn down. They keep those lakes pretty low during the winter. And that provides us an opportunity to actually, we’ll take trees, load them up on a trailer and some sort of a side by side, and actually drive them out and place them where we want them to be, in coves and abatements. So in that situation, we’re going out, we have a lot more control, because we can physically manipulate those structures exactly where we want them to be. We do weigh them down. Usually we’ll just use concrete blocks.
Sometimes we’ll just create clusters of trees, essentially a big brush pile. We’ll also sometimes attach those to pallets so that we can create more vertical structure and you actually stand those trees up. We’ll put those in with boats too, on lakes that aren’t drawn down. And then our agency does have what’s called a habitat barge out of a different district than mine, and it’s a bigger boat. What that allows us to do is create bigger structures and then hydraulically lift it and dump it into those lakes. So we use whatever method the water body allows us to do. I think it gives us more control when the lake is down, but we still create a lot of structures and lakes where the water level remains up during the winter time.
Schulz:How do you all go about collecting these trees? Maybe next year, somebody is interested in seeing their Christmas tree at their favorite fishing hole.
Smith: Well, this year we did have two drop off locations. We’re limited in terms of where we can have those based on staff and other things, but I imagine that these two will remain for next year as well. This year we had drop off locations: one at our Claudia Workman Wildlife Education Center, and I believe tree drop offs from the public ran from December 26 to January 6 at that location. And then we also partnered with the city of Morgantown, we have for the last couple of years. And then they take those trees and drop them off at our Ices Ferry fishing access at Cheat Lake. And I believe they did pickups from December 30, and this may be the last day, I think, January 10. So they had that option. So this year we had those two locations: one in the southern part of the state, one northern part of the state. It’d be great to have more, it’s just sort of, at this point, a limitation on staff and where we can get those and efficiently get them out. So I’m not sure going forward if we’ll have additional ones or not, but I imagine those two will remain sort of a similar time frame.
Schulz: Is there anything else that I haven’t given you a chance to discuss with me?
Smith: I guess it is probably good to mention that we will often mark the locations on different bodies of water where we put these on our website, on our DNR fishing map. Usually, if folks go to a certain body of water, there’ll be a marker or sort of a GPS location on there that gives them the general area that we’ve added habitat enhancement structures. So that’s one way they can find the general location that we’ve put those. We’ll also often have buoys that mark sort of the general area that we’ve added habitat. So we won’t necessarily mark every single structure, because we put so many in, but we’ll mark a general area. That way they know that, “Hey, in this cove, DNR has added habitat structure” so that anglers know that they can spend some time looking around it and fishing those locations to try and maximize their opportunities.
