Kentucky Fish and Wildlife looking for Christmas tree donations to create fish habitats

BOWLING GREEN, Ky. –  The Christmas holiday is almost here, and families are putting the finishing touches on their trees.

However, for those who have a real tree, disposal can be a bit of a hassle sometimes, but the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife has found a solution. Starting the day after Christmas, Dec. 26, the Department of Fish and Wildlife will accept donations of old Christmas trees and will take them to lakes across the state and use them as fish habitats.

Many lakes around Kentucky are manmade and were created between the 1950s and 1970s, and since then, the habitat at the bottom of the lakes have slowly disintegrated away. The fish that live in these lake thrive on the wooded habitats that the department can create with Christmas trees.

“We often will make large piles of these trees, not just single trees, individually when we put them into the lake. The large piles are sort of messy, and the fish love this because there’s all these, these branches that are intertwined, and these smaller baitfish will go and hide in there. And these larger sport fish like that as we build crappie, all kind of know about this, and they’ll sit kind of in the margins or right on the inside, bigger branches that stick out, and they’re waiting for some of these smaller fish to come in and nab them essentially,” said Spencer Phillips, a fish habitat biologist with the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife.

While there is no amount that they are looking to collect, they are looking to collect as many trees as they can as they have to replace these trees every few years.

“In a place where they’re going to, in Barren or sometimes, they get dried out every winter time, they don’t last as long as, maybe like a smaller apartment where they stay under the water surface. And generally, if they’re staying under the water completely about five years or so, if they’re drying every winter, we only get about three years out of them. So that’s partially why I say the more the merrier, because it’s constant replacement of others,” Phillips said.

If you would like to donate your tree, there is a map of drop off locations across the state, which you can see here.