LITTLE ROCK — For Jason Piper, the Christmas trees with the most exciting gifts under their branches are submerged in a lake rather than resting on a living room floor.
The Rogers crappie guide bundles discarded evergreens, weights the ends with a concrete block, and tethers them to Beaver Lake bluffs and docks to form homes for fish, creating his own secret sweet spots.
“It works,” Piper said. “On a good day, I can go out there and boat 45 crappie.”
Dry, balding Christmas trees can be a guilt-inducing burden for families who drag them to the curb after the holiday and test the limits of their vacuums’ suction as they attempt to remove the trails of sharp needles left behind.
But anglers covet the trees as a hiding places for fish like crappie, largemouth bass andbluegill, said Clifton Jackson, a community fisheries biologist with the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission.
The trick is especially effective in manmade reservoirs, such as Beaver Lake, where natural fish cover is sparse in many areas.
“Small spaces in the tree are great cover for young fish,” Jackson said. “A lot of times, without a lot of cover, they’ll get eaten up.”
The commission will provide Christmas tree drop-off points at 24 Arkansas lakes through Jan. 24.
The trees are more effective and less costly than other artificial structures created with grids of small, white polyvinyl chloride pipes, Jackson said. Anglers creating habitat should place them at varying depths below the lake’s normal level of 1121 feet so that they won’t impede boat traffic as water levels fall, he said.
“If you put a little habitat out there, you can slaughter ‘em,” Jackson said. “You’ll have a need-the-camera kind of day.”
A Bentonville youth group hopes area anglers can create a few prime spots from the remnants of a failed fundraiser.
About 80 members of the Christian Life Cathedral youth group are down $4,000 at the end of their annual Christmas tree sale. About 130 of the group’s 230 trees remained in a north Bentonville parking lot on Christmas Eve, youth pastor MattBrown said.
After a successful sellout last year, the group doubled its inventory for this year’s sale, which raises money for retreats and supplies. But a change in location and a lack of advertising brought fewer shoppers, leaving the group with an oversupply.
“About Dec. 15, I could tell we were in trouble,” Brown said. “It was raining and snowing. We probably sold 10 trees the whole next weekend.”
Brown welcomed families to take free trees off of the lot this week, but he eventually realized he’d need more help dispensing with the trees.
Two groups of fishermen plan to load up trailers todayto drop the remaining trees into Beaver and Bella Vista lakes.
“We’ve got no use for them now,” Brown said. “We’ve got to do something with them.”
Alan Bland, a park ranger with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, said there are no formal drop-off spots on Beaver Lake, but the Corps allows residents to pile Christmas trees on the west side of the Arkansas 12 bridge, near the boat ramp, where fishermen can pick them up for personal use.
A complete list of Game and Fish Commission dropoff sites is available online at agfc.com.
To contact this reporter:
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 11 on 12/26/2009