By the first week of February 2022, a Georgia Department of Natural Resources fishing report put a number on a habit that Lake Allatoona had been keeping since the middle of the last decade: roughly 225 recycled Christmas trees newly placed around the Victoria Day Use Fishing Jetty, an effort then in its 16th year, and more than 3,500 trees sunk into the reservoir in total. Those figures reach us through a secondary summary of that DNR report, and they should be read as the program’s own accounting rather than an independent audit.
Ten days earlier, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had published its own account of the January install, written by Charles Walker, describing Allatoona Lake Rangers and volunteers working the exposed lakebed with donated firs. Working alongside them, a volunteer named Jimmy Moore had by then spent about six years doing something adjacent and stranger: cutting bamboo, tying it into pyramids, and sinking those into the same water as permanent scaffolding for the trees to lean against.
A discarded Christmas tree is, structurally, a cone of branching wood with hundreds of small interior gaps. That is very close to the definition of nursery cover for juvenile fish. The Allatoona program’s premise is that the object does not have to be redesigned to do the job — it only has to be weighted, anchored, and dropped in the right place, in the right month.
The seventeen-foot window
Timing is the part of this that has to be exact. Allatoona is drawn down in winter, and by the January install described in the Corps account, the pool sat roughly 17 feet below its normal level. That drawdown converts what is ordinarily boat-and-diver work into something closer to yard labor: rangers and volunteers walk out onto ground that will be under water by spring, place the material by hand, and let the returning pool do the sinking…