An undated image of volunteers tying Christmas trees to a log on a back-channel at Elk Rock Island near Milkwaukie, Ore.
Courtesy of the North Clackamas Watersheds Council
The North Clackamas Watersheds Council is one of a handful of environmental groups across Oregon that want to turn your Christmas tree into a fish habitat.
On Jan. 10, the watersheds council will collect live-cut Christmas trees in Milwaukie, and then tie them to logs along a side channel of the Willamette River on Elk Rock Island. There the trees provide food for bugs and habitat for salmon and steelhead, and naturally break down.
Neil Schulman, the executive director of the watersheds council, said trees and rivers are intrinsically connected.
“Streams need complexity, and that’s why we’re doing this,” he said.
For years, much of that complexity was missing, mostly because humans stepped in.
“We actually used to think that they [rivers] needed to be clean,” he said. “So, for decades, humans took them [trees] out of streams between like the ‘30s and the ‘70s. And then we realized that we actually shouldn’t have been doing that.”
Streams shouldn’t look tidy, Schulman said.
“The saying is a stream should look like a teenager’s bedroom,” he said. “It should be messy with stuff piled on top of everything. That’s its natural state that provides that complex habitat.”
The group is one of many other environmental conservation groups and programs, such as Christmas for Coho, across Oregon and the country that has done this for years.
Every year, the watersheds council ends up with somewhere between 400 to 600 trees, which they will in turn tie to sunken logs with a natural fiber rope. The Christmas trees usually break down within a year, Schulman said. And not only do these trees provide food and habitat for aquatic life, but they also benefit local communities too.
“All that wood in the streams actually does things like slow down erosion and keeps the river and a lot of places from kind of carving into people’s banks and things like that,” he said.
The North Clackamas Watersheds Council will collect Christmas trees on Saturday, Jan. 10 from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. for a $5 fee at North Clackamas Park near the shelter by the Milwaukie Center.
