Scouts, Agencies Sink Christmas Trees to Boost Canyon Ferry Perch Habitat

Scout Troop 214 spent January hauling 1,600 Christmas trees off Helena curbs and staging them near the silos at Canyon Ferry Reservoir, setting up a late-March operation that sent two DNRC helicopters making 29 runs over the water to drop cable-strung, cinder-block-weighted bundles onto the reservoir floor.

The deployment on March 21 relied on what DNRC area aviation officer Wade Hendricks calls a hover hookup: one helicopter at a time drops low over the staging area, ground crew attach a bundled load while the aircraft idles overhead, and the pilot carries it about a minute out to a buoy-marked drop zone. FWP uses GPS trackers to map where older bundles already rest, building a running inventory of artificial structure across the basin. Target locations this year centered on the mid-lake area off White Earth and Goose Bay, at depths of 15 to 30 feet.

The need for that structure traces directly to Canyon Ferry's hydrology. The reservoir fluctuates enough in elevation year to year that aquatic vegetation cannot establish along most of its shoreline, leaving the bottom largely featureless. "There's very limited habitat as far as spawning areas or hiding cover for young of the year fish," said FWP senior fisheries technician Troy Humphrey. Yellow perch attach their egg masses to woody debris and hard substrate in shallow water; without it, juvenile survival falls and recruitment stalls.

Each bundle is built by drilling through the stump of a tree, threading a steel cable, and spacing cinder blocks between trees to keep the string pinned to the bottom. The needles drop off by late summer, leaving a skeletal matrix that perch use for years. Since the program launched in 1999 in response to declining perch numbers, roughly 75,000 trees have been dropped into Canyon Ferry.

Troop 214's collection work, which included scout Carson Beckman among dozens of Helena volunteers, compressed what Humphrey said used to consume the better part of a full FWP work week into roughly half that. "The scouts are amazing, that's really been a game changer for us," he said.

Perch fill a dual role on Canyon Ferry: they are a primary angling target and the main forage base keeping walleye populations fed. FWP plans spring population surveys to assess recruitment; anglers working the Goose Bay and White Earth basin after ice-out may already find perch staging around this year's new structure.