Around age 11, Kyle Glenn was walking the roadside path to go fishing for trout in Wiscoy Creek with his dad, Paul.
As they approached a small bridge overpass, the pair noticed an angler at the bridge. After a few moments, Tom Piwowar began to share a familiar tale to most, the kind of “5-pound brown trout from right over there” story that every optimistic angler knows best to believe.
As the trio continued to watch an early morning hatch of tricos Piwowara introduced young Kyle and his dad to the idea of joining him as a member of the Western New York Trout Unlimited Chapter.
More than a decade later, TU’s Coldwater Conservation Staff would partner with New York Department of Environmental Conservation to identify Wiscoy Creek as a critical wild trout tributary to the Upper Genessee River.
Now a recent University of Buffalo graduate and well versed in the wild trout haunts of Wiscoy, Kyle Glenn joined the Trout Unlimited staff in 2022 as a biologist and field coordinator with eyes set on rehabilitating a local stream he loves, in partnership with fellow Western New York TU chapter members.
At the start of 2024, Glenn gave a chapter presentation that highlighted unique possibilities for volunteer-driven improvement projects on Wiscoy.
One such method would involve the use of upcycling bare Christmas trees for mending deeply eroded streambanks, a process called conifer revetment.
At this meeting, WNY TU member and teacher Jerry Krajna suggested that the project could serve as a proper hands-on learning opportunity for his students in the Genesee Valley BOCES Conservation and Heavy Equipment program.
Under the leadership of chapter president Joe Morgan, volunteers began collecting tress for the project and stored them at Piwowar’s property over the winter. In early Spring, father-and-son team Joe and Ryan Bennett volunteered to help haul all 70 trees with a NYSDEC operations truck, delivering them to the Wiscoy site for future installation.
After a follow up classroom presentation and streamside walk with students a few weeks later, Glenn explained a few of the ways that these upcycled Christmas trees would be anchored and integrated.
Conifer projects of this nature require the use of wooden stakes that each tree becomes woven into. The BOCES students left with a working order for 250 wooden stakes to be measured and cut for anchoring posts.
Rather than going to the local lumber yard, students and their instructors selected a few fallen ash trees collected on the Genesee Valley campus. Under Krajna’s direction, the students cut the full order of 30-inch-long ash stakes on the campus’s sawmilling equipment and used them to help install the conifers on the first Wiscoy project site just a few weeks later.
The newly installed conifers have already started doing their job out on Wiscoy Creek. As they begin to naturalize and create new habitat for wild trout, it sure does leave one to wonder if they might just be the new home of a “5-pound brown” come spring!