Quote Originally Posted by smashdn View Post
3500 ain't much. That's for both lakes or the whole of the western fisheries area? Either way that is spreading it mighty thin.

I've been spending a fair amount of time on Old Hickory in TN. It has a serious cormorant problem as well and because of that the islands and certain shore areas are damaged due to dying trees. I don't want to see KY and Barkley get to that point if it can be helped. Not to mention they are hard on the fish.

Where are you guys getting the cypress and how are you growing them out to 5'? I attempted to transplant a few that were about 18" tall and they had about a 4' tap root on them. They didn't survive.
The 3500 is for everything west of the tradewater, but is mainly spent on barkley and kentucky. We did add some brush piles on beshear last month though. It isn't much, but we stretch it out as far as possible and sometimes beyond.

We actually did a very large diet study on the cormorants here. The obviously eat a lot of fish, but they mainly just eat whatever species is shallow at the time. So for the month of may they eat a lot of sunfish, but outside of that they are mainly feeding on shad. The study began in 2016 so we even observed them eating small silver carp. (thankfully we havent seen any small silver carp since 2015). Cormorants certainly aren't helping our fish population, but at this point the impacts are relatively small and focused around those nesting colonies/islands.

We purchase our trees from the state nursery as seedlings. We then plant them in some caged plastic totes which we have cut in half and filled with sand and compost. We plant 100 per container so they are very crowded. This seems to force them to grow up instead of down or out. I am not a horticulturalist, and I'm sure in all of crappie.com there is someone more qualified, but I would suggest trimming that taproot next time you try the transplant. Trimming seems to work fine, and is preferable to bending it. Alternatively, you could dig a 4 foot hole.