Photos by David Samis
My hiking buddy, Dave Samis, is a great bird photographer. One of his pet peeves is that the birds refuse to pose on the outside limbs, but sit farther in, where there’s always a few branches to get in the way of a great picture.
Last Wednesday I promised to provide a different sort of bird up a tree, with a more controlled situation. This bird wasn’t likely to take off and fly. In fact, it would much rather not.
The Slowly-Dying Patient
You, see, the birches in our area have a bug similar to the mountain pine beetle. It digs into the bark, starting high and working down, and rings the tree, killing it. If you’re quick enough, you can top the tree below the infection and save it for a while, anyway. In reality, you tend not to get low enough or early enough. In a couple of years, the new top starts to die, and you do it all over again.
I had an infected 80-foot (25 metres for you modern folks) birch in my back yard, and over the years I had climbed it three times, each time taking off 10 or 15 feet (3-4m), always too little, too late. So finally the day came when the whole thing had to go.
Now, by this time I was down to a 15-inch (40cm) trunk, which meant the 3-foot (1m) chunks I was taking off were pretty heavy, falling from 50 feet (15m). The idea is to take off one block with one large limb on it. In theory, the weight of the limb causes the block to fall the right way, and the weight of the block drags the limb down through the other foliage, but slowly. It’s a bit more complicated than that, but you get the idea.
Professional tree removers use a different method. They have climbing spikes and belts like linemen and clean the limbs off as they go up. I only have a good safety harness, so I free-climb the tree and tie in while I work. So the lower limbs are all there. Makes me feel a bit safer, too. I can fantasize that if I fall, I’ll hit the next limb down and stop.
Actually getting up the tree is the hardest part. I use an electric chainsaw because it’s lighter and always starts, so between my safety line, the extension cord, and the saw’s safety tether, I tend to climb for one minute, then take five to reset the ropes, and away I go again. My assistant on the ground tends to find it very boring. Dave, however, had his camera.
Sorry to remove the suspense, but the operation actually went rather smoothly. I had one anxious second when the limb I had my right foot on broke while I was cutting (birches are notorious for rotten branches that look good). However, my safety harness was already taut, so I didn’t really drop at all. Just strained something in my left hip when my body dropped but that leg stayed up.
My objective was to get the stump down to 33 feet (10m) because that’s the distance from the tree to the house. I’ve worked as a faller for too many years, and watched too many “Felling Fails” on YouTube to make those mistakes.
Dropping the Trunk
However, just to keep things interesting, I’m not going to fell the tree in the usual way, either. That leaves you with a big stump in the ground that is notoriously hard to get rid of. What I usually do is dig out around the base, chop off the roots, put a bumper jack under a big root at the back, and let the tree pull its own stump out of the hole. The big advantage to this method is that the roots give up their hold slowly, so the trunk tends to subside gracefully to the earth, rather than coming down with a resounding crash and leaving a furrow in the lawn. The disadvantage is that it’s not quite so certain exactly where it’s going to fall, because of inability to predict what the roots look like down under the dirt. Hence the distance-from-house/height-of-trunk ratio.
The other advantage, of course, is that I don’t have to do all the digging at once. I am no longer of the age where I can put in an eight-hour day with mattock and shovel. One hour is all I’m good for. But the tree is in no rush, so I’ll judge my work schedule by the pain in my back. I’ll win in the end.
Unless we have a big storm the second last day, and it blows the thing down on the fence, the neighbor’s hedge, or my garden shed.
Hey, life is uncertain. It would have cost me about $400 bucks to have someone else do it, and I wouldn’t have got all this exercise.
You can judge Dave’s success by the pictures he took.