Felling a Tree: Part 2 9 June, 2009

Transcript

David Rossney: What I'm going to do - it's very tight. You can see that the trees are very close together. There's not a lot of room to fell this tree. As I said before, it's going to hang up. It's going to be resting at about probably 60 degrees, with its crown resting on the crowns of the other trees, and then we'll have to work out how to get the tree down safely. But I need to get it felled in a particular direction across here, and to do that, I'm going to place a couple of cuts that make a sort of bird's mouth shape at the front of the tree. Then to finish the tree, I'll do a cut from the back that leaves a section of wood about that wide that isn't cut. That's what we call the hinge, and that will allow the tree to follow the line of the directional notch at the front.

That way we get control over where the tree's going, because, of course, if I just put the saw in through the tree, it could go spinning off in any direction and probably take out somebody at the same time. So it's very important that we have control over tree felling.

This is an interesting piece of woodland, actually. We're in an ancient, semi-natural woodland, which means by definition it was known to have been here before the year 1600.

But what we're looking at if you look up in the sky is a mixture of the broadleaf trees that you would expect to find in here and the conifers which have been put in much, much more recently, round about the '50s and '60s these were planted. You've got things like western hemlock, and there's some Norway spruce.

So there's a good opportunity in here, in order to get this woodland back to its much more original, native state, there's a good opportunity in here to just thin out the conifers gradually and let the natural vegetation take over.

What I'm proposing to do in here is to just remove this tree just to give the crowns a bit more space to develop and ensure that those trees grow well. Then what I would suggest in here would be that one just kept going and took out conifers out of the mix every few years until you gradually get back to a broadleaf woodland. Maybe just leave one or two of the better trees as nice examples of individual trees, but it'll bring much more light to the floor.

If you look at the ground through there, you can see it's largely bare, and there are little clusters of bluebells, where the glossy green leaves are popping up in little, tiny patches. Now if this was pure broadleaf, that would be more of a carpet, but what you are looking at here is just the bluebells hanging on.

There might be seeds in the ground waiting to come up as a fresh crop of bluebells, but if we leave the thinning for too long, those will become not viable anymore and we'll have lost the opportunity to get the ground flora back. There's a whole host of plants that will be in that situation, not just the bluebells. They're just the ones that everybody recognizes straightaway.

So we're going to do a good job to contribute to the health of this woodland by taking down this tree here today.