Sketchy birch trees over a path

It took me about 12 weeks longer than I expected to get round to it, but the sketchy windfallen birches that became hung up over the "public not public" pathway in our woodland are finally down.

Windthrow, windfall, windthrown are all terms that refer to the state that trees find themselves in when the wind has either blown them over or smashed them up in some way.

This bunch of windfallen birch trees have been keeping me up at night since I spotted them last year. Here they were yesterday when they saw their last summer morning. As you can see they lean heavily over a path and whilst I was never really concerned about them falling onto someone’s head (really wrong place at the really wrong time) I was concerned about them falling and blocking access to other woodland owners.

A bunch of windfallen and hung-up trees. Technically this would be classified as “multiple” windthrow.

Here’s a photo taken back in February looking up towards the path from the root plate of the main tree.

For scale, here’s a normal sized backpack on the stem of the main tree. It is right on the limit of the 380mm that I’m qualified to fell and deal with.

Here’s a little video taken in February of the trees.

I did plan to make a video of me heroically dropping these trees to the ground and fixing the mess. I started that video in February and one hour into the process, I got my saw stuck, bent a guide bar and destroyed a few links in a chain. Jo informs me this was funny to watch, but the lesson I took away from this experience was that I was not ready to tackle this particular bunch of trees. Experience has told me that nothing inspires me to do something like when someone or something tells me I cannot do it. So I ruminated on how to deal with these trees for months and I referred to them as the “sketchy birch over a path”. Eventually they featured in this post on risk assessment and I remained convinced that I’d tackle them as my next job in the woodland. Never mind the fact that I’d had no training in dealing with windblown trees (it isn’t something covered in treeschool, because reasons) I was adamant I’d drop them safely and in the process bag an exceptional video.

That didn’t happen. But what did happen was that by sheer luck, I managed to make my way onto a windblown trees NPTC course with an accompanying assessment on the 29th and 30th of June 2023. I am delighted to state that I passed the course and as a result, I am now trained, qualified and designated as competent in the dealing with individually windblown trees. This is great news, but the sketchy birch over a path are classed as multiple windthrow so technically I was not trained to deal with it. But I don’t let a little thing like that get in my way. The multiple nature of the trees didn’t make the process that much more complex.

It did however, make it complex enough that I thought it would be wise to not be distracted by also recording video at the same time. So I didn’t record any video footage of it all coming down. I did however get a few nice photos.

The trees before we started works

The risk assessment I’d put together (which was actually followed) stated that we’d close the path off. As this was a private path, chapter 8 “Traffic Safety Measures and Signs for Road Works and Temporary Situations” doesn’t apply, so out came the homemade signs. I made them from a pair of screwfix saw horses, some cheapo signs and some table saw and pallet workshop chicanery.

The path was closed and roped off using hi-vis / yellow rope. Any woodland owners were notified it’d be closed for a few hours.

They were three trees entangled in this mess so we had three defined processes. I didn’t get pictures of the first operation, so here’s a photoshopped image to explain it.

The tree I’ve highlighted at the front had to go first as it was providing support to the main windfallen tree. The danger was that if this tree was removed, the main tree could roll onto me and that would not be fun. So to control for that, we set the winch up (photoshopped in as a pink line) in such a way so that the tree could fall down, but not roll towards me. This worked perfectly.

Tree 1 could only come out when the main tree was secured from rolling with a winch.

You can see in the below photo where the tree one is off the stump. Unsurprisingly it was hung up, so in order to pull it down, we moved the position of the winch to pull it from behind. You can just make out the steel winch cable in the lower left, just above the power unit of the chainsaw.

I wish I could have taken a photo of pulling this out of the tree. The winch lifted it about eight feet off the ground and then slowly and surely things started popping and cracking. A few minutes of winching and it was all down.

Once that was done, we moved onto the main tree with the lifting rootplate with the second operation. This is where I was actually qualified to do the task as this was now an individual windblown (mostly) tree. It went off without a hitch but I didn’t take any photos of the process as I was concentrating on the task in hand. It’s hard to tell you just how thrilling this stuff when you’re doing it and it is easy to lose track of something simple like “remembering to take photos”.

The process is quite straight forward. Put a suitably rated strop around the trunk of the tree and connect the winch behind it. Tension the winch to ensure the rootplate doesn’t interfere with the tension on the winch and then once you’re happy that it has tension, back the winch off a smidge. Now make the correct compression cuts (j cut) in the stem at a suitable distance from the root plate. Move to the other side of the tree and have the winch operator tension the winch up again. Make your finishing cut to sever the stem and what should happen (and did) is that the root plate falls back down into place and the tree falls to the ground. Here you can see that’s exactly what happened.

The strop can be seen around the stem of the tree along with the winch cable, the root plate is back to the ground and the tree is down and safe. No one hurt, but everyone buzzing. Did I mention this is thrilling?

Main tree is down, rootplate is back in place and all we have to do is clean up and deal with tree three which was badly damaged by trees one and two, so it had to go.

The final tree to come out was the third tree that was partially holding everything up in the air. Whilst it was not technically windfall, it was however badly damaged and had suffered multiple cracks and structural problems. As it was birch, it had to go. I may have left it if it was an oak. Not birch though, like a drunk walking home from the pub, birch loves to fall over given half a chance. Here is third tree. Thanks to the fast growing nature of birch and its desire to find light, it had grown into a bizarre posture. This tree will not be missed.

The final tree, a weird shaped birch. A low value tree in a high risk location. It had to go.

By the end of the day we had arrived at this stage. Everything was cleared up, the wood was stacked ready for yours truly to go and cut, split and stack it somewhere.

Amazingly during the works, I located an acorn that had germinated and sprouted a little oak sapling, so I managed to get a deer proof tube on it to give it the best chance of life. The handsome chap in the picture is Dan and he’s one of my classmates at Treeschool. I have to give Dan credit for his help in this work. I wouldn’t have been able to do it if he wasn’t there. He operated the winch in operations one and two, he felled the tree in operation three and he also worked with me to clear up the waste from the path and get it all stacked and moved to make it all look as neat as it could. I appreciate Dan and so should you.

I wish I remembered to take more photos of the process, but there’ll be more. The woodland still has LOADS of windthrow to process and next time I am certainly recording it. I even have a specific project in mind. There’s an windfallen oak, with a windfallen birch on top, with another windfallen birch on that.

Thanks for reading!

Cheers,

Jamie