IF A TREE FALLS IN THE FOREST

If a tree falls in the forest and there's no one there to hear it, does it make a sound? I'm going to weigh in with my own answer to this age old question: No. I say that because on Sunday we discovered that a very large tree had, in fact, fallen in our woods, not far from our house, and until we tried to walk down our little path in the woods, we had absolutely no idea it had fallen.

It's a sad loss because it was yet another birch and of the few birches that remain on our property, it was one of the healthier ones. Birches are not long-lived trees in our area and I think most of the birches on our property were planted (or planted themselves) at about the same time, so we've been losing them steadily since we bought the house 14 years ago.

It turns out that the rather torrential rain we had last week did it in. I'm not sure how much rain we got but it was certainly a few inches at least over a handful of days. This birch, a naturally shallow-rooted tree, was growing in the woods near the creek and seems to have just toppled over, roots and all. Unfortunately it landed in a younger maple tree where it is currently hung up so we'll have to do something about that and a some point we'll take care of the trunk.

Unfortunately it's hung up in an otherwise healthy maple, so we'll have to get in there to free it up.

A few big branches fell onto the little path that we mow through the ferns in the woods in order to get to the road to the east of us. The branches are beautiful white ones, perfect for Christmas decorations, but I'm torn between wanting to find a spot to save them and wanting to stick them in the chipper shredder to make some great mulch.

So yep ... somehow a big 'ol tree fell and we had no idea. At least one mystery is solved.

BIDDING FAREWELL TO MORE TREES

You won't believe what is happening at our house today. In fact, it was so disturbing to me that I left as quickly as I could this morning without so much as grabbing a photo of it first.

More trees are coming down. Does anyone else get that sick feeling in their stomach when they have to take down a tree, even when you really have no choice in the matter?

We've owned our house for a little over 12 years now and I bet we've taken down 20 trees in that time. It sort of sickens me. I can think of only maybe two that have come down for purely aesthetic reasons; trees that were failing but weren't in danger of falling on anything important.

This all started a couple weeks ago when we discovered that half a maple tree right on our lot line had fallen over in a big wind storm and landed on top of our neighbor's work forklift/cherry picker thing. We paid for the damage (ouch, but what are you going to do) and knew we needed to get the other half of that tree taken down quickly.

We have a great tree guy who I've sung the praises of before, but it doesn't pay to have him come out to just do one tree. Most of his cost is in assembling his crew and getting his equipment out. So if you can lump several trees into one visit the cost per tree goes down dramatically.

Here's a photo of our great tree guy when we had the huge birch tree cut down a couple years ago.

In addition to the half maple, we also had him take down a multi-trunked cedar tree that was hanging way over our neighbor's property. We don't want to take any chances.

Those two trees (or tree and a half as the case may be) are not terribly troubling losses. But the two others we had taken down today are.

One is a relatively large ash tree to the north of the house that, just by chance, we discovered was completely rotten last week. It obviously has not been in the best of health as it has been dropping branches and there's a lot of dead wood on the top, but it wasn't until last weekend that we found that you could stick your finger right into the trunk. I'm not sure what caused this. I peeled off the bark (which was easy to do as it was like a sponge) and did not find any sign of emerald ash borer, an exotic beetle that is decimating the ash tree population east of the Mississippi River and particularly in the Midwest. They leave winding paths under the bark of the tree (see photo below). Once a tree has emerald ash borers there is nothing that can be done to save it.

What damage from emerald ash borers looks like.

I noticed that there was a large nail in the trunk of the tree about 6 inches from the ground. I have no idea why it was put there but I wouldn't be surprised if that created a wound that helped allow whatever claimed its life to enter.

That ash tree probably would not have fallen on our house if it did topple. But it most certainly would have fallen on or gotten entangled with an even bigger ash tree to the east of it. This tree looked to be in mostly good health but almost two years ago our tree guy pointed out to us that it has an 8-foot-long longitudinal crack on the north side of it. We've been watching it carefully and in fall we noticed that two more cracks developed. And this big tree would absolutely crush our house if it came down in the direction in which it's leaning. Our tree guy gave us a really good deal to take it down at the same time as the other trees.

The broken tree that started it all.

Who knows, it might have been just fine for years, but after seeing the damage that half of a smaller tree caused to our neighbor's vehicle, I'm a bit paranoid about the whole idea of trees falling over.

Unfortunately the big tree was also my bird feeder tree. We'll have to find a new place to relocate the feeders to because the birds really need the food at this time of the year.

As for the future, I'm hoping we can find a large tree that will work in the area near where the ashes came down so we can get a start on the trees of the future. We still have a wooded area full of hundreds of trees, but I'm just not comfortable that I know our ratio of trees removed to trees planted is not where I'd like it to be.

The four trees we had removed today needed to come down, I have no doubt. But it doesn't make the sound of chainsaws and wood chippers any easier to bear and it won't make their absence any easier to get used to.