This week has been a lot of work with chainsaws and trees. On Monday Steve and the ranger team went out on to the reserve to remove two Douglas Firs from just above the boardwalk.

This was incredibly interesting for me as I had never been involved in tree felling before, so it was a great bit of insight. First we had to decide which way we wanted the trees to fall, causing as little damage to the surrounding trees as possible. After a bit of a think we were all set to go, and my job was to be one of the pairs eyes and ears on the ground to make sure that members of the public stayed well clear of the action.

It was pretty exciting, and resulted in some huge thuds as the trees came crashing down. After they were down Adam, Andy and I were tasked with snedding and cross-cutting (Adam only) of the trees into logs for use on our portable sawmill. This took much longer than I expected, and was quite tough going.

Using our high-powered winch we were able to move and arrange these large logs into safe piles ready for milling in the coming week. A fantastic day!

I then continued my week by heading along to a Clyde Community Initiatives (CCI) training course on Chainsaw Maintenance and Cross Cutting. How conveniently timed! The course was extremely well run by Bill McKechnie who went over all of the maintenance and operational information of several different types of chainsaw. Thank you very much to CCI and to Bill for making this so interesting and allowing me to add this skill to my belt.

Thanks again everyone.

Speak soon

Sam