It has been a busy winter of felling spruce. I have spent my days being sprayed with resin and showered with sawdust. It has been hard work, challenging at times, but it has been enjoyable!
Every time I come in after a felling session and remove my boots and chainsaw trousers, there is a substantial pile of sawdust on the floor. Especially in late winter, when the sap is starting to rise, the sticky resin is like glue. If you sit down for a rest on a convenient log, when you try to stand up you find you are stuck to it. Once you’ve pulled yourself off, you find your trousers keep sticking to your bottom for the rest of the day. Dirt sticks to the resin-glue, which gets all over your trousers, your top and sprays onto your arms, neck and face, and is not readily removed without a good scrub.
Then there is the brash – all the branches that are cut from the trunk after felling to produce clean logs. Spruce trees produce abundant brash, with springy branches that don’t readily snap, and lots of spiky green needles. After felling a few trees you start having to wade or clamber through all the brash, and it often needs to be moved to prevent logs being buried and never seen again! Fortunately I have a brilliant volunteer, Steve, who helps a lot with brash tidying.
Despite all these things, I enjoy felling the spruce. It is something few people do these days as the vast majority of commercial conifers are felled by harvesters. It is an absorbing task to get the felling cuts right every time, so that the tree falls exactly where you wanted. You are left with a stump that betrays the neatness and accuracy (or otherwise) of the cuts that were made. Then the snedding which, when done mindfully, can be very satisfying, working along the tree smoothly and efficiently to remove all the branches. A good snedding action is almost like shaving the tree, leaving you with a lovely clean stem that can be cut into logs of the required length (or extracted full length and cut later). Snedding is much more ergonomic, and therefore enjoyable, if the trunk is raised off the ground, ideally at thigh height, so I have been trying to use felling benches wherever possible to help with this.
With a sharp saw and cool weather (overheating in chainsaw gear is much less fun), felling spruce makes for a great activity. Further pleasure comes from the satisfaction of seeing the difference made afterwards. Knowing that these trees are slowly becoming less dominant in Comar Wood, making space for a more diverse woodland to develop.
This winter, felling has been in three main areas:
First, a coupe of about 0.2 ha (half an acre). Part of my management plan is to clear the spruce in coupes of around this size and allow these areas to regenerate with a greater diversity of species. I plan to do one or two of these per year and space them throughout the woodland to gradually clear the spruce and create a mosaic of regenerating areas, while maintaining overall woodland cover. We cleared a very small coupe of poor spruce two years ago, which is acting as a trial to see how regeneration will progress. This winter we have been cutting an area adjacent to the top boundary, near the western end of the wood. This is the first coupe we have felled with bigger spruce trees, so again was a trial to see how the felling could be done efficiently, as well as how the ensuing regeneration will develop.
There are some sizeable birch trees within the coupe, which we have left. Most are concentrated near the top boundary, with a couple lower down. Several of these birch pre-date the spruce planting and the scars of ring-barking (which was done to the birch at the time of the spruce planting) can be seen on their trunks: obviously they were not killed, and continued to grow with the spruce. Some dead birch stems also provide good standing deadwood habitat.
One of our access tracks runs along the bottom edge of the coupe, making extraction of the timber relatively simple. Much of the felling was done using a bench felling method, which has worked pretty well. Most trees were felled along the contour, while every two or three rows a tree from the top or bottom of the coupe was felled up or down the hill (i.e. perpendicular to the main felling direction) to act as a bench. Once snedded, the full trunk could be rolled down the benches to the track at the bottom. For the last section I left several trees at the bottom edge to catch the logs and stop them rolling onto the track. In some parts of the coupe it was not possible to roll the logs down, due to the retained birch trees, so these logs will need to be pulled down with the winch.
We have almost finished the felling. The resulting clearing forms an open space where regeneration can commence (once we clear the logs and move some brash). However, being surrounded by spruce trees on three sides, and birch trees at the top, it still feels very much part of the woodland.
The second area of felling was along the new track line. Last winter we felled the trees for the first 250m or so of the new track line, which runs east across the hillside to give access to further areas of the woodland. During the summer and autumn Bruce, a local forestry contractor, did a rough first dig of this section of track. It is enough to get machines along, but still needs to be tidied up and more drainage added. This winter we felled the next section of about 80m. Here the track line descends steeply below a large section of remnant native woodland to join an existing old track that runs around the bottom edge of the spruce for part of the wood. I plan to extract the trees with my winch so that Bruce can extend the track and provide access to the next section of the wood.
Felling the spruce for this section of track has reduced the shading of the remnant native woodland area above the track line, which should help the native woodland flora to spread further down the slope. This large area of remnant native woodland continues further along the hillside, with a block of spruce below it that is creating heavy shade to the lower slopes of the native woodland. Once built, the track will provide access to allow thinning or removal of this spruce, increasing light levels into the remnant native area. It is exciting to be making inroads into a new part of the woodland, where there is so much potential for work to be done.
The bottom part of this section of new track runs close to the powerline and had some birch and large spruce trees that were within striking distance of it (with some leaning towards it), so I asked SSE for an outage on the powerline to allow us to fell the trees safely. The third area of felling (mentioned below) was also next to the powerline. SSE accommodated my request with a two week outage at the end of February, which gave ample time for Ruiridh and me to fell the trees in these two areas.
The third area of felling was a group of about 40 large spruce and larch trees on a steep bank opposite our gate. As well as being next to the powerline, some were also close to a new house that has recently been built next to our boundary. It seemed a good idea to remove these large trees before they became any bigger, considering their location, and to allow light in to the bank to allow regeneration of native species. Several of these trees were the biggest I have ever felled, some being over 30m tall and one having a particularly large basal diameter. I used the winch to assist with felling a couple of the big ones that were leaning towards the road or the new house, otherwise wedges were sufficient. The large trees along the boundary had many huge side branches, so snedding took a while and produced giant piles of brash. A day’s wood chipping cleared most of the brash that was in the way, so now I am left with a big pile of logs at the bottom of the bank to sort and stack and a few lengths to pull down.
Some birch trees remain at the top of the bank. There is already evidence of natural regeneration including rowan, oak and hazel, with other species such as alder, bird cherry and blackthorn regenerating nearby, so signs are good. I plan to plant some hazels on the bank next winter (hopefully ones that I propagate myself in my mini tree nursery, if successful!), as I feel hazel is a useful and beautiful native species that should have a greater presence in our woodland.
The felling by the gate is right opposite our stacking area, so requires minimal extraction and forwarding. In the other areas the next job will be to extract the felled timber with the winch, ready to forward down to the gate, where it can be sold. Meanwhile, I am already thinking about next winter’s felling. The new track has provided access to many areas of the spruce that are still dense and impenetrable, crying out for thinning or removal of small groups of trees to allow light into the stand and increase diversity. Seeing the difference that the felling over the last three years has made at the western end of the wood, I am very excited to continue this work east along the new track to bring further transformation and renewal to this little piece of land.
