We took the 300 year old maple , that I condemned a couple of weeks ago, down.
Bitch of a tree. Side lean, narrow lay and as it turned out, when I dropped the first branch, a nest of giant hornets in a cavity 8 feet above ground level.
Oh well.
Then to further make things interesting, the owner of the castle called me and told they had a crew from our national TV making a show about the castle and they wanted some action footage.
So they dropped by and filmed while I did some derring do aloft.
Then Richard was nice enough to tell then where to place a camera, so they'd get most out of filming the felling.
That meant that on an already tricky tree, I had to be precise enough to not hit the camera.
We had reduced the side lean by removing a lot of the crown on that side. Not fun to do, the tree turned out to be in worse state than I'd estimated. Only a couple of inches of sound wood on the outside holding the top up.
I think even Guy would have given that one a death sentense.
Well, like Jerry says, sometimes you just gotta cowboy up and do her.
I took a hand full of antihistamines ( Did I mention that I'm allergic to hornets?) fired up the 880 and dropped the tree right in the middle of the lay.
Didn't even get stung.In fact none of us got stung, even when we were bucking it. Can't figure why. Those critters are normally so agressive.
Richard was keeping everyone out of the drop zone while I dropped the tree and he later told me that the female anchor person got so shocked when the tree fell, that she more or less jumped into his arms.
Camera crew absolutely loved it. So did the owner of the castle.
So I'll be a hero on national TV soon.
Too bad I don't have a TV to watch it on.
We had a forwarder there to clean up. Those are hard to beat for big wood