Follow up of the pain in the ass horsechesnut.
I was working on a small grounds (3/4 acre, no castle though) covered with tall trees of various ages, like ashes, maples, black locusts, horsechesnuts, poplars, lindens and willows. A major security concern for the HO as many of them were leaning hard toward the outside (the neighbor's house, a road, the power and com lines, a new big industrial shed and a path to access to the school). Some were dead or dying, some partially rotten or even hollow, some had already fallen, plus all sorts of brocken stuff by the wind. The trees were in the 60 to 100' range and many can't fit in the property's width. Diagonally or lengthwise ok, excepted I had to preserve some young keepers if possible. Tricky. Climbing all that would have take way too much time for the allowed sheddule. So it was mostly felling, limbing and bucking in firewood lengths all day long. 5 weeks of work. I'm not done yet and will come back in marsh to finish.
Back to the horsechesnut.
I have to apologize, the squirrel has probably no responsability in dulling my chain by hidding some gravel up there. But the human with his chit does. All the region was a war zone in ww1. An elder told me that the trees he harvested in a wood not very far away were full of shrapnels. So, I got some samples too, luckily not as heavily loaded as his trees.
The horsechestnuts are (were now) old enough to have a good size at this time. 3 of the 5 were hit by the spit-out of some battle. They took the beating, recovered and grew over it.
Plenty of discolorations in the center of the trunks and co-leaders, from tiny dark spots to wide brown/grey areas. And the hidden beans in metal or something. The last one was the worse. Between like 10 and 30 ' high, I couldn't make a cut without hiting something. File, file, new chain, file, file, file, new chain, file, file
Some were discreet and changed slightly the sound of the chain and altered the cutting speed. 3 times, it made like a "tak", while at the same time I was hit in the leg by something. But I only found once a tiny remain of one offending thing still embeded in the cut's side.
I guess that's very usual for the tree guys working is the battle's areas, but it's new to me.