Looked at a customer's storm damaged bigleaf maple which had an included union fail onto the neighbor's house. A couple of arborists...ummm...loggers were there to remove it. When I was talking to the neighbor on the phone a little while earlier, he said his "general contractor had some arb...arrabist, what is it you call yourselves?"
I said I'm a certified arborist.
"the general contractor has some arborists on their way from Shelton (neighboring logging town)"
So while I was looking at the "what to do with the damaged tree once the Arbologgers are done" I learned that a compression fork/ included bark crotch, commonplace on bigleaf maple, is a "spike top", and its where trunk is trying to become a new top. That's where you get the water and bugs.
It had very little decay at the 14" wide rams horns. No insect damage. A bad fork, increasing weight from flowers/ foliage/ rain, and I'm guessing sap flow.
I hope the guys got the trunk off, house tarped, and all went home safely. Seemed like they'd accomplished 15 minutes of work in two hours by the time I left. They were doing a lot of figuring for something reasonably straight-forward if you can set rigging in the tree higher than ladder reach, without spikes. We had some heavy rain about 3 hours after I left.
Dropped a small pine before some excavation work tomorrow for a repeat customer. She has a motorcycle, basketball hoop, chainsaw, and yes, girlfriend. Liz asked me to drop this tree because since she fell a tree on the house, she's not allowed to cut any more trees near the house. They live in an annosus root disease pocket with lots of second or third growth trees. History of a lot of hemlock failures, and I'd removed some that were leaning toward her house previously. On the way out of a $75 notch, limb, buck, no clean-up job, I see a 100' hemlock, 3' on the butt, with a ground level cavity and dead section across 1/3 the circumference. Hopefully, I can get that job.