Whooooo is making all that noise?

 

Who the heck starts running a chainsaw at seven in the morning on a Saturday was the question I was asking myself until my wife called me shortly after leaving for an errand and said she thinks one of our trees fell down and was blocking the entire road. So I got my shoes on to walk down the street and onto the other (and much busier) street that runs behind our property and saw the scene above. Yes it was our tree. Yes it was blocking the entire road. The person running the chainsaw at seven in the morning on a Saturday was a contractor for the city working to clear the road block that my property was causing. 

Thank you!

They had it cleared a few hours later though they left some of the tree overhanging the strip that I mow to keep the sightlines clear and also a lot of debris. So a couple days later on a particularly nice sunny fall day where the temperature was still in the low sixties by mid morning, i.e. perfect chainsaw weather, I put a fresh battery in my electric chainsaw and walked down to see if I could make some progress. I was able to and soon had it trimmed back to the edge of where I mow.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to address the question of why the tree fell down. My hunch is that the nearly six inches of rain we had earlier that week possibly had something to do with it. I could have waded down through all the underbrush and debris to get a look at the base end to see if there was an upturned root ball but I'm not particularly fond of ticks which were likely still out and about. Also, the disease from ticks that causes people to become very sick eating red meat has a few documented cases in my neck of the woods and people... it just isn't worth the risk! Although fall is here, the leaves are still green for the time being but soon they will be turning colors and falling to the ground, affording me a view of the problem some weeks into the future. I'm a patient man.

Here is a bonus picture that I took on the very same morning I was doing my chainsaw work. I saw a large barred owl sitting in the snag of a tree on my neighbor's property across the street. He didn't seem too concerned with my presence nor I was of him. In fact, I welcome the guy to hang out on my property any time he wants because he does a good job of keeping rabbits in check. In fact, at this time of the year and in the spring, when I have the bedroom windows open at night, I often times hear him killing a shrieking rabbit (sorry TB) for his midnight snack and that is one less rabbit snacking on my garden. That is just fine by me.