{"id":70795,"date":"2019-04-09T07:03:59","date_gmt":"2019-04-09T13:03:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=70795"},"modified":"2019-04-09T07:46:46","modified_gmt":"2019-04-09T13:46:46","slug":"the-demise-of-my-eagle-tree","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2019\/04\/09\/the-demise-of-my-eagle-tree\/","title":{"rendered":"The Demise Of My Eagle Tree"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday was a big day for me.<\/p>\n

I have a huge elm tree on my side yard that I sometimes call the Eagle Tree because Bald Eagles occasionally perch in it in winter. For me it’s a momentous occasion to have a Bald Eagle in my own yard. That tree is the biggest tree in the entire neighborhood. Forty one years ago my subdivision was a large cow pasture and my tree was just about the only one in the area. One of my neighbors who bought his house in 1979 says that my tree was a big one even back then. It’s absolutely huge now, especially for a tree in this desert.<\/p>\n

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Here’s one of the eagles that appeared several years ago. Sometimes the bird would show up daily for a week or even two. I could never get decent photographs because the angle’s so steep and the setting so cluttery but just having them there was a delight for me.<\/p>\n

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In a different year this eagle showed up tangled in fishing line with part of a bird, possibly a coot, hanging from the end of the line. I was afraid the monofilament line would become entangled in the tree and doom the eagle but there wasn’t anything I could do about it and thankfully it didn’t happen.<\/p>\n

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Another eagle another year gave me a delightful wing stretch. This is probably my favorite photo of an eagle in my tree despite the band on its right leg.<\/p>\n

But that tree has been a pain in the ass for decades. Chinese Elms are “dirty” trees – even a slight wind rains small branches down all over my lawn and garden, seed pods are shed by the gazillion in the spring and every one of them sprouts when they land in my garden and it sheds its leaves very slowly in the late fall so we usually have snow by then and the result is a huge mess.<\/p>\n

But the worst problem has been falling limbs. Big ones, especially when the wind blows or during wet snow storms. They’ve done a lot of damage in my yard and my neighbor’s yard and this past winter one of them fell on my neighbor’s house, went through the roof and penetrated the interior ceiling of his young son’s bedroom.<\/p>\n

So the Eagle Tree had to go and yesterday was the day it happened. The tree sits on the boundary of my property and the yard of my neighbor so we shared the expense of removal.<\/p>\n

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This is it in all its “glory”, photo taken just as the crews from Diamond Tree Experts were arriving soon after dawn. Everything was backlit but I thought the tree in silhouette was an effective way of showing how big it is relative to the houses. The crane operator told me the tree is about 90′ tall from tip to base (he has instrumentation inside the crane that accurately tells him how far the crane’s boom is extended).<\/p>\n

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This guy is the key to the entire operation. I call him the “Sky Guy” because he hangs from the crane to get up there and he spent the entire morning in the tree – making critical cuts at just the right places to allow the rest of his crew below, four other guys, to get the job done safely. The Sky Guy is highly skilled and he has all the guts in the world. For me it was scary just to watch him.<\/p>\n

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And he’s on his way. I took this photo and the previous one from the front window of my house.<\/p>\n

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Here he’s about half way up the tree but he had much further to go. In case you’re curious, all that greenery growing up some of the tree trunks is ivy.<\/p>\n

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The tree is such a mess of branches and twigs that he had great difficulty maneuvering through it to get to just the right places to tie off the crane’s cable and make the cuts. The forked trunk on the right is next to go.<\/p>\n

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Here it’s hanging over my house on its way to the street. I spent the entire morning sitting in a chair on my neighbor’s driveway across the street, camera in hand of course.<\/p>\n

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Each time the highly skilled crane operator would lay the excised part of the tree…<\/p>\n

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lengthwise on the street (the street had been closed off) so the rest of the crew could cut it up into manageable pieces and then load them onto trucks with a front end loader. It was an efficient operation and thankfully it all went smoothly.<\/p>\n

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But the Sky Guy had many cuts to make and there were many loads to deliver to the street. He sometimes disappeared in all that ivy – it must have been a real pain for him to deal with.<\/p>\n

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Here he’s making one of the cuts with his chain saw.<\/p>\n

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And here we see that same limb being delivered to the street.<\/p>\n

I always held my breath while the load was passing directly over my house. The crane operator also has instrumentation that weighs the load and he told me that some of them weighed well over 6000 lbs. If a cable had broken or slipped when this photo was taken the limb would have gone through my roof, the ceiling and floor of the upper floor and ended up in my basement.<\/p>\n

That possibility definitely gave me pause.<\/p>\n

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Eventually they got the entire tree down but then they had to cut the stump down as low and level as possible. For a variety of reasons my neighbor and I decided to leave the stump in place.<\/p>\n

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Here’s the stump after everything else was removed. I’ve included the old tennis shoe for scale. I measured the diameter of the stump and at its widest point it’s 6′ 7″ in diameter.<\/p>\n

The only real surprise of the morning was finding a den of garter snakes at the base of the tree. One of the snakes is visible – can you spot it?<\/p>\n

It’s at the lower right – we can only see part of its body and tail hanging down. The entrance to the den is just to the right of the tail. We found 8 snakes and who knows how many more of them are still inside the den or elsewhere. One of the members of the crew was afraid of snakes but I told him I love having them around.<\/p>\n

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Meet Khysen, my neighbor’s son. It was his bedroom that was penetrated by the tree limb so I figured he deserved to provide additional scale for the size of the stump.<\/p>\n

I’ll miss that tree in some ways. It provided shade and a nice ambience on my deck but overall I’m delighted to see it gone. It will take some getting used to though. I can’t believe how much sky has suddenly appeared in the view from my front yard and driveway.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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Notes:\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n