Voice from the Woods September 2022: American Loggers and pride in the job

Watching American Loggers recently served to emphasise this point. I watched in bewilderment at the big stumps and general carnage wrought on the landscape. Are rates so low that it’s just a case of smash and grab, taking the best trees and leaving behind a trail of devastation? When I started cutting, low stumps were an absolute must, with time spent kicking away moss and soil from around the base of the tree. This was considered normal practice and the reasons were probably twofold: (1) In those days, most timber sales were measured and so getting as much length was clearly more lucrative, and (2) the machines of the day could get stuck quite easily and poor ground clearance often resulted in getting hooked up on a stump.

That was quite common with County tractors, with the axle under the engine catching on every stump going. I once had an Old Bray Nuffield which wasn’t rated, yet had much better clearance due to the front axle being in front of the engine. Its poor reputation was almost certainly down to the front bray stub axles snapping quite easily, but after fitting some from an old loading shovel it wasn’t a bad machine and served its time well. 

At around this time, purpose-built forestry machines were starting to take over, although a lot of 578 and 678 Bruunetts were still on the go. These machines were better travellers, but the hydrostatic transmission, from an International 572 tractor, was hopeless after half an hour, as the oiled warmed up. I recall driving one for a while when in the Lake District, but gave up driving during the day as it just revved a lot while struggling to work. I quickly resorted to driving at night when the cooler temperature improved the performance considerably.

Most of these machines were sold off quite quickly by the Forestry Commission and in due course this probably bankrupted many forestry contractors due to their poor reliability. This was due to using International tractor skid units for the power and transmission unit and I’m sure there will be people reading this who still have nightmares thinking about it. Someone even had the bright idea of fitting an automatic cut-off should the transmission overheat, which usually resulted in a high-speed hill descent, as there was no way of stopping once the engine cut out.

These days, most forestry contractors are very good at what they do, but where do you find anyone to tackle the big, old trees? Now and again I find myself having to head to the secret resting place (amongst the nettles) of the big, grizzly old tracked Caterpillar, where she waits patiently beneath the trees for the call to service. Despite not being ideal, the big, old, lumbering giant works well if you plan your work. For extracting timber down a regular route, the tracks make far too much mess, but for one-off, difficult extractions, the old beast is ideal. I recently had to extract some big, old oaks which had been windblown down a small bank, which was very boggy at the bottom.

Winching would have been a nightmare as the oak was very heavy, with individual logs weighing roughly four tonnes each. The old Cat lifts them up, raises them to whatever height is necessary, then climbs the hill out of the bog with ease. I can then lift them over the fence without damaging it and place them carefully on the grass, keeping them nice and clean for milling.

You see? The old ways can work when you have the right tools and experience! But while you might have the experience for these kinds of jobs, the machinery is in short supply.

Maybe it’s naivety or just nostalgia, but some of my older work colleagues still view this type of activity through rose-tinted spectacles. I still feel sick when I think about some of the hardship I had to endure in the past. I recall the days when we were sent into an area of windblown trees with a chainsaw and a winch and were expected to untangle the assembled mass. Winching is hard, slow and dangerous work and making these jobs pay was extremely difficult. When I look back, I’m puzzled why the Forestry Commission, the contractors or whoever else was in charge didn’t buy a 360 excavator and place a grab on it so we could untangle the trees first. Before the days of the harvester, this would have been a far more efficient, quicker and less dangerous way of doing the job rather than having to fight our way through a jungle.

No, in this instance you can keep nostalgia. I certainly don’t miss those days or ways one little bit, and yet the Caterpillar – which is now nearly 50 years old – makes short work of these oaks. This is due largely to its strength and how well it was made. Despite being relatively small it still weighs in at 12 tonnes and has a fantastic power-shift transmission. This allows the operator to creep very slowly or drive full throttle up a steep hill with no jerks or snatches. It’s a brutal piece of kit and with so much torque and lifting power it’s almost impossible to stop.

The area I’m currently working on is fairly remote and even in this weather fairly boggy. Rhododendrons abound and these flatten nicely to create a raft-type structure over which to drive, provided I don’t keep going over the same spot.

After having been tied to the mill and the general day-to-day routine, it’s quite liberating being in the woods and chugging up a steep incline with a huge oak tree in the grab. I think having been away from this kind of work for such a long time, you tend to see things with fresh eyes. It’s crazy to me that here in Northumberland we have thousands of tonnes of chipwood heaped everywhere and hundreds of smaller plantations waiting to be tidied up, yet we’re in the midst of an energy crisis, with heating oil prices up four or five times what they were a year ago. It leaves me wondering why on earth people don’t burn softwood. Are they too snobbish? At the end of the day, heat is heat!

It seems to me the only cost-of-living crisis is that people have become too removed from the natural environment and haven’t a clue about where or how things are made or where they come from. Without wishing to sound like some street activist, I am left wondering why more people don’t burn their own wood, grow their own food and put two fingers up to these giant corporations!