Tree Fellers

Apologies for the subject line - please feel free to insert you favourite cod-Oirish joke here and yes, there were only two of them. I have mentioned in previous posts that we had a plan to get the three big Black Spruce trees on our front lawn taken down; the three trees we fear most likely to fall on the house when some 'cousin' of Storm Desmond comes rattling through from the SW. I had warned you to listen out for shouts of "Timber!" A phone call last night confirmed that they would be here today and asked me to please take down the post and rail fence as agreed.

A fascinating machine to watch - a tracked
cherry-picker which deploys 4 'feet' hydraulically

That would have worked really well if my ancient and 'last legs' 14V Bosch electric screw driver had not chosen to die last night and refuse to take on any charge overnight. Huge thank you to K-Dub who lent me a very nice De-Walt version for the day worth, I hear, about €350. Gulp - look after it!

Three quarter tonne of diesel shredder/chipper which made
short work even of branches up to 4-5 inches thick

If readers were expecting these 'lumberjacks' to turn up in dungarees and check shirts, all beardy and 'pioneer'-ish, to cut a great wedge at the base of the tree and send 65 feet of tree crashing into the horizontal position amid heroic shouts, then they were in for a shock. These guys are very careful and professional tree surgeons clad in all the safety gear, kevlar trousers and mesh-visor hard hats. They work their way up the tree lopping off all the side branches, using a cherry picker to get about 2/3 of the way up but then putting on foot irons, full climbing harness and a loop of rope round the tree at waist-height to carry on up till the main trunk was sufficiently thin to be worth cutting through. Then they work their way back down cutting off 5 foot (ish) chunks of trunk till they get to cherry-picker height. At that stage cherry-picker man takes over again and works his way down slicing off 12" thick rounds (for me to split up with the axe later) till he gets to about 10 feet, which they refer to as the 'butt'. This bit alone gets the 'Timber!' treatment, getting dropped to horizontal before being sliced up.

Starting his 'walk' up the tree.

All the time, the lads are working a clear-as-you-go policy shredding all the branches with a huge diesel powered chipper which fires its output into their tipper lorry. You can have this for garden mulch and paths - they are more than happy to park the heap where ever they can get to.  Finally they do a huge clear up raking and shovelling up rubbish, barrowing it away to a position of your choice and even using a leaf-blower to turn your grass back to green and your drive back to gravel-grey. The 'logs' they stack where ever you want, within reason, obviously.

One of the lads is in the cherry picker here but
top left you can just see the walk-up harness guy
removing the last few branches on his tree

So there you had it. 2 lads 'removed' 3 huge fir trees in about 8 hours. Every thing is tidier than when they arrived (we don't leaf-blow our driveway in general!), nobody got hurt, no tree trunks fell on our house and the only casualty was my Bosch screwdriver. They are brilliant lads and charge a really fair price and I would have no hesitation in recommending them to anyone.

Finishing off the stumps. 

We no longer have the fear of those trees blowing down and we have a lovely, open, well lit aspect to the front of the house.It does not look all 'loomed over'. It has room to breathe. Tomorrow morning, from my pillow, I will be able to see sky instead of just ten feet or so of tree trunk. As we come in through the main gate in the car, we can now see the whole house, not just the right hand side of it. I need to re-instate the fence, but I will wait till I have replaced the dead screwdriver before I do that.

Job done and squared away - about 6pm in this picture so
getting dusky but you can see how open the view now is.

That task kept us all entertained all day; we even spent some of the day sitting outside on our front terrace in the garden-chairs just leaning back and watching the lads clambering about and dropping bits of tree. It was easier that way to look up, rather than stand with your neck all cricked, looking upwards. All done now, though. The guys had tea and accepted some of Liz's goo-ey chocolate cake leaving us to admire the new 'big sky' view of the house from the lane. We are very pleased.

Nanny Óg looking big. Here watched by Marta (lamb)

In other news, Charlotte is back from college for a bit of Easter Holidays (all be it having to nip back to Dublin each weekend for her paid job), so we have told Nanny Óg that she can now get on with the job of kidding. Nanny Óg does not seem at all interested though she did spend a lot of today lying down in the straw shelter looking huge.

Barbara (front) displays right back at Tom.

The turkeys took us by surprise today with a new (to us) behaviour. We have seen lots and lots of Tom displaying; he is quite obsessive about it. We have not had any eggs yet as far as we know, though Barbara may be hiding them. Today, though, she started doing a male-style display right back at Tom - tail erect and fanned, back-feathers all raised and wings pressed down hard to the ground. We have no explanation for this. The presence of the 'strangers' (our tree guys) and their big noisy shredder/chipper may have had something to do with it.

Anyway, enough for this one post. I will leave you with a nice shot of the geese splashing about in their bath (George the gander and one of the ladies here) in the sunshine.

The Best Laid Plans.....

This post was going to be all about the wonderful time I was going to have trying out the sport of archery for the first time in the delightful company of the Silverwood clan. Then along came Storm Desmond with his howling gales and our first ever RED weather warning, this one for rain plus all the usual advice from the Police not to risk any un-necessary journeys. I won't bore you with the details as most of my readers will have probably copped their own share of Des by now and some will have struggled with the genuine hardships of flooding and damage which make our 'big puddles' pale into insignificance. I am in no way claiming 'hard done by' status; we just got a bit wetter and more blown around than usual. I postponed the archery till after Christmas and opted to stay here and look after the place, the livestock (and Liz?) rather than leave Liz on her own.

This tiny narrow drainage ditch is not usually visible from
our hill top. Here the concrete 'kesh' bridges are submerged.

So, I have some nice pictures of our "floods". The drain that runs into the River Lung below us has burst its banks as has the Lung itself, the local bridge named for our townland is almost up to its arches with the River so full and high, and the name-sake Lough is as big and full as any locals can ever remember seeing it. That was quite some rain that came down. We were worried for the trees near the house (and may have decided we need to do something about them), of course, but relaxed enough to be joking about conspiracy theories.

The bridge is nearly up to its arches with the 'Desmond Depth'.

Are these storms now being named, we wonder, to soften us up because Met Éireann KNOW SOMETHING about climate change that they are not telling us yet, perhaps that our standard N. Atlantic storms in November are going to be so powerful soon that we need to name them like Hurricanes? (gasp). More ridiculously, we wonder whether these storms are cunning enough to know that they can get named if they would only put in that little extra effort. Thus Abigail was not that impressive, Barney was getting there, Clodagh was definitely trying and Desmond was the best/worst ever. Do we have a Stephen King novel here? Sentient anti-cyclones?

The local Lough is no mean body of water this week. The tiny
white dots here are our wintering Whooper swans. 

Meanwhile, back in the real world the locals are all impressed by the size and fullness of the Lough. It has filled the whole valley, where it is normally a thin weedy ribbon of water half hidden by the bullrushes. Gossip has it that it was "always" this full and contained enormous pike one of which sits, stuffed, in a glass case in Liz's work-place. But then ten years ago the Dept of Civic Works (or what ever they are called) changed the drainage and allowed the Lough to empty much faster rather than hanging on to the water 'up here'. "You wait", said one local veteran, "..and in a couple of days you will hear of flooding in Boyle or Carrick. We never had that before. They should never have done that".

My new favourite 'weapon', this old cleaver was once the
property of John Walsh's Dad though he took to using it
in the cellar for chopping up kindling wood. 

So much for the rain and floods. We got off lightly this time and we are now enjoying some blue sky, calm (ish) days as the big puddles drain slowly away and the cat, Blue. stops cursing us for cutting off all his grassy walkways and hunting routes with water and puddles. We sympathise with the folk in UK who inherited Desmond from us and got the serious floods and damage. With this non-archery weekend over we are now coming up fast on Christmas and we needed to start thinking about festive food and, in particular, turkeys.

Liz dons farmer's wife hands and starts plucking this monster.

Our first 'customer' is Brother in Law, 'Sparks' who has this year bought one of those fancy-pants  American style, cylindrical, outdoor, deep-fat turkey fryers. He is due to cook turkey for a gang of mates this week and 'ordered' a bird from us, rather bravely, having no more idea than we did as to how it would 'do', how big it would get or what it would cook and taste like. This is our first year of turkeys and our birds are the old fashion 'heritage' variety "Bronze". These are old style "single muscled" birds where most shop mass-produced birds these days are white and 'double muscled' like Belgian Blue cow or a 'Beltex' sheep, bred to put on extra muscle in intensive systems and fed no end of special food, growth promoters and so on like a steroid-enhanced weight lifter.

Those massive wing feathers took some pulling. 

When these guys hatched in June, we had no idea how they would flesh up and I worried that we'd only be able to give Sparks an over-grown chicken. We were amazed and delighted at the growth rates on them and within 4 months the youngsters were nearly as big as their Mum (Barbara). Spark's bird was always going to be the biggest as he wanted his in early December but even so, we knew we were on to a serious weight bird and him only 6 months old at this stage.

If you don't want to know how these big, living birds turn into oven ready, plastic wrapped carcasses then skip this and the next 2  paragraphs. Then, of course, there was the problem of how do you cleanly, painlessly and respectfully despatch such a big bird. The books talk of a rather gymnastic process involving standing up with your bird upside down holding his feet in your hands. Juggle a broom handle across his neck, stand on it and pull his legs upwards, breaking his neck. I was not at all convinced that I could do this quickly and cleanly and with no stress to the bird so I have to admit that I fell back on good old decapitation, the trusty meat cleaver and a big chunk of wood. Thunk. Job done, 100% certainty of death.

A lively auction  down at the Community Centre to raise money
for the same.

Done well, the bird is grabbed and 'cuddled' so he stays calm though he might be a bit curious as to why he is being walked across the grass, through the puddles, out to the other side of the pond. At the very last minute you shift your grip to his legs and let him hang upside down with this head sagging onto the wooden block. He relaxes and possibly feels rather helpless but he is not in any kind of pain and then (thunk) he knows no more.

Our antidote to Desmond.

If anyone is thinking of trying this, just be aware that although the bird may 'die' instantly, he will kick off an unconscious explosion of wing flapping and leg-twitching which will go on for a good 30 seconds and will bleed out profusely through the neck cut. The flapping will splash this blood everywhere, so I do it outside and near some long grass, so that I can dangle the bird low to the ground and contain the blood that way. You always get some on your wellies and trouser legs, so it is worth wearing old clothes and being ready to rinse the wellies before you go back indoors! I take a dustbin liner out with me to 'hide' the dead one in so that I don't have to march back past my gang of curious geese, turkeys, chickens and Guineas with a dead bird hanging from my hand, making my way back to the shed where the bird gets hung upside down by his feet to bleed out into the bag. I don't suppose the birds feel upset or grief at the loss of their friend but it makes me feel better.

Polly doing 'Monarch of the Glen'

At that point the birds get handed over to Liz who loves the plucking and 'dressing' side of the job. My work is done (though I do help with the big, tough wing feathers). This lad we were delighted to find, weighed just under 10 kg 'fresh' (but sans head and blood) and then in 'oven ready' format weighed 7.9 kg (17 lbs). Liz went for the 'traditional' presentation, legs still on, some feathers still on the 'hands' and with the giblets (neck, liver, gizzard and heart) in a bag stuffed up his fundament. Sparks can cut off the hands and feet and make good gravy out of the giblets if he desires. Good luck, Sparks. You will be our first Guinea-Pig customer and we will be very interested to know how the boy cooked up.