We were fascinated yesterday to see this massive machine come down the road, pull out the fence post in the field behind us, roll onto the field and then replace the fence post back in the ground. The machine wasn’t like anything we’d seen before so we watched it rumble across the field to the trees behind it and it started pulling up the smaller trees!
There’s been a lot of tree felling going on. Some eucalyptus plantations have been felled – but I think the land they are clearing behind us is because the councils are fining people for not keeping land clear as part of a drive to stop wild fires. Unless the land is designated for plantations, it has to be kept clear and clean if it is with x number of meters of houses or a fire break of x meters has to be in place.
The trees they are taking down behind us are pine and don’t look as though they were plantation trees (they aren’t in rows). Several have fallen down over the years and not cleared away, so it would have been a bit of a wild fire risk.
Anyway, we watched as this machine plucked smaller trees and then carefully laid them down side by side. Then someone with a chainsaw started cutting the bigger trees and this machine moved them and stacked them. I think there were two people working, the operator of the machine and the chainsaw person. They’d pretty much cleared it in a day. I wonder how many people would have been used in the past – or how much time it would have taken.
And then this morning I saw this where eucalyptus trees are being cleared. It’s like a massive pencil sharpener! The trees get fed into where the arrow is and then they get rolled around and all their branches get cut off. Ready to be taken away.
It’s very interesting watching the land getting cleared. It’s like it would have looked 70 or so years ago. Houses are appearing which were ‘lost’ among the trees.
I’ve thought before how the eucalyptus are like a reservoir in reverse. Instead of valleys getting flooded, the hills get ‘raised’. I think the trees get to about 20 meters before they are harvested – so the whole landscape was basically raised by this amount!
This is a great example – the yellow line is where the hill top would have originally been pre-eucalyptus. So the horizon really has changed:
The walk I take in the morning has changed and has opened up tremendously. There are views where there were trees before and there’s certainly a couple of houses which would have been in the shadows of trees now having 180 degree sea views! I can see old walls and tracks which were previously hidden.
It appears that people either love or hate the eucalyptus, with perhaps the people who like them being limited to people who work or profit from the wood business (which is by no means insignificant) and the land owners who grow them for profit. I’m sort of neutral as it’s all we’ve known, but before we moved here I was very aware of the wild fire risk, and we didn’t view houses which were too close to eucalyptus trees. Some councils are encouraging the eucalyptus to be replaced with other crops like avocado (which would be great!).
One big challenge though that the wood felling creates is the massive machinery wrecks the roads and can completely wipe out unsurfaced tracks. The felling companies are responsible for making the roads right again or paying fines – but this rarely happens. Councils where this is a big problem (there was one village which became inaccessible as all roads to the village were severely damaged by machinery) now enforce the big machines to have tracking devices so if roads or tracks are damaged, they know who to get in touch with to get fixed or fined.
So it will be interesting to see what happens now, both in the land behind us and whether the eucalyptus that’s been cleared is replanted with eucalyptus or something else.