This page has been set up to share photos & video relating to the "Other Silviculture Work" chapter of "Step By Step, A Tree Planter's Handbook." Visit www.replant.ca/books to see books about tree planting.
Some tree planters go on to do brushing or spacing work after their planting season is over, usually using brush saws. This is a Stihl brush saw.
Here we see someone filling a brush saw. Brush saws and chain saws run on gasoline, but you cannot add straight gasoline to them. These types of engines are called "two stroke" or "two cycle" engines, and they need a tiny bit of oil mixed in with the gasoline to lubricate the inside of the piston, so as the piston heats up and expands, it doesn't rub too hard against the cylinder wall and seize up. The proper ratio of gas to oil used by most saw experts is 50:1, or fifty times as much gas as oil. Less oil, and you run the risk of seizing your engine. More oil (which is known as a mixture that is too rich) means that the saw won't run properly, and the spark plug will get fouled easily. You should also know the difference between common types of oils. Motor oil is used in cars, trucks, ATV's, and similar vehicles, and usually has a two number designation such as 10-30 or 15-40. Motor oil usually has a yellowish or golden color when new. Two stroke oil, also known colloquially as mix oil, is the type of oil mixed with gasoline for use in two-cycle engines. Two stroke oil is usually tinted blue. Finally, chain saw bar oil is used to lubricate the chain on a chain saw, where it is rotating around the bar of the saw. Chain oil often comes in summer or winter weights (winter is thinner viscosity), and is often tinted red (but is sometimes the same color as motor oil).
Here's a worker using a brush saw to cut a lodgepole pine tree. Although a brush saw can cut thicker stems than this, it is predominantly used for stems of this thickness or smaller.
Some planters go into a forestry career, and specialize in GIS work (Geographic Information Systems).
It's common for foresters and GIS specialists to spend a lot of time working on creating maps.
Some planters enroll in forestry tech programs or degrees, and find work almost year round, including work as silvicultural surveyors.
Timber cruising is another sub-career within forestry that is of interest to many people.
Reclamation work is often closely related to silviculture, and some types of reclamation work can even involve tree planting. In this photo, workers are cutting up willow stems to plant along stream banks. Willow is an interesting species, because a healthy cutting from a live willow tree will usually grow into a new willow tree if planted in a moist area.
Here are a number of willow cuttings, being harvested to be planted along a stream bank.
Nurseries often hire groups of people (mostly planters) to do cone picking jobs, to source seed for future seedlings.
Some planting companies also do a lot of fire-fighting work. Workers may end up planting trees in May through July, and then potentially get assigned to fire-fighting crews in August. This photo shows a stand of trees alongside a road that has been sprayed with a special type of fire retardant chemical, in hopes that the fire won't cross the road successfully.
Various types of herbicide treatment work are often available to workers in mid-August through early September. In this photo, a worker is doing some backpack spray work. The spray is designed to kill grasses and deciduous trees that compete with the coniferous seedlings.
The chemicals used in the herbicide program are mixed carefully with water to dilute them, so they can't spill into the environment in concentrated form.
This water reservoir on the back of a flatdeck truck is used for mixing up spray packs.
Herbicide spraying can only take place in very limited and controlled environmental conditions, ie. within certain temperature and humidity ranges, and when the wind is very calm. This device is called a Kestrel, and it's used to measure wind speed and other variables.
Here's a helicopter with a spray boom and spray reservoir attached to the bottom of the helicopter.
For planters who are looking for additional winter work, there is a bit of mitigation work to deal with the mountain pine beetle epidemic. Some of this work involves surveys to look for and assess trees that have been attacked. Other work is referred to as "fall and burn," where infested trees are dropped and burned, to try to control the spread of the pest. For fall and burn work, a faller drops and cuts up the trees, and a chucker piles the pieces and burns them. Tough work, and very cold. Most of this work is currently being done in northern Alberta, from Grand Prairie down to south of the Yellowhead. A safety item of note here: You can see me wearing chainsaw chaps in this photo. WorkSafe does not allow fallers to wear chaps anymore. However, I have a second pair of full wrap kevlar pants on underneath, so it's all good. I was only wearing the chaps to help protect the rain pants that I was wearing over my kevlar pants.
In the fall, once temperatures have dropped and the risk of wildfires is very low, some companies have burning programs in order to burn the slash piles on their blocks. Usually, workers will walk around the blocks and light the piles on fire with a device called a drip torch, which contains a mix of diesel and gasoline. Here is a drip torch in action.
Here is a close-up of the spout from a drip torch. The loop in the spout prevents the flames from reaching back up into the driptorch and causing an explosion of the fuel supply.
When a drip torch is not in use, the spout can be turned upside down and screwed into the inside of the torch. This closed drip torch shows a couple of knobs that are important. The knob in the center (which is part of the bottom plate of the spout) has to be unscrewed to allow fuel flow when the torch is being used. At the moment, this knob is closed for transport, so no fuel can leak out of the torch if it tips over. The smaller knob on the rim of the torch is an air vent. It has to be open when the torch is in use, but again, should be screwed shut when the torch is being stored or transported.
This truck is being prepared for a day of burning. There's a crate of drip torches, one of several yellow jerry cans that will contain diesel, and several red jerry cans that contain gasoline. The ideal fuel mixture is probably about one third gasoline to two-thirds diesel. The diesel is more oily, burns slowly, and sticks to the wood in the piles. The only problem is that it is hard to light, so a little bit of gasoline in the mix is used to get the diesel burning properly. If too much gasoline is used in the mix, it burns too quickly and then disappears (and can also be dangerous due to the risk of an explosion).
This photo was taken the day after a crew did an initial burning sweep through a block. It shows the residue after a slash pile has essentially burned down to nothing, but in the background, a pair of workers are re-lighting a pile that didn't burn properly.
Here is a pile that is just starting to burn, with some piles in the background that are pretty lit.
This pile is glorious. There probably won't be much left here once this fire goes out.
Click here to see a page listing books related to reforestation in Canada. If you received a photocopied version of this book from your planting company, or you're a trainer at a Canadian planting company, click on this link for more information.
