janey

A young green woodpecker and mistle thrush for comparison: Or perhaps you spotted something really rare and not usually seen in this country that will get the twitchers overly excited?

I'm with you on this one. Yes, the realities are that wear and tear takes it's toll on the body as you get older and recovery time becomes longer as you age. But knowledge and technique also play a huge part in in any job and climbing is no exception. An older climber can easily out perform a teenager (obviously, there will always be exceptions) because of their experience. Again, it is so dependant on the individual's ability and mental attitude.

Or a Ginja I'm far too old and knackered to be on the tools these days, but I'm smart enough to realise this. My climbing days are definately long gone. I could keep you well supplied in tea and cake though

So you only love me for my arb, huh ?

Yeah, us bikers stick together On a serious note, this whole women in the industry, women on the tools, can women climb as well as men blah blah blah topic gets very tedious and I get quite irritated by it. My gender has never been an issue in this industry. And I will never let it be. We are all individuals with our own merits and if anyone is stupid enough to stereotype me because I am a woman, then they are not worth my time and they are certainly not worthy of being called a professional.

One down, only several thousand to go

Aw, that's sweet

I love the descriptiveness of a lot of the scientific names. They can tell you a lot about the specimen's size, shape, colour, habit, place of origin and so on and can be helpful with ident's.

Can you see where the avenue is due to end from where you want to start, if you see what I mean? If you can, then you can borrow the old Roman road building trick for straight lines. Place a fencepost, stick, spade, willing or not so willing assistant, anything slim and vertical really in the starting position for your avenue (post 1) and another one in the finishing position (post 2). To get some more markers for the avenue in line with these first two, squat (if necessary) behind post 1 and visually line up post 2 until it cannot be seen as it will be directly behind post 1. You can now get a helper to add in more markers into this sight line while you keep checking that they are in line with 1 and 2. I hope this makes sense?

Thank god for a bit of, gasp!, common sense . Man, woman, straight, gay, bi, black, white, Asian, Christian, Jedi.... Does it really matter? Attitude and physical and mental ability are the important issues, not someone's gender. I've worked with lazey women and lazey men. I've also worked with hugely talented and inspiring women and again, men. Yes, there are very few women in arb' and forestry (3% according to LANTRA). I don't think this is an issue unless we make it an issue. With so much positive discrimination towards women (which I don't agree with, btw), we, as a gender, have far more opportunities and funding available than any man coming into the idustry. Is this fair? Is this equality? Does this mean that women are somehow more suitable to work with trees? No, it doesn't. It just means that someone in a position of power has deemed that that there needs to be a more even proportion of men to women, regardless of an individual's apptitude towards the job. I've worked bloody hard to get taken seriously as a professional arboriculturalist, not a female arboriculturalist, please note. I am an individual, with my own strengths and weaknesses and my gender is totally and utterly irrelevant. Which is how it should be for anyone.

Ha, you can try the ministry of silly walks method, where you set your stride to 1m and then pace the length of the soon - to - be avenue and make a good guesstimate of the length from the number of your paces. Or, the more boring way is to use a large scale map and then measure the distance off of that. This method is nowhere near as much fun or as entertaining for any bystanders. A single ave' is one single line of trees. A double ave' is where you have two lines of trees running parallel to each other, like what you would have either side of a road.