- Cape Rolling Out Bloomfield Road Art Trail (8/21/19)1
- Donors Pledge Almost Two Grand To Replace SEMO's Possibly Sentient ‘Gum Tree' (8/16/18)
- SEMO and The Will To (Become A Consultant) – Part 2 (6/14/18)
- SEMO and The Will To Do (You Really Want To See That Legal Notice?) – Part 1 (6/4/18)
- Judge, Jury... Trashman (6/1/18)
- Diary of Cape Girardeau Road Deconstruction (5/11/18)
- Trying To Save A Tree From City “Improvements” (4/30/18)2
Logging Reality Shows Have Room For One More
I'm addicted to TV shows about loggers.
I'm not really sure why. Perhaps it's the outdoorsy aspect of the shows or the sense of danger. Logging is the second deadliest occupation in the US behind being a commercial fisherman.
I did some logging growing up, but nothing on the scope or scale of the reality shows they air on TV. Really, about the only things these TV shows and my teenage logging experiences have in common are chainsaws. Well, that and trees. You can't be a logger without trees, can you?
No, we didn't have massive pieces of equipment that allow today's professional loggers to efficiently harvest trees from incredibly steep terrain or monstrous machines that can cut the limbs off of a fallen tree and slice it into trailer-sized length in mere seconds.
We just had dad's McCullough chainsaw, an old International Harvester tractor, a wagon that had been put together using the back half of an old pickup truck, our own muscle and the 84 acre property owned by my parents that was half covered by woods. That was it.
Really, our logging experiences wouldn't have made much of a TV show. It would have been pretty lame, except for maybe that one time when the parking brake on the tractor slipped and it started rolling down hill without a driver. I never saw my dad ever move that fast.
But I enjoy following the load competitions on The History Channel's Ax Men and the totally alien world of Swamp Loggers on Discovery and the family of Maine woodsmen on American Logger. While the logging reality-show market may appear to be at capacity, the other weekend I was in my backyard and realized there might be room for just one more.
My 100-year-old backyard elm trees had not yet leafed out and I could easily see a few broken limbs, presumably remnants from the big ice storms of last year.
While contemplating these dangling branches, one of the squirrels that live in my backyard jumped from the canopy of our one big elm to the canopy of the other. That's when I had the idea for my logging reality show:
American Squirrel Tree Trimmers
Squirrels are already tree-trimmers in their own right. Squirrels build tree nests out of short limbs they've chewed from the tree. Whenever a windstorm comes along and blows one nest away, the squirrels just build another.
Wild squirrels just use limbs and twigs that they've randomly chosen. But what if we could train them to be better arborist, to sculpt the trees to our liking?
And then what if we could get them to wear little hardhats and tiny flannel shirts and train them on how to use just-their-size miniature Stihl chainsaws that they could wield against limbs a little too big for them to chew through?
And since all good reality shows need some dramatic tension, what if we made sure to have some young "greenhorn" squirrel tree trimmers who are constantly screwing up. Or maybe we could include a crazy rabid squirrel logger who would do the unexpected. Or perhaps we could even get a team of beavers to give the show some competitive tension. Squirrel loggers versus beaver loggers. I like that.
I think that would be a show people would want to watch.
And if the History Channel or Discovery wasn't interested, there's always Animal Planet.
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