*5 star qualities of a Professional Arborist
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Warning - Contains some worrying videos!
Do you have trees which tower over your house or creak in the wind?
Are your hedges out of control and sucking every last drop of light from your house?
Well it sounds like you need some professional advice!
So who do you call and how do you know if their advice is Correct?
Most of the time we reach for the mouse and search the internet or Golden pages for the company with the largest advert or the appearance of greater professionalism. In this lense I want to expose the exhilorating world of treeclimbing and shed greater light on what seperates the 'Cowboys' from 'Surgeons' with the 5 attributes of a professional Arborist:
These are all things to check before engaging a tree care professional. do your homework or as Abraham Lincoln would:
"Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe."
The huge increase in construction over the last ten years in Ireland has resulted in the removal and destruction of many of the city and town trees. Some could have been avoided and a great deal of resources put to better use if information and education about trees was more widely available.
Recent article about Training to become an Arborist
Training & education for Arborists
educational courses about trees
Why hire an arborist?
International Society of Arboriculture-certified arborist
"Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe."
Abraham Lincoln
just a light hearted one...
1. Qualifications
To put it simply, qualifications should be the starting point for anyone who is engaging someone for tree care. Without the right certificates of competence or training certs you have no evidence that the man with the chainsaw knows what he is doing. Trees can take hundreds of years to grow and minutes to destroy. Accidents can also happen in seconds.
Make sure that a person hired to use a chainsaw has Knowledge, Ability, Training and Experience. KATE for short. S/he must have certificates of competence provided by a recognised Awarding body such as City and Guilds. Check the date that this was awarded and ask for evidence of refresher training if the date is more than five years ago! This is not compulsory but a good operator will keep skills current (see Skills and Experience below).
Certificates of competence must reflect the task in hand. Employing a person to climb trees that is qualified only to plant them is a no-brainer. Employing anyone to do a job that they are not trained to do is likewise!
qualifications for City and guilds
training and certification for chainsaws
free chainsaw awareness courses
2. Skills & Experience
Ask for references or photos of previous work.
Ask for a description of the work they intend to do. How will the tree be affected by the work carried out?
Are they qualified to prune trees? Are the qualifications up to date?
This link below is for a very inexpensive guide to pruning....
pruning guidelines
Pruning Services
3. ENOUGH insurance
Having insurance is rarely a problem and most contractors will produce a document for Public liability and Employers liability when asked to. However, the trick here is to actually read the cover note and find out what the policy covers and if it is adequate for the task in hand. Many contractors are 'winging it' with landscaping insurance policies that don't cover climbers or they have a height restriction on their policy. These policies are of course much cheaper! Should an accident occur, the contractor is legally within their rights to claim off your property insurance for any injuries etc.
Trust Insurance for treecare
tree work accidents
Recommended reading for budding arborists
4. The right attitude
An arborist should be polite, well informed, diligent and keen. Advice should be offered that reduces or eliminates the problem that a tree is causing. Arborists should be able to offer several solutions that are in keeping with the needs of the tree and the customer.
It has always been my opinion that a very good arborist approaches any siruation with the wholehearted desire to find the most cost effective and sustainable solution to a problem.
Don't expect all tree care professionals to be Tree-huggers but they should have an attitude to serve, preserve and mitigate not cut and run!
5. References
Be it a list of previous customers or a photo book of completed work, references give you some idea of what to expect from your contractor. Look for trade memberships also such as:International society of Arboriculture
Arboricultural Association
Society of Irish Foresters
Many contractors will have a gallery of photo on their websiteor Flickr etc.
Some tree care opeations may be confusing when described but a picture speaks a thousand words and may explain the final look of a tree after completion of the operation.
The picture above shows a before and after Crown reduction. Explaining a professional technique like this can be alot more difficult.
Here's our blog with more tree info...
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it was my first
Hi I,m Kevin Birchall. I'm a Professional Tree climber, Instructor and Mentor working in Ireland and Bavaria, Germany.I have a passion for sharing knowledge, learning and connecting with people. I regularly write about aboriculture and Forestry for HLI Magazine in Ireland and enjoy posting on The Tree Tribe Blog and my own Marketing Blog. In my spare time I hunt, run and cycle and tackle adventure races when I get chance.
I'm primarily driven by a desire to promote and develop the Land-based industries in Ireland and Internationally. Forestry, Arboriculture and Horticulture require practitioners to gather an immense amount of knowledge and skills which are often overlooked by customers when tendering. I believe that this is mainly the result of a lack of information that is availble to customers, so hopefully by producing lenses such as this one I can help to make a difference. If you would like to connect find me here on Facebook
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