Explore alternatives to felling every ash

Many readers will have heard of ash dieback (a disease of ash trees), even more will have noted the recent and current road closures across Mendip for tree felling. The reason given for the removal of these mature trees is public health and safety.

It has to be accepted that some trees do pose a threat to public safety and genuinely need to be felled, but there are alternatives to obliterating many of them.

It would appear that some landowners are using the public safety card to allow the wholescale removal of any vegetation that has the temerity to stand upright anywhere near a public road, track or path.

On a hill near Wells, trees 30 metres down a steep incline running down from the road have been removed.

There appears to have been little regard given to potential hibernating bats or bat roosts, hibernating dormice or other wildlife that depend on these trees for refuge and support.

Apart from the benefits for wildlife, such trees are part of one of the two most important carbon sinks, second only to our oceans. Without them climate change and global warming will continue to accelerate unabated. If replacement trees were planted it would take at least 50 years before they contributed to the carbon sink.

Where woodland edges have been exposed it leaves the standing trees vulnerable to strong winter winds that can push the shallowrooted trees over like dominos.

There are alternatives, one of which I have experienced most recently in a nature reserve, where adults and children regularly visit and walk along well-used paths. There the ash trees have been reduced to approximately four metres above ground level and veteranised by forming cavities and crevices for colonisation by bats and birds The children associated

with the local forest school are also making bat and bird boxes to fit to the trees and native climbing shrubs encouraged to climb them.

In these difficult times it is now well known that most people derive great benefit from our wild environment and may well marvel at how such large trees grow from a tiny seed. Anyone who lives within earshot of the site of the recent tree work will have heard the almost incessant whine of chainsaws followed by the creak and crash of another superb tree hitting the ground, and then the final demise when the brash is chopped by grating chippers.

It is difficult to imagine how such an experience is anything other than detrimental to the wellbeing

of caring people. Please if you have an ash tree(s) think hard before you raze it to the ground. Can it be reduced and veteranised, does it really need to be removed, can it be left to see if it is one of the expected 15 per cent that will survive ash dieback?