I’ve never had the pleasure of doing a crane removal myself, but I am well versed in the alternatives, and that’s enough for me to deduce the incredible advantages of the crane. It lifts the material in large pieces over obstacles like houses, and this makes the work significantly faster and easier--since typically arborists cut up trees into pieces and drag, roll or carry every pound to the truck. 

It also means you don’t need a drop zone directly under the tree. A tree growing out of a courtyard, for example, could easily be hoisted upward.

Technical tree removals are, in a way, beneficial for retaining large trees in our built environment. Take the typical chainsaw take-down that your cousin can do for you on a Saturday. The "notch" is cut in the front of the tree, a horizontal "back-cut" approaches the notch from behind and gravity does the rest. I mean no disrespect to the helpful cousins out there, but when you have a large tree over a busy road, gravity is not your friend!

Arborists have many techniques to defy gravity, ranging from pushing the tree over with a wedge, or pulling it over with a rope, to installing aerial rigging points and hoisting material upward using mechanical advantage and/or actual machinery. 

Each higher level of precision ratchets up our tolerance for large urban trees by giving us peace of mind that they can be removed safely. Tree removals, therefore, are part of tree CARE, and having a skilled workforce capable of doing them is essential to healthy urban  forests. 

And did I mention they are very fast?

Written by VT UCF's Urban Forester, Adam McCullough