I could hear the familiar sound despite closed windows and a wind from the wrong direction.
RrrrrrRRRRRRrrrrrrrRRRRRRRRRRRRRrrrrrrrrrRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
Craaaaaaack! Whumpf.
The diesel beavers were at work in the neighborhood.
Saw-on-a-stick being used properly. That’s not generally how I see them being used.
In this case, it turned out that someone had finally realized that the very large dead tree in their yard might pose a threat to the cars parked under it. And to the house, and to the neighbor’s house and car, and to drivers if it decided to fall into the street when it fell over, and to . . . The tree has been dead for at least a year, and I suspect the ice brought down the first large limb, inspiring the long-needed removal of the rest of the tree.
When most of this city was built, people planted fast growing trees like cottonwoods and Siberian Elms. They have a lifespan of around 50 years, and their time has come. Every so often I hear the sound of chainsaws, then falling wood, then a stump grinder (although not every one goes with the last). The nickname came about after I went to the park and observed that four trees had disappeared in the course of three hours of a lot of noise and apparently much mess. “Giant beavers attacked the park.’
MomRed: “That’s nice dear.”
In all fairness, she was a little bit busy at the time, trying to sort out US government forms on a US government website.
DadRed heard the comment and from then on the big serious chainsaws have become “diesel beavers.”
Cat Rotator's Quarterly 
They could always revert to more historical ways, and use dynamite instead of stump grinders. “Look, Ma! That stump just went into low Earth orbit!”
🙂
I think the fire department and SWAT team frown on other people using explosives within city limits. I suspect the home glass repair folks would be glad to sponsor a few stump removals, though.
nice one
Interesting way to look at it! Or you could import actual beavers, for noise abatement of course… But then you’d have to train them where and when to drop the trees… 🙂
And there’s the part about convincing someone to keep a garden hose running so they could make a pond and mound . . . There are beaver in the Canadian Breaks, but fish-n-game doesn’t talk about that too much.
Of course they don’t. Once they admit they’re there, they have to formulate and execute management plan. That takes time and costs money, and just because they’d be required to do it doesn’t mean they’d get more resources to do so. Willful ignorance is far easier.