Country Diary: Wenlock Edge

The air is full of light, the sharp edge of a breeze and the music of destruction. Like an electric guitar laboring through a couple of chords, the chainsaw goes about its relentless business. At the end of an avenue of lime trees, whose yellow leaves are being spun through a breeze bringing the first of this year's cold weather, arborists have climbed into one tree and are cutting branches. I remember how that feels: the sense of power as the chain bites through white timber; the smell of chain-oil, fuel and flying sawdust; the thrill of working high in the trees where senses are sharpened by danger.

And yet the sound of chainsaws represents something dark. What has taken years, sometimes centuries to grow can be reduced to a pile of logs in a matter of minutes. Chainsaws create a soundtrack for human chauvinism in ways that the sound of axes do not. With an ax, each blow rings down the centuries, linking iron with stone and a kind of labor which is thousands of years old. It's the scale and speed of destruction that chainsaws enable that gives them such power. In woods and forests around the world the chainsaws rev, whine and scream through their savage repertoire, unleashing arboricide. At the very opposite end of this spectrum, but not far away, a spotted woodpecker drums on a branch. With its piebald and red markings, the bird walks along high branches, stopping to throw its high piping call into the clear autumn air, then hammers on the branch to make a drumming sound that carries far into the treetops. Searching for insects along a dead bough that rises skyward, the woodpecker becomes an emblem against the chainsaw and a reason for leaving trees with dead bits alone. But the music of destruction is loud and the world is deaf.