Jumpingpound Creek Tree Wrapping Project

Back in the year 2000, it was a busy year for Bow Valley Habitat Development and me! Projects were on the go in both Canmore and Cochrane, with a foray into the upper and lower reaches of Jumpingpound Creek, wrapping giant cottonwoods and keeping the beaver’s attention on the willows and some smaller aspen and poplar trees that sucker up out of the ground, close to the mother tree continuously.

My crew on the JP Project were from both Cochrane and Calgary, my friend Ralph Tait’s son Jesse and his friend from the city were my wrapping crew. Ralph has now passed, but I did talk to Jesse recently, and we talked about old times. In only a few days of hard work and lots of mesh, wire and staples, we wrapped 308 trees in the summer of 2000.

In 2013, thirteen years since the wrapping, I ventured to one of the sites that we wrapped, to do a follow up, which I always do on my projects. It was really nice to see the wrapped trees still decorated with our wire and still protecting the trees from beaver damage.

The system of wrapping that I designed for this project, is called the slip wire tree wrapping technique. The diagram below helps to illustrate how the system works.  

 Where the normal bark growth is, mostly above the top of wire. Remember, this is after 13 years of growth. All of the trees that my team and I wrap, are always wrapped snugly and completed properly.

I have since conducted workshops on tree planting, but the results are always the same, a total failure, because I was not around to supervise or manage. This is the sad truth about both volunteer, business and municipal tree wrappers. When I say business, I am talking about developers that send a bunch of unsupervised staff off to the creek to wrap their precious planted trees, to protect them from the beavers, and then have to watch as their poorly wrapped trees get taken out by beavers, one by one.

Some of the tree wrapping that I have observed in both Cochrane, Calgary and Airdrie, is garbage. I have picked wire mesh baskets out of the creek annually, during my planting program on the streams in those cities and my home town. The beavers usually lift the baskets of wire mesh that haven’t been properly anchored, and then they go to work dinning on the most expensive poplar, aspen and other exotics that the beavers have ever encountered, in their life time. I am talking about West Nose Creek, where poplar, aspen and willows went pretty much extinct, many years ago.

It is kind of funny, because it isn’t our money being spent!

The trees close to the water, where flooding had occurred on that early summer of 2013, during the big flood, still had their wire and yet the floating debris that had piled up on the trees didn’t remove the wraps.