Life's a beech: trees sometimes fall -- and they do it in unpredictable ways

I own and manage woodland. One of the things that keeps me awake at nights is the fear of one of my trees falling and hurting somebody. Maybe even me. A couple of times a year I inspect the entire site, tree by tree, and mark for felling any tree that appears even slightly dodgy. Because it takes a while to fell dozens of trees, sometimes the ones I've marked are still standing a year or two later. Clearly I was wrong in my assessment. And sometimes a tree will fall, just for the heck of it, after I've decided it's perfectly healthy.

There are tell-tale signs that a tree is on its last, um... roots. Extensive loss of bark, beetle holes, fungus infestation -- these are all worrying signs. Any tree that isn't in leaf by May is clearly dead.

And yet...

When trees fall, my experience is that they rarely do it like the cartoons. They don't tip over at the base, and come to rest on the ground with the root bole pointing upwards. If a tree is likely to fail near the root, it's pretty obvious, anyway.

No, the dangerous trees, the ones that disturb my sleep, are the ones which fail in the trunk fifty feet or more above ground.

This happened to one of my larger trees last winter. From its rings, this beech was about sixty years old -- in its prime. It stood maybe a hundred feet tall, with a circumference about twelve feet at the root, and I would guess it weighed about fifty tons. It didn't fall, exactly: the top fifty feet -- the branch canopy -- snapped off cleanly, and ended up covering an area the size of a tennis court. As it came down, it brought six other substantial trees with it. It took me a month of evenings to saw them all up and carry the timber away.

Happily, nobody was anywhere near this monster when it came down. The remaining trunk is still standing, because it's _way_ beyond the capacity of my tools to fell it. It might re-grow from the broken top -- sometimes they do. If not, I hope nobody is nearby when the rest of it falls.

The frightening thing is that there's no way I could have predicted this outcome. Inspecting the debris gave me no reason to think that anything was wrong with the tree. The wood was rock-hard, as mature beech is. No sign of rot or fungus. And, yet, here it was, laying on the ground, an in-your-face reminder of the power of nature to spoil your day.

My woods are not open to the public -- not in principle, anyway. But I've learned that dogs are no respecters of signage; and where Fido goes, Fido's owner is sure to follow, even if he has to push through a house-sized bramble bush to do it. And my woods are often visited unintentionally by folks who have strayed off the path, or just want to get some shade in the summer. They shouldn't be there, but they are, and the penalty for trespass ought not to be a twenty-ton beech canopy on your head.

You can get insurance to cover the legal liability, but that won't help with the guilt, if you end up party to a manslaughter.

So what to do? I guess like everything else in life, you prepare as best you can, and then hope nothing goes terribly wrong.

Published 2026-05-14, updated 2026-05-14

Life's a beech: trees sometimes fall -- and they do it in unpredictable ways

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