Ethics

Someone may already live there

In spring, a lot of trees already have someone in them: birds, nesting, who got there before you did. If you spot a nest, pick a different tree that day. There will still be a tree there once the nest is empty.

Dead wood isn’t always empty

A branch that’s fully dead won’t feel you snap it off. The tree already let it go, and for the tree itself, that branch coming off changes nothing.

But dead wood rarely stays empty for long. In a lot of species, a rotting branch becomes exactly the kind of soft, damp place ants, isopods, and other small decomposers like to move into, and over time they turn it into a real home. Snap that branch and you take their home apart along with it, and a clumsy hand doing that isn’t much fun for whoever was living there. Where you can tell a branch has gone soft and dark like that, the kinder move is to leave it alone and climb around it, quiet as a ninja, rather than clearing it out of your way.

Bark wears

Boots and a repeated route wear a groove into bark the same way feet wear a groove into a trail. If there’s a tree you climb often, vary your line up it, so the same strip of bark isn’t the only one doing the work.

Take your shoes off

Bare feet are gentler on bark than a boot sole is, so this one happens to be good for the tree as well as for you. (There’s more on why it feels good on the Learn page.)

Some trees are for sitting under

Some trees are old enough, or rare enough, that they’re marked Beloved on the map: sat with, not climbed. If a tree you find is marked protected, look, don’t climb it.

Whose ground is it

A lot of good trees stand on someone’s land. Public and permitted are not the same thing, and the map says which is which, where it knows.