Go on a tour to learn about trees

Before you begin

• Use the safety checklist to help you plan and risk assess your activity. Additional help to carry out your risk assessment, including examples can be found here. Don’t forget to make sure all young people and adults involved in the activity know how to take part safely.
• Make sure you’ll have enough adult helpers. You may need some parents and carers to help if you’re short on helpers.

Planning this activity 

• You may want to find an area which has been intentionally planted with trees to visit for this activity, such as a commercial woodland, nature reserve, a fruit-tree farm, a Christmas tree site, a conservation site or local forest plantation. A local nature charity or council might be able to help too.
• To make sure you cover everything you need to know for the Scouts Forester Activity Badge, we’ve included some questions for the group to ask in the instructions. Anyone working towards the badge should be encouraged to take notes and write down answers to their questions as they go.

Run the activity

1. Encourage everyone to take a look around. See if they can identify the trees around them. Your guide, if you have one, should be able to help. Bear in mind that trees in commercial woodland are far more likely to be all the same species than trees in natural woodland.
2. Have someone ask what the trees are being grown for. Your guide should be able to tell you more.
3. Have everyone think of some reasons why you might grow certain trees on a plantation. Encourage everyone to look closely at the characteristics of the trees around them. Some possible reasons:

• • For fuel
  • For timber
  • For fruit
  • For resins or sap, such as rubber
  • For cultivation, such as for Christmas trees
  • For science/education, at somewhere like the Eden project

4. Have everyone examine how the trees are being grown. See if they’ve been planted in rows or grown along frames or wires.
5. Have someone ask how the plantation deals with the effects of grazing animals that might harm the trees. You could find out if they put collars or fences around the trunks to protect the bark and new shoots of saplings (young trees). Your guide should be able to tell you more.
6. Have someone ask about other threats to the trees, like weather, vandalism or disease. You could find out if having lots of one species in one place poses more or less risk to diseases that affect trees and other wildlife. Your guide should be able to give you specifics.
7. Have someone ask about what machinery and tools are used at the plantation. See if they use any specialised equipment to measure the growth or capture other data about their trees. Your guide should be able to tell you more.
8. Think about specific items/facilities like wood-chippers, cherry-pickers, sawmills and machinery for picking or processing materials and moving things. Don’t forget smaller things like chainsaws, hand-axes and bow saws. Precise tasks are more likely to require a smaller tool.
9. Have someone ask about the people who work at the plantation and what gear they need to do their jobs. Think about protective equipment like visors, goggles, ear-protectors, tough boots and gloves, as well as hi-vis jackets. See if the group can work out why each piece of protective gear is needed. Your guide should be able to help and might be able to find some spare items for everyone to examine.
10. Have someone find out how the plantation operates alongside the natural world. Think closely about the relationship with different wild animals and plants. Your guide should be able to provide some examples of this.
11. Some plantations might rely on wildlife to help them get the product they want, so they’ll create perfect conditions for those organisms to live among the trees. Others may harvest their product at a certain time to avoid disturbing nesting or migrating birds and other animals.
12. Give everyone a chance to ask any follow-up questions, and anything else they’d like to know.
13. When you reach the end of the tour and everyone has asked their questions, thank your guide for showing you around the site and sharing their insight.