Anyone who has walked through the forests in and around the Gooi in recent months has probably seen them: warning notes from the Goois Nature Reserve. These are attached to trees to alert visitors to a mysterious ‘tree ringer’. This person cuts away part of the tree bark in a ring shape, causing the tree to die in a short time.
“It is not okay for someone to do this kind of thing in our area without our permission,” says Peter Kampen, forest and nature team leader at the Goois Nature Reserve. Yet the organization suspects that there are no malicious intentions behind it.
American bird cherry
The trees mainly affected are American bird cherries, a species known as an ‘invasive exotic’. This tree species was planted on a large scale for timber production at the beginning of the last century, but it is now seen as a problem. It grows quickly, overgrows other plants and spreads easily via seeds dispersed by birds.
The big disadvantage is that you can hardly get rid of it again. Kampen: “If you saw it off, it will just grow out again.” The seeds also spread quickly: “Birds eat the berries of the tree, and then they poop out the seeds in other places. It’s almost impossible to get rid of them. It’s really like mopping with the tap open.”
What is ‘rings’?
You can only get rid of them by pulling them out of the ground by the roots or ringing them. That is exactly what the unknown perpetrator does in the Gooise woods.