In Newlands Forest on the slopes of Devil’s Peak you may notice trees with unobtrusive grey bark part of the way up. Enquiries led to a man who paints them.
From left: Hacked and Dying. Sripped for the market and left to die. Tree painter Alex Murahla at work.
I didn’t know what was going on. I thought SANParks was killing bad trees. Then I met a ranger and he said it was illegal bark stripping.Newlands was evidently under so much strain from stripping that some areas of the forest had crossed a tipping point. It really affected me. My poor wife had to deal with me walking around in the forest at 10 o’clock at night with my little head torch and pepper spray to catch these guys.Never, never. The guys are extremely brazen but they know the terrain.
We heard that some arborists had success preventing bark stripping in urban areas by painting trees. So we painted some Cape beech trees in the area guys were actively stripping to see what would happen. We used weak, grey PVA, it’s not too intrusive. Then we observed the site for a few months. People were stripping all around it but not the painted trees. We’d found a solution.Yeah, well we had a problem of scale, of course. It took me a whole afternoon to paint eight trees.
Becoming critical of a cultural practice is very sensitive terrain. We’re not critical of a practice that has been going on for centuries, we are critical about it being done in a completely unsustainable manner, and then going from unsustainable to extremely destructive. For some, it’s simply a commercial criminal enterprise.The strippers aren’t sure what’s in the paint. Could it kill you or make you sick? They don’t necessarily know.
Of course, there are those who do. The Sugarbird Trust has little signs on the mountain with a Snapscan code and somebody contributed R50,000 the other day. And look at the amazing work that Friends of Table Mountain or Take Back Our Mountains does. Friends spent half a million rand last year repairing trails and this year we hope to do double or triple that amount — all public funding.I have a soft spot for assegai, but also stinkwoods. Actually, I love the red alder as well, they’re beautiful.