23
March/April 2019
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THE DAVEY BULLETIN
GIANT COMPOSTERS
Cortese Tree Specialists has a unique partnership with
Zoo Knoxville's elephants and giraffes. They provide these
giants of the African savanna with trees for enrichment
activities – and to eat.
Nick St. Sauveur, district manager, said the giraffes and
the elephants can only eat certain species of trees because
LENDING A HAND TO
STUDENT CLIMBERS
Employees from the Davey Institute, The Care of Trees and
the South St. Paul office helped with a two-day weekend,
hands-on rigging class for urban forestry students at the
University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point.
Les Werner, forestry professor in the College of Natural
Resources, asked Don Roppolo, manager of arboricultural
training, Davey Institute, if he would help instruct the class.
To help teach the class, Roppolo received help from Nate
Engel, foreman, Quinton Risley, foreman, and Casey Snyder,
Plant Health Care technician, from the South St. Paul office,
and Charles Shonts, district manager, The Care of Trees,
Naperville, Illinois, office.
"The students were really excited about it," Roppolo said.
"Dr. Warner was extremely appreciative, because it's
something he wasn't able to deliver to his students without
help. If it wasn't for us volunteering our time, it wouldn't
have been possible."
The class was an opportunity for the students to use the
equipment in a controlled, safe environment with instructors
who could explain the concepts of rigging in detail,
Roppolo said.
"In our field, I associate it with riding a bicycle," Roppolo
said. "We could spend three days talking about how to
ride a bicycle, but until you get outside and get on the
bicycle and try to ride it, there's no replacing it."
The students had the opportunity to do rigging on the ground, while
Davey employees did the pruning in the trees. Some of the students
climbed trees outside of the target zone to have a better view of the
work being done.
Far left: Cortese Tree's
Nick St. Sauveur
has delivered several
loads of trees to the
Zoo Knoxville for the
elephants' exhibit.
Left: The trees provided
to the elephants are
not just for eating.
The elephants also
enjoy playing with the
stumps and logs.
some are toxic to them. Their favorites are sweetgum,
hackberry, silver maple and box elder. St. Sauveur jokingly
said they tolerate tulip poplars.
"They are kind of like big kids; they are picky about what
they eat," he said.
