Trees destroy themselves randomly

Bug: when moving around my farm with no tool equipped at all, sometimes a tree I walk by will randomly be destroyed to the sound of a single ax chop... WITH NO AX EQUIPPED, and NOT hitting the tree in any way, not even once... This is really bad when part of my farm is a mature maple grove I deliberately have, all with taps... I don't WANT a fully cleared farm, so it's making me PO'd that the game is trying to force tree removal. (Cranky old treehugger that I am.) I plant and tap trees wherever it lets me, like up at the railroad. This random tree destruction on my farm has happened several times. And there is a single ax chop sound when it happens, which is weird because it takes several deliberate chops in a row to actually fell a tree. Am feeling irritated to be losing my prime timber, and this also means it is too risky to buy pricey fruit trees.
Am on android, this happens on both 1.19 and the latest 1.25. Running on Galaxy Note 9 with tons of RAM and space.