The Forestry Forum
General Forestry => Tree, Plant and Wood I.D. => Topic started by: sprucebunny on November 09, 2016, 09:50:27 PM
This is a close up of one 12" DBH tree in a foursome.
Care to guess the species ?
Tomorrow I'll post a picture of it's neighbor :)
(https://forestryforum.com/gallery/albums/userpics/11412/SBbark2close.jpg?easyrotate_cache=1478746125)
fagus grandfolia
Not beech :)
I literally said out loud, "That's gotta be a beech of some sort". Sprucebunny, I hate you. You keep turning my world upside down! :D ;)
Red maple
Yes ! Red Maple.
This group fascinates me. Two of the trees are ordinary looking and this one has very smooth bark for a large Red Maple. It's almost a foot in diam. up where the first picture is taken.
(https://forestryforum.com/gallery/albums/userpics/11412/SB2trunksbark~0.jpg?easyrotate_cache=1478812061)
That's an 8x8 on the ground. All 3 maples are over a foot DBH (https://forestryforum.com/gallery/albums/userpics/11412/SBbark2butts.jpg?easyrotate_cache=1478812171)
Red maple a tough tree to teach someone by bark.12" or so tree can be like in picture smooth and grey or the usual slightly furrowed but not as much as sugar maple or like shagbark hickory with the peeling bark (not common around here mostly larger trees.)
The smooth bark red maple I have heard it referred to as moose maple or soft maple , quite a bit of it in our area not much demand for it , everybody wants hard maple. ::) ??? Im just learning this imogy thing.
The way I understand it, Moose maple or moosewood usually refers to striped maple which is different from red.
Moosewood starts out smooth and stripey but usually has furrows in the bark by the time it's about 4" in diameter. It rarely gets over 5-6 " diam..
I don't know why they call it 'moosewood' because moose don't seem to eat it. If they can't find red maple, they would rather chew on balsam saplings.
Red maple is soft maple. There is ( or was ) a market for it for cheap furniture parts ( I think that was the use). I've got tons of it on my woodlot but I don't think it's even very good as firewood which is all my moose-chewed trees would by any good for.
I can see how red maple with smooth bark might be called 'moose maple' because they chew on it so often. And once the bark starts to have furrows, the moose don't chew on it.
I know horses love chewing on red maple. Stupid horses killed all of mine in their stupid pasture years ago.