Identifying trees in winter - Silver or red maple

[Twar]

I know the easy answer is to check the leaves in the summer, but that ship has sailed. This is a new property to us and I didn't plan ahead. I am pretty good at Identifying sugar maples in winter from the bark or the buds and the opposing branching on all maples. I have decided to add more taps and went out scouting trees. I ran into a very large maple with a thick shaggy/flaky bark. Bark is clearly not a red maple, but I can see the red flower bud clusters up high in the tree so it's not a sugar. It must be a silver maple?

I didn't think I had any silver maples as i have only seen them in yards around here, not deep in the woods. Likely I never looked close enough.

Is there an easy way to tell in winter if a younger tree is a silver vs. red?

I have been assuming red buds is a red and never considered then to be a silver. Now I am questioning it. Old trees with the shaggy bark seem easier to identify, it's those 8"-18" maples where the bark all looks the same that I will struggle with.

Next summer I am marking all the trees before winter. I will be tapping that silver maple this year as it has a huge crown. I'll also post up a picture when I am home with some daylight and can get a picture or two.

Thanks

[Bricklayer]

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I have a couple of silvers by the swampy part of my bush. I just call them soft maples. Red or silver. I treat them as the same anyways. I hung buckets on them when I had buckets and never had any real success. Was a waste of time. I put tubing and vacuum up and tap them now cause the line goes right by them. Not to sure how much they produce.
Lots of people tap both. So if your gonna tap silvers you might as well tap the reds too. Like trying to squeeze blood from a stone on buckets though.

[bigschuss]

I ran into a very large maple with a thick shaggy/flaky bark. Bark is clearly not a red maple, but I can see the red flower bud clusters up high in the tree so it's not a sugar.

I would not be so sure it's not a red. I have many, huge old red maples on my property that are indiscernible from sugars based on the bark alone. You'd sear they were sugar maples. I don't have silver maples where I'm at, so I don't know if they have large, reddish bud clusters.

[Twar]

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This is what the bark looks like. I will get a good picture during the day.

[Bricklayer]

If I were walking through the woods and saw that. I would call it a mature silver.
Sometimes I scratch away the snow and look what leaves are on the ground right under it close to the base.

[Mark B]

At what height does the tree branch out. Most of my reds branch out pretty high up. Most of my silvers branch pretty low and are very full. Silvers don't really color up hard before leaf drop. They drop on my property with a silver / white underside and a light green top.

[Kettle Ridge]

Do the twigs droop and then bend slightly upwards? Twigs with this sort of fishhook shape are characteristic of big silver maples.

[MN Jake]

All of the common maples have red buds. Sugar maple buds are pointed, all the soft maple buds are rounded. The comparison picture you posted is a silver, large long plates of bark. Silvers are very adaptable, we have many that fork at the ground and many that are 40' strait trunks. Just depends on the space available. Kettle ridge is spot on with the "hooked ends". We tap 500 silvers and not one is really shaped like another. They do whatever they need in whatever space they have and make one heck of a goofy forest

[Twar]

Here is a picture of the actual tree in question. It's al most 30" dbh but has multiple trunks. 17432

Here is a 14" dbh red and 14"dbh sugar. These are easy and I could verify with the buds. The problem is in this size the bark of a sugar can be as smooth as the red and the bark of a red could be rough. I have been using the buds to tell. Most reds seem to have large red bud clusters in the canopy, so when I cant get a low branch I can still tell it's a red. Again my problem is how do I tell if it's a red or a silver without leaves when they are smaller. I guess it doesn't really matter but I am now questioning my identification of reds.
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[Twar]

Close up of the silver bark. 17435

[sticknstring]

I have some tree pics I would like help with ID, but can't get the pictures to load off my phone or my computer. It says JPG files are accepted and that is what the pics are. Can someone help me out? I am 99.999999999999999% sure they are maple trees, I just want to see if I can tell which kind. We have a ton of soft maple trees with the smooth bark around our ground, so you can't go anywhere without seeing the common maple leaves. Any direction would be greatly appreciated

[Twar]

Check the file size. My phone takes large pictures and does the motion pictures by default. They show as jpg but wouldn't upload. I had to go to the picture and save a still image. That cut the size in half and they uploaded. I don't know if it was the size of the file or the fact that the phone did motion images that caused the issue.

[sticknstring]

Thanks Twar, that was the issue!!

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Tree number 1

[sticknstring]

Tree 2
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A leaf that was there, there are tons of these but then again, maple leaves everywhere so cant tell if it was from the tree pictured

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[Bricklayer]

Leaf kinda looks like a Black Maple. Hard to tell though. Black maple leafs look like chubby sugar maple leafs. That's how I remember them. And weirder looking. The bark on a black maple usually looks just like a sugar. Not much different. Basically the same tree. Same sugar contant usually. I think.

[Sugarbush Ridge]

I may be off topic here. I would cut those vines growing on those trees. They steal some of the sunlight from the tree leaves and some vines may steal sap from your tree.

[blissville maples]

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This is what the bark looks like. I will get a good picture during the day.


That's an ild suagr maple with extremely ild bark flaking off....I have one with bark that's almost 3" thick where it hasn't shed

[blissville maples]

Here is a picture of the actual tree in question. It's al most 30" dbh but has multiple trunks. 17432

Here is a 14" dbh red and 14"dbh sugar. These are easy and I could verify with the buds. The problem is in this size the bark of a sugar can be as smooth as the red and the bark of a red could be rough. I have been using the buds to tell. Most reds seem to have large red bud clusters in the canopy, so when I cant get a low branch I can still tell it's a red. Again my problem is how do I tell if it's a red or a silver without leaves when they are smaller. I guess it doesn't really matter but I am now questioning my identification of reds.
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The two pics on bottom are sugars, the pic above is a red

[Sugar Bear]

I know everybody loves to use the bark texture and format for distinguishing the trees but...

Here in the mid to lower Hudson Valley and across Southern Connecticut I have for many years used the shape of the canopy as my primary method to confirm that a maple is in fact a Sugar Maple. The Sugar Maple has in general, a much straighter trunk and upper canopy limbs shaped in a vase like format. Soft maples will sucker growth and as somebody has already said, grow in random and somewhat curled directions. Sugar Maples want to keep their limbs growing toward the highest part of the canopy and in a uniformly straight and steep fashion.

Across this region the Sugars and the Softs adhere to that rule almost all of the time. On the other hand, on the slopes of the ridges in say the Mad River Valley of Vermont I would say this observational distinction is not nearly as clear between Sugars and Softs. In that region I defer more to the color of the buds in mid spring or the leaves in summer or fall. However in Vermont when I am looking for certain types of trees to miil, say Black Cherry, my eyes go straight to the canopy to look for them. It is actually easier to identify the Cherries that way rather then looking for the distinct bark of a Cherry through the forest floor. I have missed many cherries by looking for the trunks down low through the forest. Found them all by revisiting and grazing the canopies with my eyes.

Does not sound right I know, but definitely works better for me.

[blissville maples]

[QUOTE=Bricklayer;342299]Leaf kinda looks like a Black Maple. Hard to tell though. Black maple leafs look like chubby sugar maple leafs. That's how I remember them. And weirder looking. The bark on a black maple usually looks just like a sugar. Not much different. Basically the same tree. Same sugar contant usually. I think.[/QUOTE
]

Looks like a sugar although pic was a little fuzzy so I couldn't see the details of the bark, However the leaf is a sugar...if there are 5 pronounced points to the leaf it is sugar. If it has 3 distinct points and 2 smaller and rounder points by the stem it's a red or silver. Sugars always have 5 pronounced sharp points on leaf tips

[blissville maples]

I may be off topic here. I would cut those vines growing on those trees. They steal some of the sunlight from the tree leaves and some vines may steal sap from your tree.

Absolutely....I always cut every vine I see

[Twar]

As a follow up on this, the snow melted around the tree in question so I went digging through the leaves in the ground. I found 0 silver maple leaves and 8 bizzillion red maple leaves. So I think it's clearly a red maple

[Twar]

Checked the sugar content of the sap in the tree and it was 1.5%. Everyone seems to be seeing low sugar content locally so I will check again when we get another good run .

[TerryF]

Interesting talk about the diff color of maple trees leaves etc..I'm 75 yrs old and from NE Wis and have been here all my life and a lumberjack for a lot of it. I've cut lots of maple trees of all sizes. I learned from my dad who was also a "jack" there are hard maple and soft maple trees. Hard maple grows on high ground and soft maple likes wet ground, close to swamps,sometimes it's found in shallow water in spring and wetter yrs. Soft maple turns first in the fall, dark red, hard maple turns later with yellow and red leaves, not as dark as soft maple. I tap all hard maple. I never paid attention to why the diff colors of hard maple until I got on this site yrs ago. Red, yellow and black maple mean nothing to me, if they are here I don't know but think some people are going by color of bark and trying to differentiate between them when they are the same. 2 cents worth.

[wally]

Here is a picture of the actual tree in question. It's al most 30" dbh but has multiple trunks. 17432

Here is a 14" dbh red and 14"dbh sugar. These are easy and I could verify with the buds. The problem is in this size the bark of a sugar can be as smooth as the red and the bark of a red could be rough. I have been using the buds to tell. Most reds seem to have large red bud clusters in the canopy, so when I cant get a low branch I can still tell it's a red. Again my problem is how do I tell if it's a red or a silver without leaves when they are smaller. I guess it doesn't really matter but I am now questioning my identification of reds.
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the tree in the first picture is a red, not a silver.

the trees in the next two pictures are correctly identified.