Dead and dying trees

[maple flats]

Sugar maples do not like their toes wet. That being said , if they seeded in a small rise with wet around there they can adapt, but if a 10-20" tree gets the water table raised by beavers that can often cause some mortality for sure. It's a case of the tree likeing what it had and then that changes. Too much water on the roots actually drowns the tree, the roots need air too.

[Daveg]

I have spent the past week tapping my trees. I’m putting in about 340 taps this year. I tapped one section this afternoon and made a startling and concerning discovery. About 30 of the 120 trees (sugar maples) in this area are dead or dying. I noticed a couple trees last year in this section had dyed but the rest were seemingly healthy trees. This particular section is in a lower area and are smaller trees. I went back and checked my other areas and didn’t notice any other dying trees. Any ideas as to what might be causing this?

It sounds from your description that the die off happened very suddenly rather than slowly. Most sugar maple deaths are preceded by decades of decline. That being said, speculation would trend towards a sudden change in their environment. A distinguishing characteristic (low area) would lead to excess water being the culprit. A Google map view of your area shows a lot of agriculture with their attendant herbicides and pesticides. Hopefully, no chemicals are to blame. It's unlikely that crowding, insects, or acid rain killed them because those would have killed them slowly and the trees would have showed noticeable symptoms such as leaf and limb loss, bark degradation, low sap output . My guess would be more rain than usual, like that which caused the Great Lake Ontario Flooding.