Identifying Maple & Birch Trees For Sap & Syrup Production

[Music] hey everyone I'm Madam heritton and today we are going to learn how to identify certain trees that you can tap for sap and syrup production and we are going to focus on four trees in particular today two maple trees and two birch trees and all four of these trees are very commonly found in the northeastern United States especially here in Western Pennsylvania where I live and we're only going to focus on the identification of trees specifically in their winter outfits today we are not going to focus on how to actually tap a maple tree or a birch tree and the methods involved in sap and ser production just the identification because this is probably the most important First Step involved in actually tapping your trees you should know what these trees look like before putting holes in them and this is a video that I wish I had access to early on when I was learning how to tap my maple trees because I only had a vague understanding of winter tree identification and actually what maple trees look like and so I went around and I tapped maybe six or seven different trees my first year and luckily one of those was a sugar maple tree and almost all the rest of those were Norway maple trees and if you know anything about Norway maple trees you probably know that number one Norway Maples are very invasive here in Pennsylvania and in the northeastern United States and also that their sap is pretty milky and it can kind of taint final syrup product however I didn't really notice that milkiness in that sap and I thought the sap tasted pretty good so I still drank it anyway and I mixed it with my sugar maple sap but unfortunately I did tap a malberry tree my first year and if you know anything about malberry trees you know that they don't look anything like maple trees even in the winter months they're as different as night and day and so I was wondering why the tap was dry nothing was coming out of that malberry tree I thought it was a maple tree and I eventually realized it was a malberry tree later on when the leaves finally developed and I thought wow what a big mistake that was luckily nobody got hurt maybe the malberry tree but I think it's doing all right right now anyway I don't want you to make that mistake I want you to be able to properly identify certain trees especially in their winter outfits so that's what we are going to focus on today but first we're going to take a look at sap flow and the mechanisms involved in that whole freeze th cycle with maple trees so today is the perfect day to tap a maple tree because of the temperature so maple trees rely on something known as the freeze thaw cycle in order to get that sap flow moving last night the temperatures were below freezing So Below 32° fahit and today the temperatures are approaching the mid 40s and that's what maple trees really like it's early February right now and so February into early March is a good time to tap your maple trees not all trees but maple trees in particular and if you look at the theory involved in sap flow you will see various mechanisms being proposed by researchers over the past couple of decades however the leading theory today is not necessarily transpiration it's not necessarily root pressure but stem pressure due to that freeze th cycle so declining temperature causes water uptake in the xylm which is part of the vascular transport system in the sugar maple tree at the same time gas is Contracting namely carbon dioxide in the sapwood the water that's been pulled into the xylm freezes and as water freezes it expands and this expansion causes a decrease in those air spaces which increases the internal pressure then upon thong as the temperatures are warming gas pressure forces the sap out due to positive pressure and it force it out of those holes that we place in the maple trees and we can collect our sap that way and so now that we understand the mechanism involved in maple trees that's also the mechanism involved in walnut trees like black walnut and butternut but not necessarily birch trees it's a different mechanism altogether but now that we understand a little bit about the sap flow mechanism in maple trees let's go take a closer look at some of these maple trees and learn how to identify the ones that we may be interested in tapping we're going to start with the maple trees because they are the most commonly tapped trees in the northeastern United States and if you have access to Maple trees especially sugar maple trees I would suggest starting with that tree the reason that sugar maple trees are the most popular trees when it comes to tapping and why it's named the sugar maple is that it has the highest concentration of sugar in its sap so you're looking at 2% sugar which is mainly sucrose in that sap so you can boil that down and it'll take about 40 gallons of sap to produce one gallon of syrup Acer sacrum the sugar maple tree typically grows to be about 70 to 100 ft tall and the diameter is about 2 and 1/2 to 3 ft wide sugar Maples used to be way more common in the northeastern United States and in Pennsylvania in the early 1900s it was a dominant tree here in Pennsylvania however with recent climatic changes with air pollution and acid precipitation these these trees are very sensitive to all those conditions and so a lot of them have been dying out and being replaced by other trees specifically red maple trees but you could tap those as well we're going to get to that one in a second now when you look at the bark of the sugar maple tree this is probably the key identifying characteristic in the winter time because you don't have a lot to work with with many trees unless they're evergreen trees but unfortunately the sugar maple is not an evergreen tree so the bark is light brownish gray in color it's not pure brown it's not whitish like you might see in a white oak tree it's not yellowish like you might see in a Yellow Birch Tree but it's light brownish gray and it's not completely smooth either it has longitudinal strips or plates that are irregular in shape and size so when you look at this tree right here you will see these little plates right here it's definitely not completely smooth and you'll see that it's light brownish gray now the leaves might not be the easiest to identify in the winter because on deciduous trees you look up into the canopy you'll see that all the leaves have fallen down give or take a few but if you look around the trunk of the tree you will see most of the leaves that you were looking for so just pick them up they might be dried but you can flatten them out and try to key them out that way so when we look around this tree right here I'm picking up some of these leaves and what do you know these are sugar maple leaves right here so what do these look like well typically you're looking at leaves that are between 3 and 5 in wide and long as well and they are pmat Lo so it kind of looks like your hand when you spread it out typically with Five Loaves sometimes you might see three but you're typically looking at five loes with tips that are pointed also the sinuses of the sugar maple leaves are rounded and so the loes are right here you can see there's one big one right here there's one big one up here there's one right here and they're typically five around here but the sinuses are these indentations in here and as you can see this one is rounded in between here it's not completely pointed into a vshape when we get to the red maple next you'll see that that one is completely straight almost like a V but this one is rounded right here so you're looking at tips that are ever so slightly around it and sinuses that are arounded as well and you look at these leaves and it's probably sugar maple leaves other key identifying characteristics with the sugar maple in the winter time would be the buds but if you're looking at a tree this size you look up and well there's no way you're going to look at the buds of the developing leaves unless you've got a ladder and I don't really hike with the ladder I don't know about you maybe you hike with the ladder I really don't so you might have to find the smaller trees but the identifying characteristics are a bit different in the younger trees compared to the bigger trees but if you do happen to come across the buds they're brownish and they're pointed and they've got overlapping scales and again they're opposite one another so they're not alternate not staggered left right left right but they're opposite one another and one of the reasons that Sugar Maples are such great tapable trees not only do they have such a high sugar concentration 2% which is mostly sucrose but you've got a long tapping season so when the days are a little warmer but the nights are still freezing that season's very long because the buds don't open up for quite some time so silver Maples will open up earlier red Maples will open up earlier and usually that's the end of the tapping season for that tree when the buds start to swell and open up but with a sugar maple you're looking at buds that will extend weeks into that tapping season so that's why a lot of people like to tap sugar Maples not only because the high sugar concentration but the long tapping season as well now as I briefly mentioned a lot of the characteristics that I talked about especially with the bark applies to older trees younger trees are going to look a little differently but I'm talking about an older tree right here and honestly when you're trying to tap trees you want to look for the older trees because you don't want to unnecessarily harm a younger tree that hasn't built up a lot of its defenses and you don't want to really tap into trees that are too young but this one's a nice older tree right here this is definitely a tree that I would consider tapping and as you can see the bark it's slightly furrowed but in the younger trees you're not really going to see that it's going to be much smoother but this is definitely a tree that I would consider tapping anyway those are the characteristics for the sugar maple tree AER sacrum the number one tree that you're probably going to look for let's go take a look around and see if we can find another maple tree tree that we would consider tapping now we are going to take a look at another commonly tapped tree in the northeastern United States and this one is Acer ruum or the red maple tree and so most of those characteristics that we describe for the Acer genus apply to this tree as well meaning it's deciduous tree oppositely arranged leaves simple leaves and it's got multiple loes as well this is Believe It or Not the most common Forest Tree in Pennsylvania right now it wasn't always that way but multiple trees have been dying back including the sugar maple trees it seems like this is kind of taking its place and this is a very adaptable species and you will find it down in swampy areas you also find it in very dry areas at top ridges in association with hickory trees and red oak trees and white oak trees and cherry trees as well the sugar maple tree usually you find that in rich moist wooded areas in association with hemlocks and beaches and Basswood and ash trees but not so with the red maple sometimes you'll see it in association with those trees but typically you're see seeing it in second and third growth forests that have a lot of you know Japanese Barberry a lot of privet around a lot of disturbed areas you're finding red maple trees but you could tap this tree nonetheless now the red maple tree will grow to be about as tall as a sugar maple tree so you're looking at you know 80 to 100t tall 2 and 1/ half to 3T in diameter but it doesn't live to be as old as a sugar maple tree you'll see sugar maple trees over 200 250 years old in some pretty remote areas here in Pennsylvania with red Maples you know many of them will start dying at about 150 years old you'll see some obviously much much much much younger but you'll see some occasionally older than that but typically by about 150 years old they're pretty much done sugar Maples will continue to go when you're looking at a red maple tree the sugar concentration isn't as high as a sugar concentration in a sugar maple tree so you're looking at you know about half the sugar concentration still multiple operations utilize red maple trees so it's not necessarily an inferior product you just need more of it in order to produ produce your syrup now some key identifying characteristics again we're going to start with a bark because there's not much else to go by we don't really have many of the fresh leaves or flowers to go by in the wintertime but we're mainly looking at bark right now whenever you look at the bark of a red maple tree you'll see that it's typically light gray so whereas the sugar maple tree was more brownish when you're looking at red maple trees it's typically grayish and it's almost beach-like when young so it's very very smooth but as it gets older it starts to become fissured and rougher and whenever you look at red maple trees towards the bottom in older trees you'll see that it's fissured and rough and as you go towards the top of a red maple tree it's smoother and I don't know if you can see this right here very well but right back here is a younger trunk right here and you'll see that this is much smoother this is typically what the younger maple trees look like and right here this is much older so you can see that's deeply fissured and it's rougher right here so younger right here and it's smoother and then rougher right here and it's fissured and furrowed the leaves are about 2 and 1/2 to 4 in wide and long as well and they're typically smaller than the sugar maple leaves those can be up to about 5 in wide and it's got usually three loes so whereas the sugar maple leaves have about five loes the red Maples typically three but you will see five Lo leaves as well and it's typically more pointed in appearance compared to the sugar maple leaf also those sinuses that we talked about those indentations in here remember the sugar maple had the rounded sinus when you're looking at a red map Leaf sinus you'll see that it's v-shaped or pointed right here so You' got the pointed tips but you also have the v-shaped sinuses so the sugar maple the first tree we talked about rounded but the red maple right here is v-shaped now Leaf buds that's another way to properly identify maple trees in the winter months and if you're lucky enough to find a younger tree you can analyze those buds and see what they look like now one of the reasons that they call it red maple is because of the leaf buds but also the young Twigs as well they are Reddish in appearance so if you look at those you'll see they're reddish and they're also much bigger than you might see in sugar maple buds so the sugar maple buds are smaller and pointed and brown whereas the red maple buds are bigger and they are Reddish and these will start to Leaf out earlier than the sugar maple leaves so red maple tree we talked about the sugar maple tree as well there are two maple trees that a lot of people tap here in the northeastern United States you can tap many other maple trees as well a lot of people will tap even box elder trees silver maple trees black maple trees we're just going to focus on those two today then we're going to look around try to find birch trees as well because you can tap those so we're going to move away from the maple trees and into the birch trees because several birch trees can be successfully tapped for sap and syrup production and birch trees belong to the family beela and the genus is Betula and Betula is characterized by deciduous trees that have simple leaves that are alternately arranged so not opposite like you might find in a maple tree but alternate staggered left right left right and the Birch leaves are elliptical and doubly saw too so they have many fine teeth around the margin here in Pennsylvania we have about five native birch trees and two that are non-native but naturalized around the state if we would tap into a birch tree right now we would not get sap if we would have into a maple tree right now we would get sap why won we get sap from this right now so the maple trees and the black walnut trees they rely on the freeze Tha cycle this requires the soil temperatures to be about 50° f consistently because this relies on root pressure in order to drop the sap same thing going on with grape species as well that's sap production so this is root pressure not the freeze thaw cycle utilizing stem pressure that we see in the maple tree so we're going to have to wait until the maple trees stop in several weeks from now and then once the maple sap run stops that's a good time to start tapping your birch trees and this will last for a couple weeks as well now birch trees contain much much much much much less sugar in their saps still they could be successfully tapped you just got to harvest much more sap in order to turn that into syrup we're going to start with this tree right here which is one of my favorite trees in Pennsylvania and this is the Yellow Birch vetula alagani Anis so the yellow birch tree is the largest of our native birch trees here in Pennsylvania and you typically find it in association with beach trees with white pine with black Birch and hemlock trees as well and if you just take a look around me you can tell this is a different habitat than the one that I was exploring looking for those maple trees you see there's a lot more green around a lot of hemlock trees some white pine trees down there as well and you could hear some water as well so that's the kind of habitat that you're looking for when you're looking for birch trees specifically Yellow Birch trees but also black birch trees as well the Yellow Birch Tree Grows will be about 90 ft tall and about 2 and 1/2 ft in diameter and something that's unique about the Yellow Birch Tree in particular is that it typically Sprouts on logs or stumps and it appears perched or would I like to say non-committed so if you take a look around and you're looking for trees that are kind of perched up in the air and it looks like they're non-committed or maybe sometimes they're even sprouting on Sandstone Boulders that you might see around here it could be a Yellow Birch Tree some other trees do that as well not all of them do but typically you're going to see that with yellow birch trees now the bark of the Yellow Birch Tree is shiny yellowish gray and a bit Tanish in appearance when you look at it you'll see that it's kind of peeling off in papery strips and and those strips are curled at the margins and that's one of the key identifying characteristics for many birch trees that papery bark that kind of peels right off not all birch trees have that but you will see it with a yellow birch tree that you can almost just kind of peel this right off right here if you look really closely you will see that it's curled at the edges as well the inner bark has a slight odor of winter green so if you crush those Twigs if you scratch it and you smell it you'll smell that fragrance of Wintergreen which is a compound known as methyl salicylate now it's not as concentrated as as you might find in Black birch trees it's much more concentrated in Black birch trees than here but if you do scratch it inner bark if you scratch a twig you will smell that odor of methyl salic which is that winter green Essence now the buds of yellow birch trees are typically a/4 of an inch long and they're pointed and brownish and the young Twigs are green and slightly hairy but they become Brown and smooth as they age and that's a key identifying characteristic between the next tree that we'll talk about which is the black birs tree when you look at those Twigs they're not hairy like you would find any Yellow Birch Tree but as they both mature they're both smooth so it's kind of hard to tell once the Twigs get much older but in young Twigs in the Yellow Birch Tree you'll see it's slightly hairy and when you look at the leaves of yellow birch trees you will see that they're elliptical in shape remember they're alternately arranged left right left right they're stagger not opposite like you would find in a maple tree and you look at the margin and it's doubly soft tooth so they're many many fine teeth it's not going to cut you anything but many fine teeth all the way around the margin and when you look at the main vein right here the mid rib you you see all these lateral veins coming out they're completely straight they're about 9 to 11 pairs up and down the leaf the Leaf's between about you know 2 to 4 in Long now when you're tapping a birch tree you're going to need a lot more sap than a maple tree in order to produce syrup so with birch tree you're looking at you know .5% sugar concentration compared to the 2% sugar concentration found in a sugar maple and a sugar concentration is completely different so the sugar maple tree you're looking at primarily sucrose as the main disaccharide sugar when you're looking at birch trees the sugar concentration is mainly made up of fructose and glucose with only a little bit of sucrose and a little bit of galactose as well so it gives it a completely different flavor and you're going to need well over 80 gallons of sap to produce one gallon of syrup now why you may be interested in tapping this over sugar maple trees is that the sap actually might even be healthier in yellow birch trees compared to sugar maple trees at least that's what some research suggest that the sap in the syrup of yellow birst trees actually has a higher mineral content lower sugar content obviously we just talked about that in a higher orac value which is oxygen radical absorbance capacity meaning total antioxidant capacity is higher in the Yellow Birch Tree syrup compared to the sugar maple syrup the only downside is that you need a lot more of this to produce the same amount of syrup that you would get in a sugar maple tree regardless you can tap this tree this is the Yellow Birch Tree vegetal alagani Anis it does taste very good I've had the syrup before much different than regular maple syrup but it's very good nonetheless we talked about the Yellow Birch Tree bet aligan Anis let's take a look around and see if we can find another birch tree I think I see one right over there that would be the black birch tree so let's go over there and learn how to identify that one all right are you still with me I know we talked about a lot today three species of trees you can tap for sap and syrup and we're going to talk about one more and this is the final one but honestly we could talk about over two dozen species that you could eventually tap because there are that many plus many many more we're going stop with this one right here which is the black Birch Beal lenta also known as sweet birch or cherry Birch and this one kind of resembles the Yellow Birch Tree but there's some key identifying characteristics but you could tap it nonetheless and the syrup will resemble the syrup that you would make from the Yellow Birch Tree as well so they call it the Sweet Birch because this one contains methyl salic silate which is that winter green Essence that we talked about in the Yellow Birch Tree but it's way more concentrated in here so I took a knife and I went into the inner bark right here and then I smelled it I would smell that winter green Aroma same thing if you take a twig and you scratch it you would get that as well this was a very popular tree for a long time to create that winter green fragrance however now it's pretty much all synthetically done so that's why they call it the Sweet Birch they also call it the Cherry Birch because it kind of resembles a cherry tree when you look at these horizontal lenil right here so the lenil are horizontal porous openings that are involved in gas exchange and to a smaller degree transpiration and when you look at cherry trees you will see some of these horizontal striations as well but this is the black birch tree when we look at the bark of this tree we see that it has these vertical cracks in it and that's one of the key identifying characteristics that I look for you're not always going to see that in field guides that vertical cracking that you see in this birch tree right here but whenever I see it just out in the field that's one of the things I look for and you're not going to see the peely bark that you might see in the Yellow Birch Tree so the Yellow Birch Tree we see the bar can just peel right off and it's got those curled ends if you look at this tree right here there's really nothing that I can peel off other than from this vertical crack right here so that's one of the key identifying differentiations between the black birch tree and the Yellow Birch Tree the buds of the black birch tree resemble the buds in the yellow birs trees you're looking at about a quar of an inch long brown and pointed when you look at the Young Twigs though that's how you differentiate between the two if you're looking at a smaller tree remember a little hairy in the Twigs of the Yellow Birch Tree but not really hairy in the young Twigs of the black birch tree the leaves they look like one another as well however the leaves of the black birch tree typically have more lateral veins maybe about a dozen of them all the way up to 18 compared to the 9 to 11 lateral veins in the leaves of the Yellow Birch Tree but doubly saw tooth like you would find in the Yellow Birch Tree and the habitat is a little different they do overlap so you will find Yellow Birch trees in this habitat that I'm exploring right now but you will also find black birch trees in drier areas the top ridges in association with oak trees and hickory trees as well you won't find your yellow bir trees in those areas those like the cooler moisture areas including the slopes where the hemlocks grow when you look at a distribution map usually the black birst trees go down farther south whereas the yellow birst trees stay a little farther north so black birst tree sweet birch tree Cherry birch tree all names to describe Benta definitely a taable tree that you can tap for sap and syrup all right so there we have it four species that you could tap for sap and syrup production we talked about Acer sacrum the sugar maple Acer ruum the red maple betel alagani Anis the yellow birch tree and Bal lenta the black birch tree or the sweet birch tree the Cherry birch tree whatever you want to call it and of course that's just a brief list among many that we could discuss when it comes to sap and syrup we're just going to stop with some of the most commonly found trees here in the northeastern United States especially here in Pennsylvania and I encourage you to take this information and actually apply it learn the art of tapping trees and learn to make your own Ser or maybe even take it a step further and turn that into sugar you know the maple trees and the birch trees maybe the h horn beam trees and the black water trees and the sore trees they teach us valuable lessons they teach us how to directly reconnect to our landscape not only that they teach us how to then build ourselves out of the elements that build up this land you know sugar is not the easiest thing to acquire in nature might be the easiest thing to acquire in the grocery store but not the easiest thing to acquire in nature but leave it to the birch trees and the maple trees to teach us how easy it is to do that thanks so much for watching this video I truly appreciate it I encourage you to head on over to learnr land.com sign up for the email newsletter feel free to subscribe to my YouTube channel or follow me on social media at learn yourland thanks again I truly appreciate it I'll see you on the next [Music] video

Channel: Learn Your Land

Views: 107,380

Keywords: Adam Haritan, Learn Your Land, Wild Foodism, Foraging Pittsburgh, Western Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania, Wild, Foraging, Eat Wild, Hunt, Hike, Nature, Hunter Gatherer, Maple, Trees, Birch, Maple Syrup, Tapping Trees, Syrup Production, Tree Identification, Mushrooms, Fungi, Plants, McConnells Mill State Park, Portersville, Lenape, Sugarbush, God, Universe, Arthur Haines, Stuart Wilde, David Wolfe, Daniel Vitalis

Id: a5jUYx8xObE

Length: 24min 27sec (1467 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 13 2017