Tree Identification - Northeastern Hardwoods

it's June here in Western New York and that means all the leaves are on and it's a great time to make a video showing you how to identify trees particular the hardwoods that have leaves on them one thing that kind of confuses everybody is that uh when you're talking about Hardwoods or soft Woods hard woods is anything with leaves on it whether or not their wood is actually hard or not and a soft wood is anything with needles on it whether or not their wood is actually soft or not we're filming in lth park today and one nice thing about uh doing a tree identification video here is that leth park has a great deal of diversity meaning that just about any species that grows in New York state you can find somewhere here in the park you can find a lot of species that don't grow in New York state because uh William prior leor did a lot of planting of trees that were given to them or acquired from other parts of the world it makes it a great place to study trees and learn how to identify the species this is a red oak tree uh this is one of the species that I make a lot of my bread and butter from it's it's a very valuable commercial tree uh it can get real big and real old and here in leth park there's if you like going to see Big Trees there's big Oaks to be seen here in leworth we'll go look for some later um but Oak can vary quite a bit uh in appearance the bark like on this one is fairly smooth um and Oak can have very gnarled bark sort of like alligator skin uh and part of that is because Red Oak is actually a a family of trees there's Red Oak Scarlet Oak Black Oak and pin oak all are in the red oak family and they all have fundamental similarities and they're often sold as the same Forest product the lumber from them red oak trees the bark often get smoother as you go towards the upper Limbs and most of your oak trees will have a really big robust Crown it it's shade intolerant so it actually needs a lot of light and uh Oak can grow pretty fast and it's the crown of the tree it is the engine of the wood production your oak leaves in general have this basic shape to them they have a a leading filament up the middle and then uh the kind of arms radiate off from there Red Oak the leaves aren't always this big but uh the difference between Red Oak and Scarlet Oak is that a red oak will have will be kind of more robust like this and a Scarlet Oak will be more likely to have kind of skinny arms to the leaf like that see same basic scheme to the leaf just a slightly different form in a stand with a closed canopy such as we're in right now it can be hard to find a Young Oak uh growing on the ground Oak seedlings or saplings because Oak acorns cannot take uh they can't germinate in the shade they need lots of direct sunlight so I had a hard time finding a leaf that I could reach CU all of them were on were pretty high off the ground found this up a branch that A storm blew off this kind of buoys your spirit to see giant red oak like the ones they have here members of the White Oak family have the classic Oak shape to the leaf but the fringes are rounded for the White Oak as opposed to pointed for members of the red oak fan family see all these Leaf fringes are rounded and to show you a white oak trunk I found you quite a specimen there this guy it's close to 4ot through White Oak bar is more furrowed than that of red oak uh it's at times it's almost like plates on the tree but it'd be very hard to confuse a white oak for a red oak just they have a look to them and once you see it there's no mistaking it uh the acorns of a white oak are way more palatable to deer and turkey and uh game animals uh I've tasted them uh White Oak acorns are kind of sweet whereas Red Oak acorns are bitter uh so for our Hunters this is a more prized tree to have on your land or your hunting land than red oak this is the black cherry tree it's got flaky bark that can look kind of purplish at times and sometimes it can get gum that oozes out of it this one does actually shows that tree is stressed for some reason but you don't always get that on black cherry uh it's often something of an ugly duckling tree when it's young it'll often be crooked and not that impressive to look at as it gets older uh this tree grows really fast it can straight out and become a really nice attractive impressive looking tree as it gets older they don't they kind of live fast and die young they don't get all that old but they can get pretty big the leaves of a cherry are vaguely football shaped and they're very finely toothy along the edges uh the Twigs are opposite meaning that they won't be a mirror image of each other and if you're ever confused about whether the The Twig you're looking at is a cherry uh break it off and then smell the broken end and it smells like dirt or like I hate to say it like pachuli or something it just has a an unpleasant smell this is a soft maple and it's one of those species that can give people fits because it can be hard uh to tell apart from itself and it can be hard to tell apart from hard maple um now first of all soft maple goes by several names uh it's Acer rub is the scientific name of this soft maple can be red maple or silver maple ah but it's the the wood is all the same product the lumber from it now you can see this has fairly smooth bark on it and this is also a soft maple and has rather flaky bar and the form of the tree can change uh within the woods and there's there's several uh ways you can tell them apart and you just put it all together to decide which species it is I don't know how well the camera is picking it up but the bark of a soft maple is fundamentally gray but if you look at it more closely you'll usually see uh almost purplish or greenish undertones to the color of it now as opposed to hard maple which is usually kind of silvery undertones to the bark that's one way of telling now here's something that may confuse things a bit in identifying soft maple um can you see on the trunk those parallel lines are sort of gill-like markings not every soft maple will have those you can see the pattern repeats itself to some extent down the trunk of the tree not every soft maple will have those gill-like markings on it but if the tree has gill-like markings on it it is certainly a soft maple so one big key in uh identifying your species is The Twig pattern what we have here is the leading twig and we have opposite opposite Twigs they grow mirror image of each other and any tree with an opposite twig pattern is either a maple or an ash or a dogwood um one thing that can confuse this is as the tree grows one half of the mirror image can break off at some point the tree keeps growing uh and it's it's also confusing when the the limbs are way up high where you can't pull one down and look at it here's another one where the the other half broke up and it just kept growing but the minute you see a single mirrored pair of Twigs like that you'll know that it's a maple an ash or a dogwood the leaves of the soft maple tree have that classic Canadian flag look to them the way that you tell uh soft maple from a hard maple is that in between the points of of your classic Maple Leaf shape uh it'll be toothy you get these fine teeth and I'm going to find a hard maple leaf later that will show it's a smooth line from point to point on a hard maple here's another soft maple that has a real pronounced Gill patterns on it again not every soft maple has this on it but when you see gild patterns on the tree it is certainly a soft maple this is a hard maple tree uh as a Forester in making this video I'm always tempted to look for a terrific saw log specimen uh in this case this one isn't it's got the knots and it's short stubby uh but uh hard maple goes by several names it's also sugar maple because this is the tree you tap to make syrup with uh it's also known as rock Maple or even I've heard it called White Maple before um it has a look to it the bark can be confused with soft maple but it's less likely to flake kind of the bark is pretty tight to it it uh tends to be grayish silver as opposed to soft maple which tends to be a purplish or greenish version of gray so so with the hard maple again we're looking for an opposite twig P pattern you have a leading twig and the smaller Twigs come off opposite each other so I can only mean that that's in the maple family Ash family or Dogwood family and again you can see how often one of the pairs will break off and you might get fooled by that but the minute you find any pairing of Limbs like that that's a giveaway the hard maple leaf has that classic Canadian flag shape to it but how you tell the difference between hard and soft maple is that when you go from point to point on hard maple it's a smooth line if there's any serrations on these fringes you'll know it's a in the soft maple family hard maple bark is usually tight unless the tree is sick it has silvery gray to it and it takes a while to develop an eye to tell this right away between hard and soft maple this is the white ash tree um I'm sorry to say that uh Ash as a species is uh kind of doomed on the continent because the emerald ash Bor uh if you you don't have it already in your neighborhood it's coming to an ash tree near you um Ashwood is real useful because the trees tendency to grow very straight has an open grain to it like uh like Oak but it's lighter um ash bark has a very typical pattern it's a tough pattern to describe but you know it when you see it and Ash can be confused with uh tulip popler which has a similar bark pattern but tulip popper bark is much much thicker than this you get the leading branch and then Twigs paired opposite each other so uh being an opposite twigged tree this is either an ash this is either an ash a maple or a dogwood uh Ash have what is called a compound leaf meaning that the leaf is not one body and has a a leading twig up the middle and then uh pairs of leaves off of that uh you know there's many trees that have compound leaves like this there's Hickory and walnut and sumac and uh Walnut will have more leaves in a cluster than this sumac 2 and Hickory can look a lot like this but uh a hickory the leaves will be for a hickory the leaves will be even less the same size than these uh Hickory will have like a really big one out here and really small ones back here Basswood trees have a vaguely heart-shaped Leaf yet pretty big and um any kind of caterpillar loves to chew on these so by the end of the summer uh the crown of the Basset will be full of chewed up Basswood leaves you see how they got a little start on it here Basswood bark is characterized by long lines that run up and down the tree when it rains the bark will turn almost black and we've had some rain recently so it's dark right now but typically Basswood bark will be kind of light gray like you can see here and uh the Fring body of a Basswood are these strings of little green berries just small and hard and uh they're not on yet so this is a beach tree there's bigger and more impressive ones than this in the par Park uh what makes this one special is that it is completely devoid of the beach park disease Beach scale disease um Beach normally has a perfectly smooth trunk like this and because of the beach scale disease it's hard to find one that looks like this anymore we'll find an example of a of a beach that's infected with Beach scale disease later u beach is not a valuable Forest product has never been a valuable Forest product that doesn't mean that it's not a useful forest forest product I love burning the stuff and so does everybody else who has a wood stove High BTUs in it uh the lumber from it uh it doesn't have much grain pattern to it it's not a particularly pretty wood um it's very very hard once dry and uh it as it dries it Chang is shape a lot a lot more so than other species I found in my wood shop so Beach leaves have that football shape they got the hooks the serrated edges on them they have kind of a waxy feel to them um when they when they turn in the fall they turn like a light tan and the leaves tend to stay on throughout much of the winter so you'll see see these tan Dead Leaves uh flapping on the on the trees all winter beach has a huge tendency to stump Sprout and root Sprout so you'll often see the under story just covered with uh Beach seedlings coming up either from old stumps or from the roots which is why it's something you have to uh control when you're managing a wood lot for valuable Forest Products most of the beach you find in the woods nowadays is going to look a lot more like this stricken by the beach park disease uh without that the beach would be nice and smooth but uh this is what they look like mostly and in response to getting Beach Park disease Beach send out all these root Sprouts all these seedlings you see on the ground our beach that spring up from the roots of the one that I just showed you they just carpet the ground and they can quickly take over and over time you have a forest that's got nothing but Beach and all of it's sick the beach beach does give out Beach nuts which is an important Mast producer for Wild game but it's uh not that reliable it puts out seed only every 5 to S years which means that something like Oak which drops it a its acorns every two or three years is a much better provider for animals in the woods members of the Aspen family have at least part of the limbs and trunk that is this gleaming bone white uh Aspen is of often known as popler or pole uh that includes Quaking Aspen and Big Tooth Aspen this is a quaking aspen here people sometimes mistake this for Birch cuz uh Paper Birch and River Birch will be white but uh there's nothing flaky about Aspen bark it's smooth and Bone white like that and when the trees get large the the base of the tree is sometimes knobby like an oak you can c sort of see that on this one down near at the bottom but any member of the Aspen family and the upper parts of the tree at least will just be bone white and smooth like that and that is the Quaking Aspen doing as its name implies the tiniest Breeze will set those leaves to Trembling this tree is I consider it something of a curveball species cuz most land owners I work with have never heard of it before it's a cucumber tree it's in the Magnolia family it gets its name from the fruiting body when it first hits the ground it looks like a little dill pickle and it quickly falls apart into these petals uh but it's it it's a tight little Mass that's that's shaped like a little sandwich pickle it first hits the ground and then it falls apart quickly uh you can tell this looks an awful lot like other species you can easily confuse it for Basswood or something like that the giveaway are the big football shaped leaves nothing no other large tree has a leaf quite like that they're smooth on the edge they can be different sizes you know but uh they you look up in the crown you see these great big football shaped leaves and nothing else looks like that the Tulip popper is so named because they blossom little tulip tulip shaped flowers that unfortunately don't last very long and you never get to see them because they're way up high in the canopy of the tree by the time they drop to the ground they're a bit disheveled but uh tulip popler can grow to be a massive tree they typically grow really straight and tall and fast they got this thick bark on them that when they're smaller can be confused with ash bark the leaf of the Tulip popper has this four loed look to it and nothing else looks quite like that so that's the big giveaway if you want confuse a tulip popular for an ash or something these Big Four loed Leaves up in the crown and I'm awful glad I found this one because uh all these tulip popular in this Woods including that one there the nearest Leaf is about 60 ft above my head so I had to look for one that was kind enough to drop this is the Bark of the bitternut Hickory and this can look fairly different from tree to tree it has a pattern to it that can be similar to Ash but it's going to be flatter and whereas ash bark has just a faint amount of sponginess to it this doesn't it's it's very hard and flat uh sometimes bitter nut Hickory has barked it's almost smooth but it can still have uh this pattern kind of in it now the leaf of the Hickory looks very similar to The Leaf of the ash cuz it's a compound leaf has uh seven members to it and the difference being how you see how much bigger the tip leaves are from the from the bottom ones uh that's one of the giveaways your shag bark Hickory couldn't be more self-explanatory uh it's got these SP that will peel off in long vertical pieces like that has compound leaves like every other Hickory and it does drop Hickory nuts but that bark is the dead giveaway you won't confuse that for anything else your hickory nut comes in a pod that's in four quad quadrants like this and the quadrants fall apart it's green when it hits the ground uh but that won't be till the the end of the summer and your quadrants come apart and the hard nut is inside and by this time of year all those Hickory nuts will be either sprouted or browsed by animals so the pot is all I've got to show you right now the Sycamore starts off flaky at its base but as you go up the tree it'll get flaky it'll it'll the the bark will almost fall off and kind of plates that expose a light colored under bark and finally at the top of the tree it's this light colored smooth limbs it's uh it often but not always grows along river banks it likes river banks uh this one is quite a ways uphill from the river um its seed is very interesting it's a round ball that falls off in the seed uh it's about the size of a golf ball and then it kind of deteriorates away it's all these thousands of tiny little uh filaments they're interesting to look at and it's not the right time of year to show you one I found one of the Sycamore flowering bodies and it's round like this and uh I was saying how their seed is this same shape only much bigger Sycamore leaves have a vaguely Maple like shape but they're broader yeah they're they're they have the Five Points like a maple does or same sheet but they're stretched horizontally a bit

Channel: Peter Collin

Views: 257,690

Keywords: Hardwood, Tree (Literature Subject), woods

Id: 5E-mgku40-0

Length: 26min 44sec (1604 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 03 2015