Old Sugar

flying french man · Dec 20, 2015

Pretty sad , but we had to remove this 150 years old sugar maple this december. We had a lot of problem with them this year , don't know if there any relations with acidification of soil....But this one had a real bad die back, one half was completely dead and the other section was in a bad situation too. It was a fun removal , plus we have prune all the other trees on the property. Problem with the battery of the go pro again....some of the work wasn't film. Thanks for watching.

LandonPainter · Dec 22, 2015

Nice work French man. I have a couple clients with mature sugar maples that also had significant dieback this last year. I recently read an article in Science daily that said sugar maples are in decline nationwide. The article suggested that increased levels of carbon in the atmosphere leads to more acidic rain falling and sugar maples have a low tolerance for that.

flying french man · Dec 23, 2015

LandonPainter said:
Nice work French man. I have a couple clients with mature sugar maples that also had significant dieback this last year. I recently read an article in Science daily that said sugar maples are in decline nationwide. The article suggested that increased levels of carbon in the atmosphere leads to more acidic rain falling and sugar maples have a low tolerance for that.

That is bad news....Also last year we had a really cold winter , and the squirrels have eat the young bark of the smaller branchs of sugar maple , looking for sugar i guess. They where eating all around the branch , wich make impossible for the tree to circulate the water and nutriements. I've seen mature tree with so much bark remove (40%) that it could be enough to kill it.

Steve Connally · Dec 23, 2015

Great video. Thanks for posting

LandonPainter · Dec 23, 2015

Yeah squirrel girdling is a real problem here in the front range of Colorado. Here they really go after elms and Russian olives for some reason. Keep the videos coming. Cheers.

JeffGu · Dec 23, 2015

LandonPainter said:
...and Russian olives for some reason...

Yeah, what is up with that? Here in Nebraska they gnaw on the elms, but don't girdle them... but Russian Olives they girdle about a 2" swath around them, about 2 feet up from the ground. I've watched them doing it, hanging onto the side of the trunk, upside-down.

I can't figure out what the attraction is to the little, tree rat bastards.