What caused this in SYP log

[E-Tex]

what is this and/or what caused it?

Lightning?

[Texas Ranger]

wind shake and a twig

[Ianab]

I think both are branches. The top one you have just missed the knot, the lower one you have actually cut through the branch on an angle.

Eventually the branch has died and broken off, and healed over the stub, just before the tree was cut down.

Because the pattern in the growth rings goes all the way to the pith, that means that what ever created it has been there since the tree was a sapling, not some injury caused later, and I bet if you examine the bark of either that log, or the one it was cut from, you will see the signs in the bark of a healed over branch stub.

Lightning or a wind crack wont deform the growth rings in that way. They had to have grown like that, around a small branch.

[moodnacreek]

A wind crack; the problem with open grown trees.

[Southside]

Around here that is known as a spike knot.

[Banjo picker]

I guess there are exceptions, but most of the time a lightning strike will kill a pine.  Oaks not as bad to die.  Just what i have seen around this area.   Banjo

[Texas Ranger]

yup, on closer inspection what I thought was a crack, is a branch stub.  My bad.