Ash trees

[SwampDonkey]

Give Peterson a gander at your local book store.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0395904552/ref=sib_rdr_toc/104-9722087-7765541?%5Fencoding=UTF8&p=S002#reader-page

Heres a book on tree bark

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0881925764/qid=1075856691/sr=1-6/ref=sr_1_6/104-9722087-7765541?v=glance&s=books

Beware that tree bark is a fools way to identify tree species since site, geography and climate can blow this technique out the window in a hurry. The only diffinative methods are flowers, leaves, buds and vascular bundles and minute wood properties.

cheers

[Tom]

While those items may insure that the ID is correct, we have sawyers who depend on their ability to idenify logs in the log yard by the only thing visible to them, the bark.  Foresters who live in areas where trees lose their leaves must depend on bark for ID'ing as well.  One of our administrators, Ron Wenrich, is a forester who cruises and has many times here talked of having to ID trees in the field by their bark.

[SwampDonkey]

Tom:

Yes, that is true. But it takes an experienced eye to be able to do this. For someone learning their species you have to use anatomical features to id your species. After your comfortable with the species then you can be fairly confident id'ing the trees by the bark. I hope you paid attention in dendro class ;)

I've tripped up a good many bark ID folks over the years. I can take you to mixed maple stands and the bark of both red and sugar are indistinguishable. Also, I bet I can trip you up on white birch and grey birch if you only look at the bark (this trips up tree thinners all the time). Some areas here we have old growth yellow birch with flaky silver-grey bark and pink wood which looks like old growth black cherry with its flaky bark. Balm-of-gilead has been confused with red oak. Some areas black cheery looks like sugar maple bark, and not flaky at all. Trembling aspen is confused with largetoothed aspen. Suppressed, dry barked balsam fir looks like white spruce bark sometimes. Hemlock even gets mixed up with white pine. What about all those hickory species, how the heck you gonna sort them by bark?  Even the oaks. Its a bark buyer's nightmare  

[Tom]

I'm sure glad I don't have all of those trees to worry about. :D

Experience helps, I know. We have loggers that use the terms Pine and hardwood to make their loads.  I 've spent many an interesting afternoon showing them the difference in the different pines and hardwoods.  They are generally anxious to learn but  haven't had anyone take the time to interest them in it.   They like it when you can tell them what the tree may be good for rather than it is just different.

I've had to ID wood from the bark or cut end of a log and, if I didn't live next to these trees, wouldln't be able to come close.  Coming close is all I can do.  Sometimes I'm right.  Familiarity is important.

I have trouble with some of the pines down here.  When the tree is cut down and I don't know where it grew, it gets really difficult.  I've ID'ed different pines from the smell  because I couldn't see the bark.  Where it's difficult to do an identification of wood without flowers, bark, environment, and all that stuff, it's still important, from a practical standpoint, to be able to ID wood on the fly.  

I mostly wanted to confront the comment "Beware that tree bark is a fools way to identify tree species' .  Sometimes the bark is all you have and an experienced Forester may take exception to being catagorized like that.

Dendro Class?  That was too new when I was in school to have a class on it. :D

[OneWithWood]

Geez, Swamp, I must be a fool  (don't you all break your fingers agreeing with me  :D )

I rely heavily on bark id because I cannot see the leaves of the trees I am interested in because my eysight is poor and the the crown is often blocked by the understory.  When I am unsure I look at the general shape of the tree and the site to refine my guess.  I am no expert and I am learning everyday but I still start with the bark.  It helps that my woods has only a handfull of pine trees.

[SwampDonkey]

Figures of speach.
I was strictly speaking that it was unwise to use bark alone. Nobody on here are fools, they might act a little odd at times though (including yours truly). ;) When your in the stand of trees and can't see the leaves or buds up there, do you not look on the ground beneath the tree? Fruits, leaves and branches galore. Just in case the bark doesn't turn the light on?
The hickories would surely trip me up, just not enough experience with their ID. The pines of the south and other side of the Mississippi would be a challance without my keys. Heck I still can't find any difference in Virginia pine and jack pine, is there? Red spruce looks the same in the smokies as it does out on the back 40 here

I'm quite experienced with tree id for northeastern species and quite a few as far south as NC and also western Canadian species. I hold a timber cruisers certificate which isn't issued by General Mills or Kellogs.  ;D

I've been responsible for marketing hardwood and softwood species when I was working at the forest products marketing board ($1 mill'n sales annually of primary products for two small counties). I do look at the bark of these bolts laying on the ground, but I also take a peak at the end grain and sniff the odor of the sawdust if unsure. Sometimes your lucky if there might be green leaves attached on a tiny epicormic hardwood branch. Also, some species are just plain obvious by bark alone, you have to admit and around here its quite definative once your used to growth characteristics of the area.
Id'ing by other means is quite practical if the logs are worth $80 a piece  and you don't want to make a mistake in paying for balm-of-gilead instead of red oak. If your a log buyer for a mill I think you'll be inspecting each piece for species, defects and scale or places like Columbia Forest Products would be saying bye bye.

cheers

[OneWithWood]

Yes, I do look on the ground at the twigs and leaves.  Fortunately all my leaves are marked on the back as to which tree they came from - it is a big help  :D :D :D ;D

Sorry, I could not resist . . .

Hickories are hard to tell apart at times.  I feel better knowing that even the pros have some difficulty with them.  If it is not a shagbark I am looking in the book and all around.

[Ron Scott]

There's nothing wrong with using all the identifiers available to you, even "the book". I always carry one in my cruiser vest for the "tough ones" even though I use the bark ID often as it might be the best identifyer available at the time. Experience with the various species that you encounter every day helps a lot and the "strange one" will usually stand out, where "the book" might be needed.

It always amazes me how well the loggers and scalers without any dendrology learning know their species.  

[SwampDonkey]

Ron:

Yes loggers know their species well, especially the experienced ones. They've been there done that so many times its bound to sink in. Alot of'em have learnt the hard way. ;)

[logbutcher]

Msr Swamp: thx for the tips. Invaluable.
I love it when you talk this way   ;D ;D  ----  "epicormic", "vascular", etc...
Two books have been helpful over the years:
Petrides "Field Gulde to Trees and Shrubs" (one of the Peterson Guides you recommend). It is kind of obtuse, difficult to use quickly in the field w a group or in a winter wind.
The other is a jewel of a tiny field gulde: by the Watts "Winter Tree Finder" that concentrates on bud scar ID in conjunction w seeds and bark.
That 'bark book' looks interesting, and by a Swiss watchmaker !
Do you know offhand the Btu rating of black ash compared w white ash ? Both seem to have the quality of being able to burn them green. The Btu ratings of species don't always agree w one another.
Stay warm. 8)

[Corley5]

If your feet are wet it's a black ash ;D  I burned some black a couple years ago that we cut as part of our cedar operation and it burned nice down to fine ash ;).  The fool would be the one who took off his snow shoes and dug through 3 feet of snow looking for a leaf, fruit or bud to identify the tree in question ;) :D :D :D :D  The only trees up here I ever have to look at twice are basswood and ash.  This is seldom and requires a closer look at the top of the tree.  Bark is how I almost always identify a tree.  In a Natural Resouce Management class I once took the instructor told me that I couldn't identify trees anymore I had to let other class members do it.  The instructor and I got in an argument one day over whether a tree was a quaking or big tooth aspen.  Judging from the bark texture and color and the size of the tree I'm still sure to this day that it's a big tooth aspen.  She on the other hand swore up and down that it was a quaking aspen.  We did find several leaves on the ground that were from a big tooth but the majority were quaking but there were some quaking aspens in the immediate vicinity .  It was fun and in the end we both agreed to disagree.  I still got an A ;)

[logbutcher]

Swamp : "petiolules, blotches, brunisols, luvisols, arthropod."
You gotta stop that !  :P  . That kind of talk will get you deported.
Bark: one guide says black ash bark is "...smooth, soft-scaly, easily rubbed off,...." Another "...rather tight and furrowed, but may be somewhat scaly." Whew...
Guess the " wet feet " clinches the deal on the ash species: black ash. I'll be looking more carefully at fruit (samara), leaves, and flowers whenever spring decides to arrive. Probably in May this year again.
Nice discussion and informative guys. At least no one here is so arrogant sure of always being correct as in some of the other forums e.g. chainsaws. :(

[SwampDonkey]

 :D  :D  :D

Yup Corley I am the same.  Although my instructor didn't tell me not to ID the trees ahead of the class. ;)  I caught my instructor on a couple mistakes heheheh. But aside from that, I remember one day in the field ID'ing trees and the professor came along with us. In one section of the woodlot there were alot of maple saplings, thick. He says to two of us, what species is this. I was more cautious than the other guy, because I suspected something was up. The other guy says sugar maple right off the bat. I hesitated, looked at the bark and buds. Well right off the top it wasn't a sugar maple because the buds weren't sharp and pointy, or light brown. And I knew it wasn't red maple, the only other natural commercial maple up here (besides the odd striped maple). But, I was also aware that Norway Maple was abundant in the city because of ornamental value (not all Norway maple has green leaves, some crimson). Norway and sugar maple bark are practicly identical here. Any way I said Norway maple. The professor goes to the tree takes a leaf and shows the other guy the vascular bundles where the leaf attaches to the stem and behold there was milk white sap oozing from it. Definately not any native maple here. Norway maple it was.  Another situation we were in a  red spruce stand and had to identify the trees by anatomical features, bark didn't count. Well generally, red spruce has tiny red hairs on current growth, but only between needle ridges on the stem. These didn't, I tried to get away with just bark and cones only and called it white spruce. It was red spruce of course. But up our way red spruce is only found on dry hardwood ridges and its usually shaly ground. Down there in that stand they were growing in stair step moss covered ground with imperfect drainage so at times of the year there is high water table. I've since experimented with red sruce seedlings and I can't get them to grow very well on marginal ground at all. They are stunted and necrotic looking. I put them on gravelly or shaley soils and they grow 3 times as fast and have that nice yellow-green shiny color. I believe down there, those spruce were hybrids because we cut some monster red spruce up here and the hairs were present when I picked cones for seed.

The ashes are easy to differenciate by bark and crown. I find blash ash branching has no symetry and older trees are covered in leafy lichens and bark is less furrowed than white. Bark is a good feature to ID with if your familiar with the species. We aren't advocating the exclusion of bark for ID purposes. Its just that we need more things to go by for folks like logbutcher and others not so familiar with species and their envirnment.  BTW that instructor said butternut is poisonous to eat and my folks have been putting the nut meats in fudge for years. I hate crackin the darn things but they taste better than cooking walnuts, which are bitter.


logbutcher:
Another book down your way is 'Overwintering Trees and Shrubs of Maine', don't know the authors off the top of my head. It has large illustrations. I have the book someplace in storage, amongst the boxes. Don't forget the ziplock bags in the rain. With most keys I find the color plates are mainly valuable for the flowers and leaves. Most photos are too dark to see the bark well enough, and the scale of the photos makes it hard to ID by bark to. If you ID young saplings, you'll find that black ash has the deeper furrows and is more corky. Young white ash bark is smooth. Then when they mature, its almost opposite the case. Life's always a challenge.

cheers

[shopteacher]

Old Butch and I are going to contact GP & Weyerhaeuser and find out where they buy their seedlings.  That way when we saw the logs the'll have the tree type printed on each board.  Wonder how they get that writing to grow inside those logs? ???  My students want to know where those microlam trees grow?  They don't care much for the looks of the TREX tree and its wood.

[Ron Scott]

Tree shape and form may be another identifier when not much else is available. Florida Deadheader doesn't have too much to work with in his "underwater cruising".

[SwampDonkey]

@ Ron

Maybe you can recall something about mahoganey logs being recovered from the great lakes, from old ship wrecks. I'm not real sure myself on the story, but I'm going to make a stab at it. I think Canadian Geographic had a write-up on it some years ago. I'll look for the article.

Apparently some folks decided to recover mahoganey from one of he lakes.They wanted it for veneer stock. They hauled a bunch of these out and turned some veneer out. After the wood dried some the veneer disintegrated because the lignon (that part of wood that glues the cells together) was all deteriorated. These logs were down there a long time, they were used as ship ballast years ago on merchantships. Must be alot of sunken ships out there in the Lakes. Just for interest sake; remember Gordie Lightfoot's ballad called the "The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald"?

Listen to the midi file here:
http://www.corfid.com/gl/wreck.htm

At the same time read the lyrics here:
Lyric Link


Some of you might want to get your hanky out  ;)


cheers all

[Corley5]

I remember the day the Edmund Fitzgerald sank :(  I was just a little fella but I remember the WIND and listening to news of the wreck on the TV.  I was thinking some more about tree ID and remembered an incident with Joe C. who was a Wildlife Tech that I worked with for a while.  He thought he was some kind of a self taught forester and he understood the basics better than I but he wasn't much at tree ID.  I went with him on habitat marking project one day where we were marking features to leave in an area to be clear cut.  We came upon a smallish tree and he went into a lecture on how we going to mark this as leave tree because it was a mast tree ???  "Joe" I said "it's a soft maple".  "Oh no" was his reply "It's an oak".  "No it's not it's a soft maple" I told him again.  He proceeded to look for oak leaves and told me that was how to determine what it was for sure.  He didn't find any oak leaves and we didn't mark the tree to be left ;D ;D    

[SwampDonkey]

In our area we have ironwood and yellowbirch. They look almost alike when in seedling form, except the 2 scales left in tact when the leaves emerge on the yellow birch. This is even true from nursery stock. Yellow birch doesn't have yellow bark untill about 10 years, before that its light brown, then green and smooth with white lenticels (etches in the bark for the cambium to breath). That's what makes speckled alder, speckled ;) Anyway, had one landowner tell me one time. 'Your suppose to know your trees, I wanna test ya' ;) . He said he had a tree his boys got from school and had planted in his yard. We went over, I looked it all over. I said one of two species, ironwood or yellow birch. I asked if he minded if I take a piece of branch, he said ok. I broke a piece off and placed it in my mouth and tasted the mint flavor and replied, definately yellow birch. But, I was sure by the bud scales, this just reinforced it.  :D  Some people even confuse it with beaked hazel. ;)

[Ron Scott]

As a Great Lakes shipweck "buff", wreck hunter for 40+ years, and member of the Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society (GLSHS), I have my personal Edmund Fitzgerald collection.

Gordon Lightfoot continues to be an honory board member of the GLSHS and his song keeps the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald as one of the country's most popular shipwrecks.

Also see:
http://www.shipwreckmuseum.com/fitz.phtml

[SwampDonkey]

Way to go Ron. A worthwhile group to belong to. I would suppose it would be quite popular with folks close to the Lakes. Good website also, btw.

Where do i make my donation? ;)

Now how did a thread related to ash trees become one about ship wrecks?  

I'll take the blame  :D  :D  :D

[SwampDonkey]

20 year old white ash and large-toothed aspen for comparison. Growing on glacial fluvial soil on a gravelly knoll. Sorry its impossible to show detail as this scale  :-/

The ash is 38 feet and 6 inch dbh; the aspen is 45 feet and 8 inch dbh.

[RedHawkRidge]

Here in Western Wis a black ash is distinctive by its bark, which is very similar to hackberry. The green and whites have similar bark, fine checkered pattern, versus the bumpy veined appearance of the black. My whites grow straight and tall, while the blacks grow in arching diffused branchings.  And neither the white or black seem to struggle as much as red oak in growing thru shade.
Also, my ironwood looks nothing like either my river or white birch -- is yellow birch something different?
jim

[SwampDonkey]

RedHawkRidge

Yes yellow birch is different than white or river birch, but all four species are birches. The difference is mainly in the flowers. On ironwood you get nutlets inside sacs. The sacs are a modified catkin actually with 9 or 11 sacs attached to one another. The yellow birch seed catkin looks alot like a spruce cone in fall (september) when ripened. Yellow birch seems to grow in the higher elevations in Va through Georgia where there is probably more mosture from fog. Up here it grows with sugar maple on ridges , or mixed with cedar, red maple and ash in lower land. You won't find it in poor cedar stands here, but you'll find it in cedar stands that are growing very well. It doesn't like wet feet. ;) And the white birch looks like a regular birch catkin in groups of 2 or 3. We also have another birch called grey birch, but its branches are wirey looking and has only a single catkin. Some of them have greyish bark, bbut they look almost like white birch. They are more of a shrub growing near marginal lands like fens, cedar swamps or red maple swamps.

And about the white ash, it does have symetry compared to black ash which seems to be all out of whack. Ooops there's that word again Jeff B. ;) And white ash does grow prolific in shade when young. Yellow birch does well on windfall mounds and rotting logs or stumps. Sometimes you see a yellow birch with stilt roots, the stump has rotted away. It will sometimes even take root on moss covered bounders and the roots look like they are grabbing ahold the bounder as they grow toward the soil.

cheers

[forester99]

If you would like great pics. of Ash try this website www.emeraldashborer.info.   They don't look like burr oaks, but they are easily confused with Black Walnut. :

[Gatorboy]

for the life of me i have no idea what an ash tree looks like

Well here is a picture of my Maryland Champion White Ash.  It's located on my property in Fallston, Maryland.