Help Needed Re:Wood Species

[Okrafarmer]

Gray birch are very warty and glandular on the fine branches, from which resin exudes.

Bark is very reliable for your region or state. Our sugar maple bark is much smoother here in farming country than it is out in the Igneous-Sediment soils in Deersdale. Sometimes challenging to separate from red maple.

The red maples down here can be quite a bit different from the ones I grew up with in Maine. Even the leaves look quite a bit different.

But beech is beech is beech.

[SwampDonkey]

I have yellow birch up here, that aren't even golden yellow on the but log, no fine peeling  bark strips. Comes off the tree in plates, you could almost make shingles from (a bit of an exaggeration there). ;D

Here's a chunk of bark that was naturally shed off the trunk. I picked it up one fall.




Looks like this on the inside.



Here's the but end of the tree. Not a dead limb on it. 25 inch dbh.

[Okrafarmer]

We had yellow birch in Maine, but the bark did not look quite like that. It was more peely. The bark you show there resembles some of the river birches that grow naturally around here (not the landscaping trees). Maybe it looks more like you show as it matures and most of the ones I saw were not that mature.

[SwampDonkey]

The top limbs are golden yellow, it's just that if you had the log sections your golden yellow is gone. Some will call it silver birch, but it's just very old and big yellow birch. Some of our yellow birch is very pronounced pink in the wood and substituted for cherry. Veneer buyers don't kick on large percentage of heart in birch. I've seen white birch veneer go for just as much as yellow birch at Columbia, over $2000/mbf at it's height before the Forestry melt down in 2005. Here is the price after 2005, Dec 2008.

Old price list attached. I think most those markets have vanished the last couple of years. I don't see much activity with hardwood at the marketing board wood yard other than pulp now. One land owner was told a while back that they aren't excepting any veneer and logs.

[weisyboy]

what you have there is beenatree.

[campy]

My 92 year old neighbor who is a master woodworker came over and ID'd the wood as Pecan.

It just looks a lot different from the Shaggy Bark Hickory I have been cutting.

Thanks all who helped me solve the mystery.