It's a little disconcerting to park my car next to a maple tree in rapid decline. Last year about half of the limbs looked dead, but this year very few limbs have any leaves at all.
Why? Your guess is as good as mine. Dig down in that part of the yard and you'll find a thick layer of gravel a few inches beneath the surface, and many things we've planted out there have failed to thrive. The maple was here before we moved in and looked okay for many years. A dogwood we planted seems to be thriving, but the Japanese maple nearby has a few leafless limbs. We've taken some dead limbs off the big maple but at some point the whole tree needs to come down.
Which is a shame because it's an ideal staging space for birds visiting our feeders. This morning I watched an adult red-bellied woodpecker grab a seed from the feeder and then fly back to feed a juvenile waiting in the tree. The dearth of foliage makes it easy to observe birds' social behavior: cardinals fighting for territory, male cowbirds putting on a courtship display for a female, and, this morning, two house finches having an encounter I couldn't quite interpret.
Taking out the sickly maple will provide more sunshine for the dogwood, but I'll miss that tree when it's gone. Is it a mistake to get so attached to particular trees? That maple seems like a permanent fixture of the landscape, but a tree that stands tall today may well start dropping limbs in the next windstorm.
Just not on my car, okay?
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| Cowbirds vying for the attention of a female. |
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| Wish I knew what they were thinking. |
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| Same tree, different branches. |
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| Dead limb between two still living. |
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| A model of sharing. |
3 comments:
A tree whose view was straight outside my back door window was dying - it has a hollow trunk from the ground to about 8-10’ up. The birds love it - lots of insects — the squirrels chase each other in, out, and around the hollow. It was tall enough to be a danger to the house if it came down so I had the tree guys take the top 2/3rds off and leave the truck. This way the squirrels and birds still love it and it’s not a danger to anything if it falls. It had a tree shoot growing on one side of it that the tree guys said would die too—— but 4 years later, it’s thriving and the branches sort of wrap around the hollow trunk. I will try to get some good pictures to post - best decision I could have made! - Laura :) 🌲
That's tempting...I'd love to leave a haven for the birds, as long as the dangerous dead limbs get removed.
We have maples hereabouts, but they can be confused with alders. Their bark provides food for squirrels. Nibbling kills limbs, and sometimes the tree. Best move? Squirrel pie?
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