Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 38, Number 18, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 13 October 1905 — About Bird’s-Eye Maple. [ARTICLE]

About Bird’s-Eye Maple.

For hundreds of years lumbermen and cabinet-makers have been studying to learn what causes maple wood to assume the mottled and spotted form known as “bird’s-eye.” In a hundred rock maple trees perhaps one is a bird’s-eye. Nobody ean pick the specific tree out by inspecting she bark or the manner of growth. You may have to chop 200 trees before you find one, but it is worth the sacrifice. Fact is, the woodpeckers make all the bird’s-eye maple there is in the world. In flying about the woods they come to a rock maple tree that yields very sweet sap in the season when sap is running. Most birds like sweets —woodpeckers are very fond of sugar. Having found a tree yielding a large per cent of sugar, the birds peck holes in the trunk and tnen stand against the bark and drink the sap as it oozes out. >, After the sap has ceased to flow and the trees have leaved out new wood and bark form in those small holes. The pecklug and sap-gathering goes on for years until the tree, having given up so much sap to the birds, begins to furnish fluid containing less sugar. In ten or twelve years after the birds quit a tree the holes are all grown up and nobody can pick out the big bird’s-eyes from other trees that the woodpeckers did not visit. —New York Sun.