How to Identify Trees in the Winter (Part 1)

Description

Learn some basics on identifying trees by their bark and other clues in the winter, and some of the bushcraft uses they have.

Beech, Maple, Spicebush, Ash, Black Cherry, Hop Hornbeam, Shagbark Hickory, Elm, Scarlet Oak, Eastern Cottonwood

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Tags: how to,identify,trees,winter,id,bark,tree id,bushcraft,nature,camping,backpacking,wood,woodworking,bowmaking,bowyer,hiking,backcountry,wilderness,snow,winter tree id,identify trees by bark,opposite,alternate,maple,ash,beech,black cherry,hop hornbeam,elm,cottonwood,survival,prepper,preparation,naturalist,how to be a naturalist,survival skills,plant identification,plant id,Identification Of Trees Of The United States,ohio,ohio trees,midwest

Video Transcription

without any of the leaves or the seeds and the branches it could be tough to tell which tree is which to an untrained eye all the bark just looks the same grayish brownish and kind of gnarly identifying trees not only has useful bushcraft purposes but it also helps you to appreciate nature more let's start with one of the more distinct trees in this forest the beech mentioned this in the show before but you can clearly identify it because of the smooth thin bark some other identifying factors in winter include the leaves and the buds you take a look it's got these long cigar shapes buds and of course the leaves are brilliant in the winter another common tree is this the maple sugar maple now this is a young one so the bark still looks fairly smooth but one of the things that I look for are these sort of eyes in the bark these horizontal striations but one of the key giveaways is if you look up the branches are opposite branching what that means is that rather than alternating like a lot of trees do the branches come out in the same area on sticks in Ohio we have the same called mad buck Matt stands for maple ash dogwood Buckeye these are four types of trees in Ohio that are opposite branching and winter checking to see if the branches are opposite or alternate can really help to distinguish trees that look very similar now this here is another maple even though the bark looks really different it's the same species hacer sakharam now this Park does look a lot like some other trees what comes to mind is honey locust and shagbark hickory but honey locust has very similar bark with these sort of flakey plates coming off of it but again you can check if it's opposite or alternate and if it's alternatives most likely honey locust also if you've got a brand of honey locust that isn't domesticated wild honey locust there's going to be lots of thorns coming out of the trunk

as for shagbark hickory it does have a very similar gnarly sort of texture but the bark is more in these strips they kind of look like beef jerky we'll take a look at one later I wouldn't really call it a tree but I might have to point this out as well this is spicebush another thing you've seen in some of the shows and in the winter without any of its distinctive leaves what gives it away are these berries and of course you can always do a check before you use it for tea or flavoring you just peel the bark it has a very fragrant sort of sweet smell it's great

this tree is an ash tree there's a lot of clues that give it away with the park you'll notice that it has the sort of criss-crossing diamond patterns sort of like a lot of X's or diamonds just all along it it's subtle but that's one of the characteristics of ash and also again if you look up very distinctive opposite branches there's actually another clue specific to Ohio that gave this away if you look around carefully there's a small holes all around it and there's actually signs of the bark peeling off and in Ohio and other areas around here we've had problems with the emerald ash borer which has pretty much wiped out most of the ashes so whenever you walk around some of the more delicate branches up there aren't going to be missing because they've fallen off the bark will likely be peeling off and you'll see lots of little holes it's a bit tough to get to this one but uh this here is a black cherry and it's got really distinctive bark we've got these very cornflake sort of texture it looks like someone just spray-painted cornflakes brown and then pasted it to a tree when you look at it from afar it generally stands out as a very dark tree against all the other ones so it's pretty easy to spot can you guess what this is it's not black snow and it's not chard leaves either it's actually a fungus called psoriasis bungee osa now in the spring in the summer you'll see a lot of these little dancing white fluffy things on these beech trees and what those are are wooly aphids and they feed off of the SAP in the tree and they excrete a sweet honeydew and this fungus attaches specifically to that excrete meant and grows on these beaches luckily I don't think it does any real harm to the tree so it's just an interesting sight this is a big tree I've seen a lot of big beaches in this forest around here and it kind of makes me wonder if there used to be a farm here or something you know maybe this was all field say for a few beech trees that ended up becoming these huge ones

once this reclaimed itself as a forest it's interesting

now this one here looks to me like hot hornbeam it's called that because it's seeds arranged like almost like grapes but they're flat they look like hops that you use and beer basically now the bark has these very very distinct striations on it that just run all along the bark and while they have these distinct striations the bark is very two-dimensional in other words it's flat there's not ridges that jut out like some of the other trees now at a glance this bark might remember resemble white oak or silver maple but those are more to three item dimensional and they usually don't look like this on trees is small it also sort of resembles Elm but once again Elm is more three-dimensional and what it looks like the most to me is honeysuckle which is an invasive plant but honeysuckle you can tell is a not this because honeysuckle have bent branches with more and more bent branches coming out of it that and its opposite branching so these are wild grapevines and they've got a lot of uses one of which is swinging around like a monkey but they actually also produce edible grapes they're very delicious they come out usually in late summer um don't you don't get them confused with poison ivy though that'd be bad

is undoubtedly one of Austin Powers favorite trees the shagbark hickory you can see where it gets the name and as we said earlier they've got these things of bark that look a lot like beef jerky or something Oh

tastes like it though now this tree can actually be used for making bows there's one of many that can be made into a bow I've said that before but I would reckon that this is a pretty good tree because pretty straight all around if you wanted to you could probably make lots of bows from this now this tree here is an elm and at first it's kind of hard to tell what it is it's got these very long striations similar to the Hawthorn beam or maybe to a young ash it looks a lot like a young ash now what I look for is the sort of three-dimensional characteristic it has when you look closely at the bark it looks like different layers of two-dimensional things have been stacked on top of each other I don't know how exactly to describe it but it's almost like terraces in the bark now another way to tell this bark from other barks is if you press on it it's very soft like styrofoam an ash tree or something else will not will not be this soft Elm the bark is great for cordage and stuff because it's very flexible and it can also be used to make bows and actually my first bow was an elm bow I actually use a tree it was straighter than this obviously but it was actually thinner but I tried making a second with very similar thickness and that didn't work because that was a tree that had grown a lot in a few years so there were less growth rings and it was less structurally stable but it's a fantastic fantastic wood for bows now this here is an oak tree to be honest I'm not very good at differentiating one oak from the other the ones that I really do know are white oak scarlet oak and Baroque I say that this one is a some sort of scarlet or red ochre one of those and one of the basic ways you can tell white from red is a white oak will have rounded lobes whereas red oak have these sharp needle points on the leaves something I look for with this sort of oak tree this doesn't apply to a white oak or some other Oaks but I look for the sort of lighter color these like large striations that are wide and flat and a lighter color it looks it's hard to describe but it's like it's got ridges but it doesn't look too 3-dimensional it doesn't look like it's very deep so that's how I tend to spot an oak you know it's it's funny because when you learn to identify trees in the winter by the bark it's actually it's really a useful skill because you start noticing only subtle differences that you might not have noticed before you know identifying them by leaves can be quite easy because they're very different from each other but identifying it by bark helps you to see these subtler differences especially in trees that look really similar so this tree back here is a cottonwood and one way you can tell is that it's got this rough rigid bark at the bottom but as you go out it gradually smoothes out you know at the bottom of scott these these vertical ridges at the top it looks more like a maple or a traditional aspen except less pale where it's smooth and got more horizontal striations of course it's alternate ranching and it's really beautiful in the summer and in the fall the leaves just flutter in the wind and the it's like glitter the way they sparkle and shine and uh on the older trees the ridges are very deep very pronounced it's it's very obvious in a sense when you see cottonwood that's older and cottonwood is a poplar so it's gotten even though it's technically a hard word wood the wood is softer and a lot of people use it to make spindles and fire boards for making fire for a hearth board you can use either the wood or the bark actually from an older tree beautiful trees

you know I just wanted to add maple trees are really dear to me as a kid that's pretty much the only tree that was in my yard there are a few others but uh more recently in the early spring you can tap these trees for syrup and and I did it for the first time this past year and it's really just it's brilliant you can tap it and the SAP will flow out and you can drink it and it's like it's very delicious natural sweet water and of course you can boil that down to a syrup and it's just having real maple syrup that you tapped on your own is a fantastic experience another one of my favorite trees