Birdseye Maple

[DuffF5]

I have been reading the posts about finding curly maple by pulling the bark off and seeing the curl. #Well I was fortunate enough to find a red maple tree, and when I pulled off a piece of bark, there is curl everywhere. #So that tree has been worked up and I can't wait until it is dried. #

My question is about Birdseye maple, is there a way to tell from pulling the bark to see the birdseye?

David

[Luthier]

Birds eye maple has little "knobs" growing on the outside of the tree. #Sometimes the larger ones can be cut off and these are called "burl". #Sometimes you can't tell until the tree is milled what figure is present on the inside.
Also, I seem to recall the best time to harvest is during the winter after the yearly growth has stopped.


Don

[Spruce]

"My question is about Birdseye maple, is there a way to tell from pulling the bark to see the birdseye?"

If you take a small hatchet blaze from bark of a growing tree (or blaze away to your heart's content on a log in a sawmill where it isn't going to hurt the tree anyway), you are basically exposing what the wood will look like when milled on the slab...
And birdseye maple usually is milled on the slab...

"Birds eye maple has little "knobs" growing on the outside of the tree."

The birdseye logs I've seen, even when heavily figured, are indistinguishable from their unfigured counterparts and have no "knobs" to speak of...

" Sometimes the larger ones can be cut off and these are called "burl"."

I don't see any connection between "burl" and "birdseye"...
2 different animals...

Here's a picture of some birdseye boards that shows (if you squint hard enough) what the cambium looks like under the bark. #It's similar to what an unfigured log looks like, except the birdseyes are visable in the cambium.
Also notice the single burl at the lower left of the pic. #It appears as a "knob" and you can see the burl figure in the wood...
To my knowledge, there is no connection between the two...