Any tree is better off without having holes drilled into its stem. Depending on their size and placement, stem holes can cause all kinds of problems for trees, from interrupting the flow of water, nutrients, and carbohydrates to allowing the entry of decay- and disease-causing microorganisms. Ultimately, none of these is good for the tree. Yet, from centuries of successfully tapping sugar maple trees, we know that these trees can be quite good at both closing tap holes and minimizing further damage from them. Healthy trees with well-developed branches full of leaves growing on good sites can be tapped for decades without causing any noticeable decline.
Still, tap holes are wounds, and even in healthy trees, they cause changes to the wood immediately surrounding them inside the tree. Tap scars appear as tapered or canoe-shaped columns of stained wood extending several inches above and below the tap hole. Historically, sawmills and other buyers of raw logs have considered tap holes and the stained wood associated with them to be defects. They either pay less for logs with such defects or reject them outright. What’s more, mills have always been wary of tapped maple because there’s so much metal associated with tapping (spouts, nails, and hooks), and inadvertently sawing into hidden metal objects is dangerous and expensive.
Traditionally, the reaction to all of this among landowners, managers, and loggers has been to remove the bottom 4 to 6 feet of any tapped maple tree stem being sold as timber. This way, any defective and potentially dangerous wood is left to rot on the forest floor or split for firewood. Given this loss of potential value, landowners have been smart to question whether they want to manage for sap or for sawlogs.
Today, with prices paid to landowners for good sugar maple logs at an all-time high, some might think it pure folly to put holes in maple trees. But that ignores the allure of sugaring, which for many is hard to resist. The good news is that the marketplace and technology have changed enough that the answer is no longer as black and white as it once was.
For starters, mills and other buyers of logs have become more accepting of tapped maple trees. There are many good reasons for this: the demand for raw logs is high, mills have learned how to better saw wood with defects, and many have incorporated new technology for detecting metal in logs.
But perhaps even more encouraging is that wood from tapped maple trees is now more often seen as character-marked, rather than defective. This has made such wood not only more viable in the marketplace but also, when it’s used in specialty products like bowls or flooring, perhaps even more valuable.
Does this mean you can ignore the question (sap or sawlogs), tap like crazy, and still expect top dollar for any tapped sawtimber you do sell some day? No. Trees with clear, defect-free wood still bring the best prices, and tapping seriously jeopardizes that potential.
What it does mean is that the answer may be different depending on whether you are asking it about a particular tree or your woodlot in general. If long-term economic return is important to you, then, for any given maple tree in your woods, you should carefully consider whether to tap it for sap or grow it for high-value timber – even though tapped ones are more salable now than they used to be. But for your woods as a whole, it might be wise to choose both.
Here’s how. Find the very best individual maples with the highest potential and mark them as no-tap trees. Do your best to grow them for sawlogs and, where possible, veneer. Even a few of these scattered among your sugarbush can pay for a lot of tubing. You can still follow the allure of sugaring by tapping the less-well-formed maples and managing them as sugar trees. Recognize that this is a decidedly non-traditional approach to timber or sugarbush management. Your sugarbush will likely be more densely stocked than has been traditionally recommended for sugarbushes. Conversely, you will likely have fewer sawtimber trees per acre than you would if you were managing strictly for sawtimber.
But there’s nothing wrong with that.