Is this Maple?

[treemandan]

if it smells like wintergreen its black birch but it looks more like cherry.

 

[Behemoth Jim]

To me the endcuts do look like cherry, but not sure. His location is a prime location for black birch, if memory serves me right. Yellow birch is also similar looking and I wonder if they hybridize. When looking at the first picture I thought it was yellow birch. The fact that it's tough to split favors birch imo. Yellow birch is especially tough to split, don't know about black birch as I;ve never split it-- I only lived in Pennsylvania for 3 months-- saw black birch a plenty there but where I grew up in Maine and where I live now there is no black birch.

 

[oxbow]

Another vote for pin cherry (AKA fire cherry). Not considered as good quality wood as black cherry for lumber or fuel.

 

[ehgauss]

It's certainly not maple. From the color of the wood, I'd lean toward cherry. If its green, black birch will smell strongly like birch beer when cut. I guess that's what they used to make it before "better things for life through chemistry".

 

[JFerg65]

That looks like cherry to me. I've always called that swamp cherry, as that is where it seems to grow in the woods we cut. I cut a bunch of that this season, and it looks, splits, and acts like cherry in the woodstove.

 

[buzz sawyer]

Definitely cherry. I took two down in my yard just like it. The cherrys were delicious but the tree had to go. Tough splitting due to the thickness of the bark. OK for firewood but not as good as black cherry - not as dense.

 

[willt1981]

around here we call that "tame cherry" as opposed to the wild cherry or chokecherry which is what mostly grows in the woods. birds will spread the tame cherry into old pastures and they will grow up in the succession forest. theyre easy to spot in the spring becasue that are a fruiting cherry and bloom like on when not much else is going on in the woods. burns like wild cherry and i even took some to the sawmill once and they bought it as wild cherry.