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The Norway maple leaves are piling up on our sidewalk. This was taken with my scanner, not a camera.
Funks Grove, in Central Illinois, is primarily sugar maple. But there is an occasional oak mixed in amongst its syrup-producing relatives. (This grove produces some of the best maple syrup in the nation.) How the oaks survived to become the tallest trees in the woodland, I'm not at all sure. But they tower over the maples, and are unmistakable in the fall. They turn red, while the sugar maples turn yellow. The contrast is gorgeous.
maple syrup was once harvested by tapping a maple tree through the bark and letting the sap run into a bucket, which required daily collecting and a whole lot of labor when you're collecting from thousands of trees. these days, the taps flow into plastic pipelines that usually use the force of gravity to send the sap into holding tanks.