Had to cut down this big 1 the other day because it was in the way of a survey line on my new property. I was shocked to see how bad it looked inside. You wouldn't have known it from the outside though. I wonder if this is very common, and if mostly with just oaks. I imagine it weakened the tree & woulda killed it at some point, even if this rotten middle was only near the base. I haven't cut it up to see how far up the tree this dead spot went. Not good for timber value either. I don't know what causes a tree to do this.

I bet you could see it in the chip as soon as you started cutting the notch?

if you were going from the other direction there would have been no telling till you started into the back cut , and then wedging it over would have gotten interesting

Pretty common in over mature black oak. Probably sand ground.

It is sandy ground.

I had some like that. A guy told me it had likely been burned over when it was a sapling. I don't know for certain.

thats black gold spilling out if you garden at all.

had a maple like that this spring

Not to change the subject but I have a bunch of red oak saplings I want to move to different spots. Any advice on transplanting them. I am waiting until the leaves change in the fall.

only during a month with a r in it.

if ya spend 50 bucks to plant a tree,spend 45 on the hole and 5 on the tree.

both great tips i got here.

Was planning to add some fertilizer and a bag of soil to each hole but not sure what fertilizer and how much. Planning to transplant in October

I’ve had several really big white oaks taken down near the house that turned out to be hollowed out near the base. Big colonies of carpenter ants.

Every tree that has a cavity big enough to be a den tree for coons or squirrels, or a hive of honeybees, is gonna be structurally compromised.

The red oaks around my place are dying off. Was at a buddys helping him cut some up. We found some big white grubs in them. They all look like yours. Rotton on the bottom.

Seen that many times!

On my place the red oaks are dying from oak wilt. Can't really stop it, can spread underground. I wonder if it is what the inside of a tree with Wetwood/Slime flux (bacterial disease that causes an spot of the tree to seep water and be black) looks like.

Yep , I had a huge red oak crash down thru my motor home and barn ...
The center looked like that , maybe worse . You would have never guessed , that there was anything wrong with that tree ..
I guess you never know ..

You should try to cruise a stand of mature oaks, especially red oak, and try to come up with a value for them. It can be very difficult to determine if they are sawlog quality or pulpwood quality and there is a huge difference in the value. There are usually tell tale signs that a forester picks up on. Black “sap” seeping out of a fissure in the bark, mushrooms growing on the side of the tree or around the roots, and black ants going up the side of the tree are a few of the signs we look for. As started earlier if it is in sandy soil or very wet soil and certain species you better be very cautious before you place a sawlog value on them.

I have been taking down Big old Maples rough guess on the rings 1800-1840 ont he one that had a solid stump but the top was rotten the ground seems much wetter than it likely used to be

the house was built in the 1860s but the farm had already been around since around 1836 when WI became it's own territory

rotten hollow up the center on several hole in the sump was so big the kids were playing in it.
kinda hard to get a decent hinge when you have a 36 inch diameter and 5 inches solid of wood on each side.

Here it's carpenter ants, can't hardly tell till we get a hurricane, then down they come

My buddy has a camp along a lake. High bank above the lakeshore. It's mostly clay soils over shale. In the spring and late fall the ground is very wet and in the summer it's as hard as a rock. Lots of big red and white oak with rotten centers

Mnjag

Where are you located?

Are the red oaks dying from oak wilt or something else

I live in bagley now and I don’t have oak wilt but about 30 percent of my tops are dead on red oak