2024 was a memorably poor maple sugaring season in Connecticut; certainly the worst since I began keeping a close eye on maple sugaring, in ca. 2010, though I'm not yet sure what the old timers are saying. I started my one tap in late January, about three weeks earlier than the traditional start time, to try to get ahead of the warm weather, but even that was probably too late. I collected maybe 8 gallons of sap by early February, brewed a few pots of maple sap tea, boiled the rest down to about 2 cups of nice light amber syrup, and that was it. The tap has been dry since the first or second week of February. All in all my total production was about what you would expect from a single decent week in what ought to be a six week season.
What went wrong? I have a few ideas, mostly warm-weather related:
- It's been a really warm winter, with only a couple of weeks of snow cover, and no serious cold periods to speak of. According to NOAA data via Weather Underground, meteorological winter (Dec 2023-Feb. 2024) was the warmest on record for a large swath of the Midwest and Northeast, and near-record-warm in southern New England, with temperatures averaging about 6-8 degrees Fahrenheit above normal. Sugar Maples need a cold winter dormancy to stay healthy, and in particular require freezing nights and daytime thaws in late winter to trigger sap flows.
- The growing season last year was generally cloudy, humid and rainy. This meant less sun than usual for photosynthesis, and thus less sugar stored by the trees. The soggy summer of '23 also caused a widespread outbreak of a fungal leaf disease, Maple Anthracnose, which caused leaf drop and an early end to the growing season in late summer.
- 2023 was also a "mast year" for Sugar Maples, meaning that they set much more seed than usual. So, in addition to losing out on sugar-producing opportunities last year due to cloudy weather and disease, the trees were using up much more energy and nutrients than in a typical year, making tons of seeds. Excessive seed production last summer probably left the Sugar Maples with less sugar than normal stored in their trunks this winter.
I suspect that all of these factors were in play, with bad weather last summer, a massive "mast" production of seeds, and an overly warm winter weakening the maple trees and sending them into 2024 with less stored sugar than normal. Then, record warmth and spotty snow in January and February led to an early, brief and unproductive sugaring season. Strong
El Nino climate conditions would have contributed to the warmth and storminess, against a backdrop of steady temperature rise from global warming; the fact that a mast year coincided with these factors was just bad luck. We'll see how the trees do this spring and summer. I'm hoping they will recover quickly, but the long-term outlook for species of cool northern forests, like Sugar Maple, in southern New England is probably not fabulous.
