Warning: Rough estimates ahead.
Every summer I’m amazed at the height, width and fullness of our large birch tree in the back yard after its spring rebirth from winter’s bareness. It is the biggest birch I know of, though I don’t go on searches for big birch trees.
As I stare at this old, mature tree, which hides all kinds of birds and squirrel nests and has some dead spots for the pileated woodpeckers, I always ask the question with the impossible answer: How many leaves?
I finally came up with a formula to estimate the number of leaves on the mighty birch with its three trunks from which several hefty horizontal branches spread. The formula may be flawed, but I go with it.
I stepped off the widths, north to south and east to west, and they were fairly even at about 40 feet. Knowing the tallest birches in Wisconsin are 65 to 70 feet, I conservatively topped my tree out at 60 feet.
Those measurements gave me 96,000 cubic feet of space. Accounting for open spaces in the tree, I halved that to come up with 48,000 cubic feet of leaf area. Then I counted 55 leaves in one cubic foot. Multiplying 48,000 by 55 gave me about 2.6 million leaves.
Am I even close? I did some research of other folks with the same leaf question. I found one estimate of 2 million leaves on a big oak tree, so that’s close to my number. However, another leaf counter came up with 200,000 leaves on a large mature tree, so that’s not close.
One thing I am sure of is how much I, along with the birds and squirrels, enjoy this big birch, no matter how many leaves.
Now everytime I look at a tree, hmm!