The large, but muffled, crash last night has finally been identified: an outwardly healthy, Large, limb from the big sugar maple east of the house. This maple is probably closing in on two hundred years old and is about eighty feet tall. It is fairly happy, as elderly maples go, but it does sometimes drop things. In this case when I say large, I mean pushing eight inches in diameter and about thirty feet in length, falling from somewhere over fifty feet up. Interestingly, it must have caught briefly on the way down,the butt end is swung ninety degrees away from the tree. Outwardly healthy, but inwardly quite rotten: rain plus a full flush of new growth equals gravity winning. I was once told that the most dangerous time to be out in the woods is late spring/early summer after a rainstorm. Windy days can be a bit scary, but it is the calm day when everything is saturated with water that you have to watch out for, limbs drop with no warning and no sound…till they hit. In any event, no damage this time around.