Nothing makes one’s ears perk up as well as walking through the woods (in this case the Rabbit Hole’s stand of Norway Spruce/Pine/Maple) on a windless, warm day and hearing an ominous popping creak from high above. It might be the massive double trunk White Pine near the drive, it has several pieces of climbing Euonymous jammed in the crotch of the trunk and consequently it sometimes makes some very odd noises, even on a day with essentially no wind.* It might be an innocuous branch rubbing somewhere; it might be a tree reacting to the changing temperature. Or it might be gravity asserting itself. It is the sort of noise that is very hard to get a solid directional fix on, you’re doing well to pin it down to about 90 degrees.
You can’t go and visually inspect all those trees, not when there are well over a dozen Norway Spruces and Pines standing at between 80 and 110 feet in height. Besides in my experience, you can never tell. The White Pine on the North Lawn all those years ago was a lovely example: a perfectly fine, fully mature pine when I walked past on a day with light wind; fifteen minutes later and it had snapped like a toothpick. On the other hand, there is an ash that is busy defying physics: it has a spiral crack so large that a child could hide in the hollow of the trunk and on windy days you can see the crack shifting. It has been that way for about five years and two hurricanes.
If it is something…well, we will KNOW about it one of these days!
*even 5mph wind is enough to get a little bit of sway at the top, which is just enough to get it to rub.
Acair Fearann 
We don’t have those big evergreen trees. We do have some big old deciduous trees known for weak wood – Chinese elm, silver maple – and they tend to keep me nervous. A few years ago I took down a silver maple that was leaning over our house.
We keep an eye on our big deciduous trees near the house, and prune as needed. A hard decision will have to be made about a fully mature Black Oak in a few years. It is absolutely central to the garden/house landscape, but is close enough to some buildings to be a hazard; unfortunately, it is also beginning to show some serious structural rot. Part of the overhead for this place is periodic visits from the tree man, here pruning the oak in question: https://acairfearann.com/2013/04/11/this-is-how-you-trim-a-tree/
I wish there were oaks in our neighborhood but when it was built in the 1930s the contractor planted cheap, fast-growing trees: Siberian elm, cottonwood, silver maple, eastern red cedar. Too bad, because oaks grow well here.
I do wish people would plant for the centuries…our neighbours just took down part of the old road line of sugar maples, planted some 200 years ago. I would like to think they will plant new sugar maples, but I bet they don’t. Actually, I wish the new ones had already been planted as replacements. You can’t conjure a majestic tree out of thin air…
I guess we are lucky that we do have big trees, even if they are not of all the species we would like.
I built a cabin on my land with a big Douglas fir as one corner post. Every time the wind blows the whole cabin creaks and groans. Someday it’ll topple I suspect but for now it’s just cool… 😉
Steve
That is neat! I’ve always liked houses which incorporate living trees.