I was leaving NR 2 and headed to Centennial Woods in search of a tree to identify when I saw a medium deciduous tree just next to the Grossman School of Business. Its clusters of rounded red buds stood out from all of the other bare trees around and I immediately recognized it as a Red Maple. We had just learned that this species had the earliest budding stage unlike its lookalikes, the Sugar Maple and the Norway Maple. I grabbed my handy dandy iPhone and logged the tree on the iNaturalist app. The app itself reaffirmed my initial identification when it suggested Acer rubrum as the subject of my photo.
