Today I noticed that the male Silver Maple flowers opened up. Today was a good day to differentiate between the male and female Silver Maples. From a distance, the female trees had red, compact ball-shaped flowers. The male trees had yellow, fuzzy ball-shaped flowers. And they were easy to tell apart from a distance. Most of the Silver Maples I observed biking to and from work only had flowers high up: I found a lot of big trees along Theodore Wirth Parkway with flowers high up in the branches, but one had a few low branches that I could photograph. The yellowish threads are the flower's stamens. The stamens bear the pollen. I'm not sure if the female flowers have fully opened up yet.
