Exotic Wood maple, birdseye

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MAPLE, BIRDSEYE
my samples:

These first 3 pics were taken at a lumber yard and represent a nice diversity of the species and also show the mineral stain that is quite common in all hard maple, bird's eye figure or otherwise. These planks all had a reasonable amount of eye figure --- there were other planks that had much less and you'll see examples of such down below.

The first one shows two birdseye thins on top of two birdseye veneer pieces. The second is an old piece of birdseye with pretty tight eyes. I was told by the friend who gave it to me that it was laid down decades ago in a Canadian bowling alley that was recently torn down. These pieces have been sitting around for 15 years or more and I really don't remember whether the veneer was that yellow when I got it or not. The color in the pic is very accurate.

veneer with eyes that are almost holes in the wood --- usually the eyes are just a tight localized swirl pattern in the wood, but these are mechanically distinguishable by touch from the surrounding wood

veneer with a small amount of curl to it

pale veneer with very sparse eyes

veneer sheet and closeup --- an excellent example of the kind of sparse-eye sheet that you will get from some vendors, who make no distinction between this very poor quality "birdseye" and the "real thing". Technically, this is certainly bird's eye maple, but it should be designated as a "sparse-eye" variety.

veneer with fairly average distribution of eyes

veneer

veneer sheet and closeup --- this one has a very dense eye pattern and demonstrates what vendors SHOULD mean when they say "dense eyes" (what they really sell, however, is frequently a very sparse pattern of eyes, nothing like this dense pattern). Bird's eye maple just doesn't GET much better than this piece. The color of the wood is slightly less pink that what shows here.