Should I remove or save my bur oak?
Bur Oak isn't a habitual problem species, so a sound one is usually worth an opinion before it comes out. Bur oak is the toughest large tree you can have on a central Indiana lot — it handles alkaline soil, compacted clay, drought, and road salt better than any other oak here, which is precisely why it so rarely appears on a removal quote. When one does, it is usually a very large old tree with a construction or decay problem, or a homeowner who has finally had enough of the acorns.
How to tell which one you've got
Bur oak declines slowly and rarely from anything species-specific, so when one thins out, look at the root zone first — it usually means fill, trenching, or compaction rather than a pathogen. The two named disorders worth ruling out are bur oak blight, a Tubakia fungus producing purple-brown wedge-shaped lesions along the leaf veins in late summer with dead leaves clinging into winter (documented in isolated Midwest locations including Illinois, not widespread), and bacterial leaf scorch, which browns leaf margins and returns worse every year with no cure.
The structural question
Bur oak is the ice-storm survivor of this group — thick corky bark, dense wood, and a wide deeply anchored root plate mean uprooting is rare even in saturated clay. The failure actually worth watching is the long horizontal lower scaffold limb on an open-grown specimen: it carries enormous ice load far from the trunk, and on an old tree with a decay pocket at the attachment that is the single limb that comes down.
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