When should a silver maple be pruned?
This is one of the few large shade trees where dormant-season structural pruning genuinely changes the outcome — reducing end weight on over-extended limbs and subordinating one side of a codominant stem lowers the leverage that snaps them. The trap is the instinct to top it: silver maple answers heading cuts with a flush of fast, weakly attached watersprouts that are worse than what you removed, so if a union already has included bark the answer is reduction plus a cable, not more cuts.
Reading silver maple before you cut
Silver maple rarely dies outright — it hollows. Stress reads as small, thin foliage with the whole crown still present, plus cottony maple scale and tar spot; genuine failure reads structurally, as decay or a cavity at a major union, a visible seam of included bark, and dieback confined to the tips of the longest limbs. Once you can put your arm into a union, that is a rigging and removal decision, not a health treatment.
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