Pine trees spruces and tamarack identification

So today on my walk I was looking closely at pine trees and identifying them. Pines are usually an in between species during succession. Succession is a process from when a field goes back into being a forest, this is occurring quite substantially in New York as most of the family farms are out of business and those fields are going back to the way they were 200 years ago. Pine trees are first growth trees that come after bushes during the succession stages and this process is going on along the top of my hill. The most common pine here is a White pine and they are all over my land. Some other common types of Pines found around here are Red pine, Blue Spruce, Red Spruce, Eastern Hemlock. I took some pictures of a few different pines and spruces and I will show you how to identify them. 

This is a picture of a white pine, these trees can grow in a bunch of different ways in fields they are usually like this and a lot rounder then when they are found in the woods. This is because they have more space to grow and take advantage of it, they have evolved self pruning like many other pine trees, this is where if they do grow in the woods they lower branches die as they are pointless and would just waste energy, that is what make pines good for dry wood if you need a fire.

One way to identify the White pine and make sure it is not a red pine is that a White pine has a bundle of 5 needles as shown above. A red pine has a bundle of usually 3 but sometimes 2.  

This is a picture of a red pine they are more uncommon that of white pines but are still found through out central New York. The red pine is not as tall as the White pine but can get to 154 feet. The white pine used to be one of the tallest trees in the east measuring at 220 feet for average size but now there are hardly any that size as they were all cut down in order to have farms. 

This is a picture of the bark of a red pine. As you can see its is a brownish red color and is flaky this is an easy way to identify this tree.