Surprise maple syruping

This morning when we went out to throw the Kong Wubba for the dog to exercise there was something plopping on our heads. We look around and here the maple trees are just dripping with sap. A few of the trees had so much that almost the entire trunk was wet with sap. We had never tapped any of our trees before but have seen it done. A local monastery has a huge, hands on, maple syrup festival were they make hundreds of gallons every spring and we have attended the event several times so knew how to do it. Spark is drilling a hole in the tree. There was so much sap that as soon as a hole, about an inch deep, was drilled the sap just came pouring out of it. We don't have any equipment for sap collection so we took the insides out of pens and used the tube part. Dancer is hammering, lightly, the pen into the tree. We tipped them down a little bit to make the sap run faster. There was a lot of finger licking going on. Spark said the trees were like candy trees because in a couple spots the sap had gotten so thick from drying on the tree that it was like soft maple candy hanging on the bark. Our consensus was that the trees are clean so we tried some. It was very, very tasty.
We did have one metal tube, from I don't know what so very unscientific, and that one ran the sap the best. From all corners of the yard came the sound thwamp, thwamp, thwamp when the bowls were empty. It was tree music!

To collect the sap we placed bowls straight under the taps and they have been catching almost all of it. When we collect it from the bowls we are straining it through a milk filter because the bugs are also loving the sweet liquid. So far we have gathered about five gallons. We have cooked down two gallons and got around a cup of syrup. It is exciting that we can make something so good from a resource right in our back yard.