Walking by an empty maple tree, I heard the chattering chorus of some chickadees and other small birds. It isn't showed in the picture, but this maple had taps and buckets to collect the running sap. Sugar maples have a higher concentration of sugar in their sap as compared with other trees, which is why maple syrup is so popular. It takes about forty gallons of sugar maple sap to make one gallon of maple syrup. To make birch syrup, for instance, it takes one hundred gallons of sap to make one gallon of birch syrup.