(I apologize to anyone who gets this as a duplicate via RSS feed. The original post was lost during a recent crash of the server.)

The mystery seed 8 last week was indeed a maple key, a silver or swamp maple (Acer saccharinum) seed to be exact.

silver-maple

Silver maples are commonly grown as ornamental trees in the eastern United States and southeastern Canada. They have lovely, delicate leaves with deeply cut lobes.

silver-maple2

It is easy to find silver maple keys because they are the largest winged seeds of the native maples and because the trees produce a lot of them. Many birds and small mammals use the seeds for food.

Hopefully a few of those seeds becomes a new tree.