Those are male flowers, for maple flowers are "polygamodioecious," which means that individual trees are polygamous but chiefly dioecious -- which means that trees can bear only male or only female flowers OR both male and female flowers can reside on the same tree, BUT the most common condition is for trees to have only all male OR all female flowers. It's hard to think of a word whose definition incorporates more ors or buts than "polygamodioecious."

If you're in a part of the world where lots of Red Maples line the streets as they do in much of the small-town eastern US, it's fun to look for this "polygamodioeciousness" -- some trees all male, some all female, but sometimes you see a tree that's mostly one way but with a branch or two of the opposite sex.

In the photo you see about half a dozen male flowers emerging from a recently opened flower bud on a leafless twig. The black, oval items at the ends of slender, white threadlike things are pollen producing anthers dangling on their filaments. The red, deeply lobed, cup-shaped structures are red calyxes, the darker, thicker sepals alternating with paler, more slender petals. If you need to review terms like sepals and calyxes, check out my flower-interpretation page at http://www.backyardnature.net/fl_stand.htm.

Six kinds of maples -- six species of the genus Acer - - are listed for Mississippi: the Red, Silver, Sugar, Southern Sugar and Chalk Maples, plus the Boxelder, which also is a maple. Different varieties of the Red Maple are recognized. The picture's flowers can be recognized as belonging to a Red Maple because: the stems are not green like a Boxelder's; the flowers are emerging well before the leaves, unlike those of Sugar, Southern Sugar and Chalk Maples, and; the flowers bear petals, unlike Silver Maple flowers.