I thought I had fire-starting all figured out until this year, when we got our firewood from a different ecosystem.  Usually, our homegrown firewood comes from the floodplain, meaning that we have plenty of box-elder for kindling and walnut for hotter fires; when we buy wood, it tends to be oak from national forest mountain nearby.

But the drier Starplate pasture was full of scrubby trees that grow up in old fields.  None (except one tulip-tree) were very large in diameter, but some resisted the splitting ax like crazy.  I'm guessing that maybe this ultra-hard wood is hop-hornbeam?

I'm so used to starting fires with box-elder kindling that I thought pale wood equated to easy starts.  It turns out that was a false correlation, as I discovered when I tried to start a fire with another pale wood (not sure what it was since the bark had fallen off).  Since then, I've realized that the easy way to tell which variety to use for kindling (especially if you don't know the species and can't look up its Btu potential) is to heft the round in your hand.  Heavy wood takes more effort to catch a flame, while light-weight wood will flare up in an instant.  (That's assuming your firewood is dry, of course.)

Some things never change, though.  Lucy continues to be a firewood thief, so I figure these new species taste about the same as the old did to a dog palate.  And the cats still love curling up in front of the stove.  Don't worry, Emily, Strider was in the comfy chair too until seconds before I snapped that shot.