Fortunately most of the oaks are probably fine; it's too early, even with our mild season this past winter, to have oaks breaking dormancy yet. We'll likely start to see growth (and blooming) closer to mid-April or so. We have seen some oak decline region-wide, though the reasons are many and overlapping so one lone cause is not to blame. Granted, climate change can add to the various stresses these oaks are experiencing, and that's a more unavoidable impact we can't do much about immediately. (Compared to, say, monitoring a roadside oak for watering needs during hot spells or redirecting any water flow from roof downspouts that might be flooding the root zone of an oak in a yard.)

For specific trees on private property that you would like assessed for health problems, we recommend you work with a certified arborist. They have training in tree diagnosis and can look for indications of stress and sources of stress from its immediate surroundings that might be able to be addressed to help the tree maintain its vigor. Trees in decline can't always be salvaged and arborists can't always intervene to treat every issue, but even dead and dying trees provide great wildlife value and any not near structures or people that it would harm when falling can be allowed to stay to continue to support the ecosystem. They rarely would pose a health risk to any nearby trees in that situation.

Anne Arundel County has been tracking the decline of oaks in the county for a few years now and has an online reporting form residents can fill out to help them collect data to look for trends. They deactivate this link during the dormant season but we've noticed it's back up and running now in preparation for the trees leafing-out in a few weeks. Assessments of tree health are hard to do and can be incomplete if done before the trees have a leafy canopy.

We are not aware of any financial help for taking down hazardous trees, but you can reach out to your county or municipal government to ask if local resources exist. If it helps to reduce costs, you may be able to avoid haul-away fees by keeping removed trees on the property (either in coarse log and branch form or in ground-up chipped form) for use as brush piles for wildlife, wood chip mulch, or just to decay on-site to recycle their nutrients back into your yard's habitat and woodland.

Miri