Thank you. 
We were able to keep all of the mulch the chipper made from the trees. We’ll put it on our trails in the woods behind the house.
Would you consider tapping it and making birch syrup?
No, it’s only one tree and it takes A LOT of birch water to make a small amount of syrup.
I know that the maple syrup ratio is something like 40:1 (40 parts sap to 1 part finished syrup).
I feel the pain. We have an enormous tree at the back of our yard. It’s a neighbourhood institution. It’s home and refuge to substantial wildlife. It’s probably close to 2m (about 7’) diameter at the base. It’s at the top of a hill and impacts not insignificantly on the look of the whole neighbourhood.
Our neighbours don’t like it because puts their yard in perpetual semi-shade, and blocks them from having city views. It’s an invasive pest species (camphor laurel). It’s non-native and provide no food to native wildlife.
Normally my strategy would be to grow some smaller trees underneath so they were well established and ready to shoot up if we took the camphor laurel down but they are infamous for poisoning the ground (with camphor) so that competing species won’t grow.
The end result is I don’t want it there but don’t want to chop it down either. Ho hum.
could that not from being taken down?
It’s possible, but as I said up thread, one of the big branches had already split from the tree and fallen onto the power lines a couple of years ago.
I was visiting my parents’ house recently. The day after I arrived, they lost power, due to a branch falling off a tree onto power lines at a house uphill from them. And then later, a much larger branch, or really the upper part of the trunk, also fell off the tree (though on the opposite side of the power lines). From the ground, we couldn’t see visible rot in the tree, but the day I left, a crew was there to remove the tree entirely. So it was apparently time for the tree to go. My brother and I remembered that tree as being at our bus stop in high school. We would stand under it for shelter during rainstorms. So I was slightly sad to see it go.