well ... i never lived in GA.. but arent you a little early ... up here.. oak are one of the last to leaf out ... and all you can exercise is patience .... you have scratched once.. good enough ... no matter how many times you want to check .... i would hesitate to keep doing it repeatedly .... leaf out is a function of soil temps.. at root depth .. not air temps... so even if it has been warmish for you .... if you bury your head 3 or 4 feet into the ground [and dont forget your mulch is keeping the soil cool longer] .. you will find.. most likely.. little or no soil warming to trigger root growth.. which will trigger leaf out ... i think the plant needs to start pumping water up into the tree ... to start plumping the buds to expand and break .... i dont know if that is science.. or just my way of thinking about it all ... i am not impressed with small branches being dead ... perhaps they were sacrificed due to the transplanting of incredibly large specimens .... regardless .. what will be.. will be .. and all you have ... right now .. is time to wait to see what the result is ... it is also not uncommon up here in z5 .. for last years transplants to delay leaf out even longer .... simply based on the transplant .... i dont see why that would be different for you ... maybe dan knows .... good luck ken PS: shade will increase the amount of time it takes .. for the soil to warm ... so expect those trees to be behind the curve ... pps: my bigger worry.. up here in the great frozen north.. more than initial bud break.. would be a heavy frost or freeze after the leaves appear .... if there was loss of the first set of leaves.. on a tree with basically no roots [comparatively speaking] .. there just might not be the reserve of stored energy to releaf ... and then you will have problems .... but right now .... your only problem .. is PROBABLY .. your anxiety ...

I would suspect that this is squirrel damage. Especially in the summer, they will frequently gnaw off bark in patches and eat the inner bark, sometimes girdling branches. It's actually pretty common with girdling to see the tissue continue to grow (or even be exaggerated) just above the damaged area until the stem dies. The sapwood may continue to be conductive for a while, and the sugars from the leaves on that limb don't have anywhere else to go...

orchidguy is right. In most cases, pruning paint/sealer is not only useless in fending off unwanted problems, but can prevent a woody plant from doing its own 'healing'. It was once thought that these products kept disease pathogens from entering a wound, but we know, now, that that is not the case. The only times that I would ever recommend that a sealer be used is if the plant in question is susceptible to a particular type of borer insect and it was the time of year for that borer to be active.

figfarmer, yeah, I know that. But I was aiming for the search engines to spider this, and when anyone types "killing a fig tree", it might come up with this. And if I'm lucky, that person happens to be in the local bay area. = ) Oh, well, just looking for blind luck, because I really want a large tree.