April 21 yesterday Leslie saw a bit of muck pushed up on the Deep Pond dam, so when we got to our land today we hurried down to the Deep Pond to see if a beaver was active there again. We had a good bit of rain last night and the ensuing flood washed away what fresh muck had been pushed up on the dam. Otherwise, no signs of recent beaver activity. On the way down, we saw some nice horsetails along the road.
Although it had been cloudy most of the day, it had been warm and the sun was just coming out as I headed off to check the beavers in Boundary Pond. So I veered up to check the Turtle Bog to see if the Blandings turtles might be out. On the way I flushed a grouse off a large rotting tree trunk. There was a quite a pile of poop beside the log, as well as some fluff on the log. I wondered if the impression in the rot of the log was made by the roosting bird.
I sat by the Turtle Bog for 20 minutes, nothing stirred. Leslie had heard a towhee yesterday and they often nest around the bog, but I didn't hear any calls. I walked along the water looking for wood frog eggs but saw none. One negative I was pleased to notice: no black flies yet. There were some buzzing flies interested in the wet ground, not me. I went up on the ridge as I headed down the valley hoping to see the annual bloodroot blooms, but I walked by their usual spot without seeing any. Leslie says what blooms are there are only on the south side of the little knoll. They used to bloom all around. I checked the upper bog on the ridge and saw only still tannic brown water. Down at the Last Pool, the big poplar gave every appearance of being in the throes of being cut down. The beavers are gnawing into it. And the pile of twigs in the water seems half the size compared to the last time I saw it. The beavers eat the small twigs whole, don't strip off the bark.
The rain has once again given the strange row of muck and logs in the middle of the pond the semblance of being a meaningful dam.
Crossing on the other side of the pool, it was easy to see that the beavers are concentrating their activity here. The water has been clouded by their swimming about
and they seem to be in the process of cutting down the remaining birch convenient to the pond.
Including those in the field above the pond.
It will be interesting if the distance from the pond will keep them from cutting the birch that are just a little bit bigger than what they've been cutting. Meanwhile, at all the birch eating stations around Boundary Pond, there seems to be less activity, though the bold creamy stripped birch wood still gives the impression of great feasting going on,
Nor does the lodge or dam seem to be getting the attention it had been getting. Of course, the dam is now so crisscrossed with logs that is difficult to tell what has just been added. Compared to two weeks ago, the dam is getting a nice heft to it. However, it still leaks.
Up on the ridge west of the lodge, I saw some curious stripping of saplings. Beavers cut saplings them nibble the bark so a porcupine must be doing it. The porcupine here in the winter had a propensity to eat small trunks too small to
climb.
Back down along the wet flats beside the pond, I saw a violet peaking out.
Swallows are inspecting our bird boxes; honeysuckle and nannyberry beginning to leaf.
April 22 a chilly cloudy day. I checked the South Bay otter latrines to see if an otter remarked territory after the spate of rain we had. I saw nothing new at the lower latrines. But at least one leopard frog had been on the move, and died on the trail, rather
deflated.
No telling what did it. And I saw some nice early saxifrage growing up on one section of mossy bank.
It looked like a beaver visited the old dock latrine and pushed some wet leaves up on its old mark that was washed away.
No muskrats today. I saw more porcupine work on the oak and maple trunks along the trails, not in the willow
so maybe the porcupine I saw whining in a willow along the trail was complaining about the lack of leaves and my theory on the timing of porcupine dining holds: oak and maple bark until the willow leaves come out. Up behind the docking rock latrine there was some lower stripping, not in beavers style, and if a porcupine did it, it didn't go up higher on the trunk. I saw in an instant that otters had roughed up the leaves in the high part of their latrine, though I suppose
the photo doesn't really show it.
One mound of leaves had a small bit of otter scat in the middle. The trail up to the leaves was, I thought, muddy enough from the rain to show prints, but I didn't see any. So this is probably not fresh work. The rain and waves also washed away the scent mound the beavers molded beside the rock where the creek comes down from Audubon Pond.
Doesn't look like a beaver has visited the area recently. Continuing along the trail along the high loessy ridge that the water I saw mud in the water like something had dug out a burrow,
I'll have to check on that when I get out in the kayak. There were no scent mounds at the otter latrine over the entrance to South Bay but there were four piles of scat in a line of about 5 meters that was 2 meters down from where they had been scatting -- and the plot of those older scats were diamond shaped, not a straight line.
Of course I was nose down into the proofs of these Euclidian otters. One scat itself had a nice design.
The largest pile was tinged with red suggesting that a large
crayfish was the meal.
The next largest pile seemed to just have fish scales.
Bullheads don't have scales so I am expecting to see smoother scats. The lack of scent mounds is also puzzling since in other years this has been quite a bulletin board. The water level at Audubon Pond is still high though I think the beavers are no longer using the spillover canal as a truck route for hauling out logs.
I could walk down the bank of the manmade canal, and saw where beavers had pushed some leaves out of the channel, but didn't really put their heart into it. The beavers did drag enough out however to collect meals for nibbling at the
entrance to the canal.
They built up their bank lodge,
primarily by piling on more logs and leaves.
This is not their season for piling mud on the lodge. With more water they are closer to more trees. These beavers seem more excited about cutting the larger trees close to the water rather than going farther up the slopes to cut smaller trees.
The beavers I watch on our land are doing the opposite. Going along the north shore, a pileated woodpecker showed off for me.
But judging from the whooping I heard behind me, another pileated was noticing, too. I also heard, but did not see, as osprey flying over the pond. The high water has flooded the muskrat holes behind the park bench. The beavers have started stripping cut logs right on that area,
perhaps relieved that muskrats will be out of the way now. I noticed some work along the far shore of the pond above Audubon Pond which is now connected thanks to the flooding. I had planned to go out and look for muskrats in the early evening, in the interior beaver ponds, but it is a bit too chilly for that sedate pleasure.
April 23 we went to the land to get the house ready for spending the weekend there. No signs of beavers at the Deep Pond and I walked down to where the creek drains into White Swamp where I saw no
fresh signs of beavers nor of otters down there. I heard a turkey gobbling with some insistence but didn't see it. Back on the island, at 5:30, I got to a ledge on the granite ridge above the north shore of Shangri-la Pond. Walking above the west end of the pond, I saw three or four piles of stripped sticks.
In editing the photo I took of the pond, I was taken with showing
the cliff only in the granite reflections in the water. Last year the pond was
rather grassy here, and two week ago most of the water was gone, so the reflections on pond in front of the lodge show the pond's perfection
Thanks to the repaired dam.
I didn't come to soak in beauty but to count beavers. I hoped four would come out before my dinner at 7pm, but since it doesn't get dark until 8:30 now, that was a long shot. However, it began well enough. A beaver popped out in the middle of the pond before 6, and as it cruised to my left going up to the north end of the pond, it didn't smell me despite the west wind. I was a bit low down and trusted the gusting wind above me to top my scent. The beaver nosed up to the major girdling job in the north end of the pond, but didn't work on that, and swam on and I lost track of it, until 10 minutes later it swam over to the dam and began working on it, now taking up heaves of mud and muck and then positioning sticks into the dam. During the early repairing that I saw the beaver seemed less concerned about how
the logs fit into the dam, but, with these finishing touches, the beaver seemed more concerned with proper positioning, even going up on the dam, but not going over it. When I tried to repair a breach at the Deep Pond dam, I worked from the dry side and so was doomed to fail. The only way to repair a dam is by working from the water side like a beaver.
After working on the dam for 15 minutes the beaver swam back up to the north end of the pond. The beaver swam as much as he could under water in the channels of the pond so I lost track of it. By 6:30 no other beavers had come out so I stood to see where that active beaver was. It quickly swam off the shore, nose up at me and slapped its tail. Then it circled and I expected another tail slap. I could see its nose working hard to smell me, and then it swam fast heading around
the bend in the pond and right below me. Beavers here have over the years often stopped below me, slapped tail or given me hard looks and then went into the lodge. This beaver stopped but then made a curious corkscrew dive, just like I remember one of the beavers doing last year. I thought it might swim all the way to the lodge, but instead it swam up the north channel of the west end of the pond and then wound up in the middle of the pond bobbing in the muck and getting something to eat, roots I assume. Still no other beavers out. What a glorious spring evening for a beaver
out early and for me too.
April 24 we motored over in the boat to Picton Island, alarming fewer pairs of buffleheads than I expected. We checked on the beaver lodge in the bay first and there are a few logs on the lodge that look recently stripped by a beaver, and up on the slope, a bit in the background in the photo below, beavers had girdled a white oak.
Leslie thought the work looked old, but I thought it was done this spring. Last year the beavers here swam around the point that forms a smaller bay to the north and then went straight to the south shore of Quarry Point and up that slope where they cut smaller oaks and a pine. We drifted out of the bay, thanks to a west wind, and I saw the path up the slope that they made last year which looked unused recently. Then farther up the point, we saw a freshly cut down pine in the process of being segmented.
and a large tree nearby had been girdled a bit more, which is to say, beavers seem to revisit the tree every year and girdle a little bit more, not completing the gnawing which will kill the tree. As we motored by the latrines on Quarry Point, I saw fresh scats in the low grassy area the main slope of granite. So I had a nice tour of the latrines a bit off the point. Last year the otters seemed more active out on the point, but we saw no signs of them having been there. But I was on tiptoe over scats at latrine the otters usually wear out.
Starting at the grassy square next to the water
There was the large pile I saw from the boat, and squirts backed up against the first face of granite.
which turned me around a bit. I always think of the otters facing inland when they scat but it makes more sense that they would turn and face the water when they scat (at least I know I would,) Then it looked like otters had been on the broad granite face, mostly covered with pine needles that goes down to the water
but I saw most of the digging and scat higher up, almost under the shade of the pine tree.
The biggest pile of scat was by the far the biggest pile I've seen this spring.
However, I didn't see any fresh scats but the scats on the rocks dry quickly on sunny breezy days, and the otters have also been pawing through the grass where it's harder to see the scats, though I did give it a close
once over, and saw nothing fresh.
While we didn't see scats over at the very point, we did see plenty of spring beauties, some growing in the thinnest pine litter just up from the water.
and back where the otters have been scatting, I saw an elegant trout lily up to stretch up to the sun.
Last spring when we drifted here we were serenaded by a large chorus of leopard frogs, not today, and the usual osprey wasn't around. We did see a heron catching a fish right along the shore. This shore is mostly all rolled rocks but the heron was standing where some cattails were trying to root and one ill fated bullhead, at least, tried to hide from the daylight there. Going down Eel Bay on the way home, we set probably a thousand buffleheads on wing, and a few pairs of common mergansers slower to leave.
After dinner at our house on our land, I headed down to Boundary Pond to check on the beavers. I first sat down with a good view of the Last Pool, where I expected the beavers to come, which meant that I didn't have a good view of where the beavers would be coming from. I sat there for a half hour and only heard the spring peepers pick up the pace of their chorus. This was one of our hottest days, upper 70s in the afternoon, and it remained warm at night. So I moved down and sat at the end of the Boundary Pond, at the end of what I used to call the Logdam
Pool before the beavers breached the log dam. No beavers came within my sight, and I was concealed well enough that a pair of wood ducks swam in front of me. It looked like a male was pursuing a female though there was a bit of gentle back and
forth.
This spring I cleared out a good bit of the trees blocking a walk along the slope of the ridge west of the pond, so I could move easily and quietly until I stood overlooking the lodge. Not a beaver in sight. No hums. Just the chorus of frogs.
April 25 another hot sunny day, and I first hurried down to enjoy the flowers on the southeast slope of the knoll behind the bank beaver lodge at the Deep Pond. My sport here, where there are so many flowers, is to find charming juxtapositions of them,
like trout lily and spring beauties
and trilliums and early saxifrage
and trillium and early meadow rue
A few trilliums were in bloom
and a there were thick clumps of Dutchman's britches, often higher up on the knoll, gaping down at the flowers below.
There were even some horsetails, but alas, only one clump of hepatica, with such tall white flowers it would seem a good place for hepatica.
I planned to watch the beavers again tonight and well before I took my seat, I walked around the Last Pool and took photos of where the beavers were likely to do some gnawing so that I could convince myself that even though I don't see them, the beavers still made it up to the Third Pond. To make a long story short, thanks to that precaution, I did prove that a beaver came up and did some gnawing around the Last Pool. On the afternoon of the 25th, I saw that the beavers had made a much deeper cut into the big poplar they had been working on as well as started girdling the almost as big poplar next to it,
and on the morning of the 26th, I saw that the girdling on that other poplar was much larger.
Though there seemed to be no night's work on the poplar with the deep cut. Well, I jump ahead to show photos take 18 hours apart, because sitting by the pond on the evening of the 25th, I didn't see a beaver go into the Last Pool. I made my vigil sitting by the Last Pool dam which continues to grow, though I am not sure why.
Looking up from the dam, the Last Pool is not really backed up but merely fills the old depressions between mounds of moss on old roots. Indeed the depressions could be the holes left by tree that blew down, and were, years ago, cut up for logs.
Looking down from the dam, the Boundary Pond backs up dependant solely on the dam built last spring.
The beavers do stop and strip logs and nibble sticks at the mound of leaves and muck they've fashioned into a dam
And a bit of the dam is ribs of moss covered roots. I can almost get the sense that the old roots were so suggestive of a dam, that beavers just by force of habit filled in the gaps with leaves, logs and muck.
Well, the beavers so far have shown no inclination to build a lodge behind this strange dam. Last year I never thought they'd build a lodge behind the Boundary Pool dam which I thought was entirely inadequate, and,
of course, they did. I sat at the end of the pond with a good view of what I called Logdam Pool, and of the Last Pool dam. It was a warm and gusty night. Flanked by two ridges this pond is usually protected from the wind, but the south breeze tonight was
coming right up it, and since there were rain clouds in the offing, the breeze was cooling. I first got a glimpse of a duck, but then I saw ripples that only a beaver can make. Soon enough the beaver pushed a mostly stripped log up out of the water and
seemed to gnaw on it again. And that's about all it did.
Then the wood ducks put on a show, with a good deal of splashing. Two males were fighting and chasing, and the victorious male guided the female over to where the beaver had been, and the beaver was gone. I think the wood ducks angled onto the shore, so I didn't walk down toward the beaver lodge, not wanting to disturb the loving ducks.
Then after I was gone, one beaver at least went up and stripped the big poplar. Walking around the Last Pool I saw what looked like fresh gnawing on a birch log
of course birch gnawing doesn't age much, but I probably would have noticed this work before, and I hadn't. Leslie and I also shared our flowers finds. She found a slope with several clumps of blue hepatica
and I took her down the flowers around the knoll and it looked like lightning bugs were gassing up a trout lily.
Wandering around at night, we heard toads and saw glow worms.
April 27 a very hot day so the place to be was the river. I braved the heat a bit by rowing up to the otter latrines along the South Bay peninsula. I checked where otters scatted along the flat rock that juts out into the bay. No fresh scats today and the scent mark left by a beaver or muskrat had been washed away -- the water is still rising in the river. Instead of walking around the rock, too hot, I rowed up to the tip of the point, going well beyond the goose nesting on a rock just up from the water.
On the back side of the little island (when the water is this high) that forms the rocky point of the peninsula, it looked like otters had been all over scratching the dirt and pine litter there. The otters have three
pathways up into the latrine. One coming up from the south cove of the day
and the other coming up from the north cove. On path comes up from water covered by a little marsh and another well out in the open
and it looks like they've worn down a path up on the rock linking these routes up and down to the water.
I was surprised to see that many of the scats had crayfish shell bits, and here and there were bleached bullhead parts.
Amidst this activity, it looked like an otter scraped up pine needles in a mound and left a scat on top.
None of the scats were piping fresh, but this is all from this spring. Then we had lunch in the shade of the big hemlock along the of shore of Murray Island where beavers have a huge lodge, but if beavers were there they were quiet. We enjoyed the toads singing from all over, as well as leopard frogs, and some ospreys calling high over head.
And we saw a curious contretemps between three geese. At first we thought a male was chasing off a male intruder. Then it became clear that the female was chasing the intruder, and then when she seemed to flag in the effort, even dipping her beak in the water toward him, the other male raged off
the island and with violent honks drove the other goose away. No nesting seemed to be involved. Then we docked on the east side of the Narrows and climbed up the ridge to enjoy the flowers -- once again there are some striking blue, almost purple, hepatica
Leslie wanted a photo of a bloom with the liver shaped leaves. But I prefer the blooms that seem to magically appear out of the litter of brown dead leaves. We also saw little yellow flowers we couldn't identify
and then up on the rocks, the shadbushes were almost ready to blossom. Leslie finds the buds more exciting than the blooms.
Of course, I checked the otter latrine above the entrance to South Bay where I saw several of the scats had dried showing parts of crayfish shells. I always assume the otters are lusting after bullheads at this time of year, and humans come from miles around to fish for them in South Bay, but evidently the otters are more interested in the crayfish. Down at Audubon Pond, where the wind was dead and the heat was heavy, the beavers continue to pile logs on their bank lodge
and they are cutting cherry trees not far from the spillway canal
Then after dinner we walked along the sixth fairway of the golf course, first listening to peepers and comb frogs, and then the toads piped in and we were pleased to see more bats flying above than we did last year. Plus there were three young deer about, not closely supervised, and they gave us some long looks, and even a few steps forward, until they ran off white tail high.
April 29 a cool sunny morning inspired me to explore the bush above the Upper Second Swamp Pond, where I fancy there is a Paradise Pond, where the beavers in the Upper Second Swamp Pond may have moved. I went via Antler Trail which always affords a good view of shadbush blossoms at this time of year,
I never get an adequate photo of these delicate flowers. They merge in their clusters like the haze of spring. Just about where the trail joins the South Bay trail, I saw a mayapple coming up. There were no new scats at the little causeway along the South Bay trail, and the green grass was coming up in orderly fashion suggesting no animals had been scratching around recently. I headed up the ridge and admired Otter Hole Pond that even after six years of being empty retains some of its former glory.
It's hard to believe that otters used to swim where all those dead grasses bake in the sun. The central portion of the pond, where the beavers of old evidently dredged enough to give a semblance of a real pond had a rather big muskrat lodge, made all of dead grasses and cattail fronds.
It's been a while since I've seen such a substantial muskrat lodge. I don't recall noticing it during the winter. The Second Swamp Pond dam looked unvisited but I didn't give it a close inspection. Not that I hurried to the bush way up pond. I checked on the Lost Swamp Pond first. I scanned the shores of the pond for beaver work, and saw none. I walked along the shore of the west end of the pond, looking hard at the water's edge. I saw small push of wet leaves up on the shore at the mossy cove, and there was a tiny stripped stick in the water. But those were the only beaver signs I saw all along that shore until I got to the dam. A beaver had pushed a good bit of mud up on the dam.
I walked over to the rock behind the lodge that is just off the east side of the dam which didn't show any signs of recent habitation like a few stripped sticks on or around it. Then I heard a whoosh of water from under the lodge, and soon enough a beaver surfaced out in the pond. It swam a slow circle back toward the lodge, and swam directly at me, until it dove
and disappeared. Then I saw that it was also swimming directly at its pile of nibbled sticks, and good many twigs yet to be nibbled.
Earlier in the spring, I saw two beavers here. Only one showed itself today. I must say I usually got a tail slap from the beavers here. But I didn't hang around to get one. I set off to find the beavers in the pond below. I saw three of them there in the early spring but haven't seen a sign of them in a month. I began by checking a tree they had started to cut in the winter, and saw that it remained standing. Then I worked my way up to their old lodge at the upper end of the pond, and saw that the lodge had collapsed in the middle and the canals to it looked untraveled.
Then I worked my way over to the canal that came up from the end of the pond
and came down from the tangle of willows farther up.
The canal bottom was littered with stripped sticks but most were almost concealed on the canal bottom -- all old work.
I say "worked my way" because there were no trails, then I began to really work my way as I moved into the thickets of willows.
Here and there I saw beaver cut saplings and stalks, but nothing fresh. Some of the cuts were high suggesting that a beaver cut them when there was snow on the ground. But no recent cuts. I have come back here at least once a year for the last two years, and I recollected a shady pool a bit to the north. I only succeeded in finding a channel that looked lost.
And it was not muddy, no beaver had used it. So I fought through the willow, much of it beginning to leaf, and went back to the east where another channel led me to a pool of water, but there were no signs of beavers there.
I went through the bush down pond, and then crossed over to make sure beavers were not using the canals coming off the main pond to the north, where most of the remaining trees are. No signs of beavers using those canals.
So? Where are the beavers of this colony that I have been watching for the past 15 years, perhaps the colony I have watched the most over those years? I went back via the Big Pond where there is fresh mud all along the long dam
Indeed the beavers have raised the pond to a higher level.
Of course the Lost Swamp Pond and the Big Pond are several times larger than the Upper Second Swamp Pond. But the colony in the later pond has over the years created the New Pond, Beaver Point Pond, Otter Hole, the Second Swamp Pond. Only the latter pond and the Upper Second Swamp Pond are still in business, but still that is a good expanse of real estate. Maybe the beavers moved into that muskrat lodge in middle Otter Hole Pond! We went to our land in the afternoon and I realized that clawing through willow thickets had tired me out. I
sat by the Deep Pond and was dozing when I heard a splash. Probably a muskrat because I soon saw one floating in the middle of the pond, studying me. Unlike beavers, muskrats usually don't ponder me as I ponder them. Then this one dove and came up with something I couldn't see and ferried it to its burrow over in the dam. A small water snake also swam over to the shore I was sitting on, and, to my surprise, came up in the grass, hunting for food no doubt.
I walked back around the knoll, no signs that the beaver is still there, but the trilliums were finally beautifully out.
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