May 1 we headed off to the land to spend the night and my first chore was to check on the Deep Pond dam to see how the beavers responded to the heavy rain. The dam is holding nicely. They pushed a rock up on the brush they used to raise the dam.
And they also pushed up mud, but primarily where there was no threat of a leak along the old embankment. And that's where they got out of the water and nibbled some sticks.
They used mud to patch the center portion of the dam which had been leaking the most and logged on many sticks below the dam, and piled on the brush.
All in all, very impressive. I was about to relay my congratulations to an animal floating out in the middle of the sundrenched pond, and then it dove and by the snap of its tail revealed itself as a muskrat. During breaks from collecting logs, I sat by the First Pond, hoping to see the head of a
Blanding's turtle pop up above the water. I did see a turtle pausing in its journey from the Teepee Pond to the Valley Pool
but it was a painted turtle.
Around the pond, I saw some very quiet green frogs, and several more painted turtles. And I was distracted by several ravens. Our neighbor, a butcher, now and then dumps carcasses which attracts ravens, crows, vultures, and, in the winter, eagles. Today the ravens seemed to peacefully manage divvying up the carcasses but not without much discussion which sounded goodnatured to me with gurgles, yodels, and caws with much repetition, in that respect ravens are just like people. At 5:20 I headed down to find a seat along the shore of the upper end of Wildcat Pond, about where I had sat when I saw the beavers so well a few days ago. I thought I might be able to tell if the beavers remembered me. This time I took a net hat to defeat the blackflies so I was a sight to see, or not see. My boots, pants,
coat were brown. The net hat was green and my gloves were blue. I was like a violet curling up out of a patch of dead leaves. And perhaps I was because a turkey came flapping down over my head, landed on the other side of the pond, and went foraging up the far shore, about 20 yards from me, and didn't notice me at all. I sat with a view of a mossy mound out in the pond with a stripped log left tastefully on it.
I hoped a beaver would soon park itself on it and do some more nibbling. At a little after six I saw a beaver out in the pond near the lodge. From the get go, it acted like something was wrong. I could see it sniffing the air, and it didn't climb up on the mud bar as usual where before all the beavers seem to get their bearings when they first come out of the lodge. In a few minutes it swam into the upper section of the pond, turned to me, and stared hard at me. This was a small
beaver. It turned away and then turned back and then headed back down pond and then stopped and turned and looked back at me -- its nose working all the time. Then it swam back down pond. No tail slap. I thought I'd be home for an early dinner. Then
another beaver headed my way, a little larger than the first, and to my surprise it swam right by me and headed up pond. I would have liked it to stop and do some foraging in front of me, but I also wanted to see a beaver working in the pools up on our land. Then I saw a third beaver come out of the lodge and this one went to the mud bar and not only sniffed around, but found little twigs to nibble on. I had a eureka moment of sorts. This is the fifth or sixth time I've seen a beaver do this either grooming or nibbling, but always nose down in the stripped sticks. It struck
me that the reason I always see these stripped sticks on the shore in what looks like a designed pattern -- often just a simple cross, is that the beavers nose the sticks apart in order to get a better smell of them. So the sticks are moved but not
into a visual pattern, but an olfactorial one. When the nosy beaver heaved back into the pond, however, it didn't head my way. It was almost time for my dinner so I was about to sneak up pond and see where that second beaver found its breakfast, and then
the small beaver came back toward me. A tail slap might ruin my plans, so I kept still. And then just like last time, a muskrat came to my rescue. As the little beaver seemed to be debating what to do about me, the muskrat sped by and and headed up pond. The beaver turned and followed it, and then went over to the shore and I lost sight of it. So I had two beavers to look for. Then when I stood the muskrat came speeding back, and turned toward me. A muskrat's first priority is to mark and just as last time this muskrat went up pond to mark and then turned back to eat, perhaps, I thought, once again to dine on the duckweed in the water right in front of me. The muskrat dove and I got my camera ready, but when it surfaced it saw me and did a dive with a snap of its tail and disappeared. The little beaver didn't go
far up pond, only to the edge of the canal heading up to Boundary Pool. When it sensed me, it escaped under water, surfacing away from me and not slapping its tail. I bumped into the other beaver in the Boundary Pool, and to my regret, I blocked its path of escape. So as I walked around the pool, it dove three times quietly and surfaced quietly, imitating a floating log
and I left it, seemingly unruffled. Heard two whippoorwills at night, briefly, and the frogs were not as loud as usual, perhaps because the night turned chilly.
May 2 a chilly cloudy morning and then rain. I didn't get out at dawn but took advantage of the clouds to scout out flowers to photograph. To me they always look better on a cloudy day, though in the case of trillium, they might not look so robust.
Not so with the violets. The blue have been around for a week
and the yellow are just coming out.
As I walked down along the foot of the mossy cliff that forms the east side of the inner valley, I couldn't take my eye off the beaver developments. The Log Dam Pool, as I call it, is now wide and deep enough to attract wood ducks, and the photo I took of it makes it look quite substantial.
Well, I had just spent an hour in tangles of honeysuckle bushes trying to cut down ironwoods with a dull saw and I had a hankering to see how I might go about it if I only had bigger teeth. No, I shouldn't joke at the beautiful way beavers manage trees. In the upper end of Wildcat Pond proper there were nibbled sticks at the base of an elm with its bark stripped three feet up the trunk.
That's the long and the short of a beavers meal, left in a beautiful tableau. Then I saw that they resumed stripping the curved birch that they gnawed on in the winter, and nearby started on another elm and a pine tree.
Then I finally got a look at the hole at the edge of the pond that they used to escape from under the ice of the pond during the deepest winter. I could easily see that they didn't chew through much ice but dug into the muddy bank and then up. There was a winter's worth of nibbling nosed about what now looks not like an arm of the pond but a little hole next to it.
I went down to look at the dam for the first time since the thaw. It seemed in good shape, but it had lazy leaks here and there and no evidence that the beavers were trying to patch them.
Clearly the beavers are thinking up stream now. The canal and ponds below the dam looked unused, but that is a hard call without investigating more closely.
I continued around the pond to get a photo of birch crown the beaver was climbing in as well as the lodge. Up close, where the beaver had climbed looked quite high. Too bad I didn't see how it grappled up to the top branch it was gnawing. On the other hand the lodge looks smaller up close --
really not that much bigger than I remember from the late fall.
I also took a photo of mud bar where the beavers first visit when they first come out of the lodge, and as I suspected the stripped logs have been nosed into a cross pattern even though you would think that since the
beavers like to groom here they would clear off the sticks. Perhaps the odors they collect serve as a kind of time clock for the beavers.
Then I had the challenge of going up the west shore of the pond between the cliff and the water. Clinging to the cliff introduced me to the first columbine of the season.
When I first saw this set-up last summer I thought the beavers might find a den in the holes along these rocks, once the pond water level got high, but I saw no evidence of that. Then back along the flats I saw my first slug enjoying birch sap made accessible by a beaver cut.
Once again there is fresh work around the pond and upper pools, and I think I keep seeing new cuts every time I go up. The dams seem about the same as they were a couple weeks ago but I got a better angle on the interesting dam that forms what I call the Last Pond. It consists of brush piled between big elms that grew out of a old decayed tree trunk, or so it looks to me.
And as a marker of the beavers' progress I took a photo of the last birch grove they are working on.
If the rains keep up, I think they'll keep working up here. In a few hours it started raining.
May 3 a warm sunny breezy day but as I headed off to tour the ponds and South Bay at 4pm the clouds were moving in. With the river water level high and the beaver ponds over flowing there's a chance bullheads might run up stream as far as they can, but so far, no signs of that. I did pause along the little causeway along the South Bay trail that crossed the creek coming down from the Big Pond. A heron flew off from the bay side and I heard turtles plop into the water. Then I saw some remnants of otter scat in the middle of the trail on the
rocks where otters were wont to scat over the years.
I am being perplexed by scats new to me, and I look at these traditional latrines at least twice a week, that don't look fresh. But when otters have a stringy scaly scat and there is some rain and then sun, the scat can be washed out and left to dry into an old look rather quickly. So that probably is the case here. The other curiosity is that the scats aren't rich black flecked with brown fish innards and not scales which is common when the otters eat bullheads. I'm getting the impression that it is a bad year for bullheads. I veered off onto the point out into the bay but didn't go as far as the willow latrine, so as not to bother the porcupine, and I think the high water level makes this latrine less attractive. I did check the new latrine -- maybe it was used three or four years ago -- that seems to be a response to the higher water level. More leaves, dirt and grass had been scraped up in the same spot,
but I saw only two balls of dry otter scat and quite possibly it was month old scat scraped up by a new arrangement of the leaves.
This is frustrating because by my human way of thinking a new latrine should be festooned with piping hot dripping thick scats. If only I could smell better.... I did see a large poop close to this latrine, obviously not otter scats. It is the color of beaver poop, the shape of raccoon poop,
but I think it might be skunk poop.
Skunks dig up an area, but I don't think they scrape leaves into mounds. Over the years, I have seen skunks along the South Bay trail but never smelled them. As I walked along down the south shore of the north cove of the bay I got a good view of the old dock latrine, as I call it, and, given the dark scraping I could see from that distance, predicted that there would be fresh scats there.
During the winter I saw some low girdling out on this point, and I got a good view of the result of that height-challenged porcupine's work on a big basswood.
That girdling was not fresh and I still expect to stumble onto a dead porcupine. How could one so loath to climb trees survive with so many fishers around? As I crossed the creek I did see a fish, a dead sunny wedged head first under a big rock. I tried to pull it out by its tail and it didn't budge. Never seen that before and don't care to think how it might have happened. Several years ago this cove was thick with sunnies one May; then there seemed to be a dearth of them; perhaps they are back. I know it sounds silly but I think of sunnies as a dry fish when I picture it being digested by an otter. I bet it has more scales and bigger scales than most bite sized fish, and whenever I've cut into them, they seem, well, drier inside than perch let alone bullheads. I was right about the old dock latrine, more scraping, and a fresh scat
but only one. And while fresh, it was a bit dry too, not from eating bullheads. Clouds had darkened the day; the warm southeast wind turned chilly and there were a few drops of rain. I was happily on the trail of otter scats and at the docking rock latrine further up the north shore of the bay, I saw new scat in the latrine just up on the ridge and an area of matted down, dusty grass. Evidently an otter, hopefully otters, are using this as a rolling area.
I haven't seen a good rolling area here like this in years. If the otters really are spending a lot of time here, they should roll it down to bare dirt. Then on the other side of a rotting log at the side of the latrine, I saw another otter foray up on the bank
with a lot more scat left, I think, by at least two otters if not three. And this scat was stringy, and, judging from the red mite on it, bug-fresh, as I like to call it.
While my next scheduled stop was the otter latrine at the entrance to the bay, I detoured up to Audubon Pond. A few times, over the years, I've done that and seen otters. I was surprised to the see the pond more flooded
than before, and that seems to have attracted at least three pairs of mallards. The geese are still here too, and a pair of common terns were noisily diving into the pond. I also saw some fresh girdling on a large tree perhaps more accessible to the
beavers thanks to the flooding.
I should note that the man made drain of this pond is not working as well as it could and that, as well as the recent heavy rain, is causing the flooding. I'm not ready to credit the beavers for defeating it because it has been under water so long. Possibly it just filled with debris. It was designed for annual cleaning and only gets sporadic attention. But the big news in the pond and what stopped me in my tracks were the muskrats. I saw one swimming up along the embankment
Then it stopped halfway and swam over toward the flooded causeway. Then behind the causeway I saw another muskrat swimming toward the bigger pond, and then I saw yet another muskrat. The second muskrat I saw, after pausing and sniffing in my direction, swam toward me and I got a video of the
workings of its strong tail. There were many muskrats here last year and I saw them late in the fall, but not once during the winter. There was also a deer on the embankment. Then I got down to the otter latrine at the entrance to South Bay and here too I saw more scraping and a stringy scat, not as fresh as the other I just saw, and no other new scats.
I took a photo of the latrine trying to capture three things: the scraped up grass, the blooming cherry tree on the bank and how slowly the almost cut willow is sprouting its leaves. Indeed I think it is dead. In the
phote farther down the shore there is a willow greening on schedule.
I walked back down the South Bay trail, tried to get a photo of the small flock of scaup out in the bay but not wanting to send them flying couldn't find a good frame to shoot through the trees. Then I stopped short before a huge bullfrog right on the trail I just walked up.
Though it probably just hopped into that position, it didn't flinch as I got a photo of what a bullfrog might look like to another bullfrog.
Then when I got back to the old dock latrine something scampered down the slope, but not an otter which would have disappeared but a ground hog that reached the safely of the dock but still had to look around at what was causing all the bother.
Then I headed for the Lost Swamp Pond going via the south shore of Otter Hole Pond. This once magnificent and lively pond is now virtually dry, though still serviceable to ducks and herons. Several of the former and one perhaps two of the latter flew off as I walked along the pond.
For years there has been a secluded spot among the rocks where I always see trillium. Some plants are still there, but not blooming. I paused to look at the Second Swamp Pond. I have seen a beaver out before 5pm this
spring, but not today. Soon I was sitting on the rock I fancy, above the mossy cove otter latrine, looking at the huge windswept pond with not a duck, goose, or anything else to be seen.
However at my feet there was new otter scat, that same dry, spread out variety that has perplexed me on this hike.
I sat for a half hour moving a little closer to the big lodge well up pond where I hoped to see beavers. I did see some stripped sticks along the shore, rather small and evidently from some little shrub. (The arrangement of the sticks supported my new theory. They looked like they had been nosed into a crossing pattern.)
There was a good bit of some nannyberry like, knee high plant nearby but I couldn't see any cut and collected by a beaver. Rain started and stopped and I stood to leave at 6:15pm and then I saw a muskrat swimming from
the north shore to the point, evidently eating and not marking, and then it rounded the point and paused head up, mouth open, in the wind whipped ripples. Collecting pollen? Imagine food sailing into your mouth. Then I saw another muskrat swimming from the north shore and staying on the lee side of the point. This was good to see. Perhaps the muskrats are breeding a bit later this year and soon I will see them crowding and fighting over the pond. No beavers out, however. The beavers at the Big Pond evidently are lumbering somewhere. There was a nice large stripped log on top of their lodge
and the dam is brimming and well patched. Its leaking because the water is soaking through in several places.
Since they are doing so much to build up the dam, I bet the beavers are harvesting trees well up pond. I should walk around it sooner or later because the tangles are growing out everywhere. While I didn't see any lumbering below or beside the dam, I did see that a beaver cut a honeysuckle which they don't eat, but will use in a pinch to firm up a dam.
May 4-5 we spent the night at the land and I went out to see the Wildcat Pond beavers in the early evening as usual, and only one came out late, a little before 7pm. It didn't go up pond as usual. It first went to the dam and over it and did some minor repairs. Then it swam up below where I was sitting on the east shore of the pond where the channel between the lower and upper pond narrows, but didn't swim by me. Instead it turned back, went around the lodge and then back over the dam and I lost sight of it. So perhaps the beavers are foraging more down below the dam where there are ponds more exposed to the sun and with more fresh greens agrowing. And obviously, its sniffing me prompted it to go over the dam. I went back to the pond at 6 am, and didn't see any beavers, which surprised me, though I know beavers change their schedules. Indeed, I saw a muskrat swim out of the lodge at 6:30 pm, get a bouquet of grass and take it back into the lodge, which suggests little mouths and/or a mother to feed. Then in the morning I didn't see a muskrat, and didn't worry about muskrats being gone. Fortunately I took photos of recent beaver work in the evening and in the morning, so I can pair them up and show that a beaver came out and up pond. The photos before and after show the
beavers' work up pond later during the night. First in the evening I noticed they had made a wallow out of a little pool just below the Boundary Pool dam. In the morning I saw fresh clay on the path out of the wallow.
In the evening I took a photo of a precious moss island in the middle of the upper Boundary Pool, and in the morning I saw that there had been more gnawing on the tree the beavers were cutting there.
Finally in the evening I took a photo of some stripped sticks to show how the beaver nosed them about. In the morning there was no evidence of nosing about that night but there were more stripped sticks. (The photos look at the patch of shore from opposite sides.)
However, I must say that my morning sojourn was disappointing. Sometimes in the morning you can see all the beavers in a colony check back into the lodge. Today I only heard the birds, wood thrush being the new arrival, and saw a porcupine in the woods far below the dam. At least it was cold enough to keep the bugs down. I studied the mud bar where there seem to be fewer stripped logs now
and thought the birch they have feasted on looked like it was bleeding.
The birch seems to have some tentative buds, and the photo below shows a lodge that looks lived in -- a bit muddy.
Now, back to May 4. In the early afternoon we went to check on the Deep Pond beavers. First Leslie showed me a red stalked plant, like the one I saw peaking out around the Teepee Pond that I lost track of.
We don't know what it will become. And then as I walked around the Deep Pond I saw the beaver peaking up at me, right at the now much wider entrance of the inlet creek.
The pond is quite high, flooding a bit around the lodge, so it is good that they built that up.
I walked back along the inlet creek looking for fresh work and found none. Then as I continued around the pond and approached the dam, I saw the beaver peeking out at me again, like it was anticipating my every move!
When it quietly submerged and swam away I went below the dam and saw that these beavers have a little wallow pool too, a comfortable puddle in which to nibble sticks.
And I saw that they were cutting more of the thin, tall trees there, that I have yet to identify.
Otherwise the black flies got a bit nasty in the afternoon putting the pants on both work and botanizing. In the evening when we walked the road and listened to the frogs we saw a porcupine up in an elm. Evidently nothing to eat on that bare limb so it must have been making a study of
the color green, always an enjoyable pastime in the early spring.
In the cool of the morning of the 5th I did cut and haul dead ironwoods, then the blackflies took what fun there is out of that. I looked at the usually lush flower patch on the east side of the first ridge on our land but only saw the violets that are white in the face and purple behind.
Then crossing back over the ridge I saw early meadow rue
and a red cup mushroom
I juiced the red up in the photo editing so it wouldn't look orange. Also saw a black and white warbler. Then after lunch I cut some aspen shading the lower garden and took a branch down as a gift to the beavers in the Deep Pond.
I dragged the branch down a likely trail the beavers could take back up. One year beavers came up to the Third Pond to feast on the willow there and they came up and cut some poplar. Then I checked on a little spring we dug out ten years ago along the ridge east of the Deep Pond. There was a small pool of water, plus trilliums and a hepatica: a nice spring picture
and I noticed that trees beavers had cut years ago were now sprouting out again
another image of spring -- but spring is blackflies too and I went back to the house to read a Melville sea yarn.
May 6 I was up at 5 am and out with the chorusing robins, then up over the ridge of the Antler Trail and looking in vain for otters in the north cove of South Bay. There was a nice wind making gentle rolling wavelets and
when two common terns started squawking I stood to go, first checking the otter latrine I was sitting near.
I found new scats but not from that morning. They had hardened.
I headed up to the Lost Swamp Pond to greet the rising sun.
In good years I'd be join by up to eight beavers but today I got there in the nick of time to see two beavers before they ducked into the lodge. But there was much else to enjoy. A heron couldn't wait and so flew up to see sol before I did.
Then after declaring this pond was gooseless the other day, I saw geese everywhere including on the lodge out in the pond behind the dam that I was sure they had abandoned. But out on the lodge in the southeast corner of the pond, I saw three geese claiming it. So this may be a case of failed parents staking out a claim for next spring. We'll see. But the pair closest to me looked all business, intent on incubating. Then I was entertained by three ducks who kept
perching up on trees and tree stumps.....
I also saw a common mudhen, quite a pretty bird when it is stalking. And when I went up on the rock above the mossy cove latrine, I saw very fresh otter scats.
So I continued to watch the three ducks, listened to a catbird's singing, and occasional goose honking. I saw two common terns here, too. Then I checked the Big Pond, where I saw much fresh mud on the dam
and got a good photo of how they are engineering the advance of the dam through the muskrat burrows.
Plus there was fresh nibbling on the south end of the dam
Good hike.
We went to the land to spend the night and the first thing I did was check to see if the beaver accepted my gift of aspen. Why not?
We had dinner early and I got to a vantage point on Wildcat Pond a little before 7pm, just about the time I saw the beaver on the night of the 4th. I watched until 8:30 and saw no beavers, no muskrats either. A pair of mallards flew in late, and I heard a hermit thrush singing in the distance to the west. So I had plenty of time to think about the beavers. Had they fattened up enough and no longer had to come out so early? Had they all come out early and gone over the dam into the wider open better vegetated ponds? On the way back to the house I took some photos in the dark of the dam and wallow below the Boundary Pool pond. I saw that they cut down the tree they were cutting on the little island in the upper Boundary pool. And I took a photo of stripped sticks that looked like fresh work, on the shore of the Logdam Pool
but in the dark of night all stripped sticks have a neon immediacy. Now I had some ways to tell if beavers came up pond that night.
May 7 In the daylight the Logdam Pool nibbling didn't leap out at me. I saw in an instant that the wallow wasn't muddy, and those photos suggest no beaver went through in the night
Ironically that morning I saw that a beaver nipped a bit of pussy willow by the Valley Pool
and there was some fresh birch saplings in the pool too, but I couldn't find where that came from. So? The Wildcat Pond beavers kept using the ponds below well into the fall. So I think it is a case of their going after emerging greens. But are they staying at all in the lodge? I didn't take a photo of the mud bar near the lodge where they nibble stick the night before but I did today and it doesn't look different from the photo I took on the 5th. I sat on the ledge above the pond and the black flies did not make it any easier to figure out if the beavers had moved. So I looked at an apron of columbines just below the rock I sitting on tolling their pollen bells above the pond.
Along the flats beside the Boundary Pool there were yellow violets, smooth skin, all about.
And I forgot to add that last night when I went back to the house puzzled by the absence of beavers, I was cheered along by peepers and a few tree frogs all they way up the beaver development. Always compensations in the
spring. Yesterday, we left more aspen by the Deep Pond. Last night Leslie checked that pond and saw one beaver swim over to it and then both beavers eating together. Today we saw that the beaver cleaned out what I had left the last two days, and we left a lot more, since the wind calmed enough so I could cut down the big aspen that was throwing too much shade on our garden. Leslie put some branches on the other side of the pond and we chatted a bit, sharing observations. The beavers only ate the leaves of one branch she left, or perhaps a muskrat did that. Then she left and
I started walking around the pond and lurking in the meager shade made by a honeysuckle just above one of the old beaver burrows in the high bank, I saw a beaver in the water facing the bank. I snuck back into the woods on the ridge and waited to see if the beaver might check out the aspen. No. In five minutes it dove
back into the burrow. I continued around the pond and saw that an aspen log was on top of the lodge
Obviously the lodge is being used, but so is the burrow. With only two beavers there's so reason to move out, I think, unless there is something preventing the pair from relaxing with each other. This pond attracts refugees from the slaughter of trapping in White Swamp. In other years the beavers pairing here, once we had three, were more demonstrative in showing they were out of sorts. Of course, maybe this is a loving pair and the male is out during the day to ward of any other males. But, why no scent mounds? Years ago one pair made a point of battling each other with competing scent mounds. Or so it seemed. It's not like these beavers are not adept at using mud. The side of the dam where there is a little wallow is now getting walled with mud.
Anyway, as I pondered these beaver developments and swatted black flies, I was distracted,delightfully, first by a striped snake in the pond,
then by a spread of trillium in front of the moss and lichen covered ridge that angles toward the lodge.
And here some bloom were going pink.
Nearby I captured a phlox, with one bloom out and two others in the process of untwisting, or so it looks.
Rain showers moved in and the darkness enlivened the birds. I finally saw the yellow warblers we'd been hearing around the Third Pond. We both thought we heard a snatch of a rose breasted grosbeak's song. They are due.
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