I got a nice photo of the trail along a dry channel that deer, raccoons and one dog took to and from the pool. 
The bogs at the end of our land are all dry except for the first one which has just a blush of moisture
Then I took photos of the three variety of ferns that do well in the wet.
The photo however doesn't capture the eery aura around these ferns that seem so well suited to the shade.
In the sunnier reaches of the moist mud, I founds some sprightly nodding burr marigolds, that seemed to be just coming out.
These neighboring flowers look like either marigolds that didn't make it or one of those flowering plants that never quite bloom, but Leslie says its Spanish needle
There was a patch of spent spears once enpurpled with flowers which I assume are purple loose strife that didn't quite reach their stride in this quiet corner of the world where they can't alarm ecologists.
The asters are carrying on the purple theme, with many buds just coming out. 
Also towering over the ferns were turtlehead flowers but most blooms were done and evidently something, perhaps deer, find their leaves tasty.
The Hemlock Cathedral was so dry, I spent most of my time scanning the canopy for dead oaks and maples, but as usual only found a dead ash or two, something to cut down and slide out when the snow eases the way down the ridge. We spent a quiet night at the land, and a long night. Nature has lights out before 8pm now. In the morning at breakfast we heard the whine of a porcupine and I saw one of the low branches of the nearby red oak bobbing. I went out and saw a large porcupine gnawing away high in the crown of the oak, and right in front of me was a small porcupine, evidently frozen between the stern lecture from above and the menace at its tail. 
Such is my faith in things not being as they seem, that I like to think of porcupine mothers as not being prickly at all, but always suffering the pangs of leading little ones by the quills. But in the trees, as in the beaver ponds, tough love reigns. Of course, the porcupine on top could have been an angry old man. The little one certainly had much to think about, and first curled up wishing I would go away.
Then it reared up,
and perhaps I did it a favor. After I went back to work, it soon climbed out onto the end of a higher branch and got to work. I heard a little more whining an hour later, but the little one had clearly made its mark as a tree trimmer.
September 3 the remnants of a tropical storm came through giving us almost two inches of rain. This afternoon I sensed clearing skies and headed off to at least check Audubon Pond and the otter latrines on the way. Walking along the South Bay trail I once again saw a flock of flickers foraging the leaf litter of the woods out to the point. I saw that before and forgot to note it. Despite the rain there was just a trickle of water flowing down the creek from the New Pond. There were puddles among all the rocks in the creek. Seeing otter scats in any of the latrines just after some heavy rain would have been remarkable, but I thought I could tell if otters had been through in the last few days, and there was no sign of otter activity at the old dock latrine. I sat there briefly and then it began raining. Last time I was caught in the rain, I trusted trees to keep me dry until the brief shower ended. An hour later I was soaked to the bone. Today I went directly to the covered bench at Audubon Pond to wait the shower out. I was first entertained by a flock of sparrows, first working the pile wort to my right and then, after perching on the little dead tree to my left,
flying over to forage on the beaver lodge. Then after the sparrows, a flock warblers, common yellow throats, I think,
did just about the same thing, save that I heard some sweeter notes from them. The lodge had some mud and grass packed up on it -- nothing major but the beavers were smoothing a way up on it.
Looking over at the bank lodge on the west shore, it looked like something had opened a path to the lodge through the surface vegetation. 
However, other than bullfrogs and a kingfisher nothing disturbed the water during the 45 minutes I sat there waiting for the rain to stop. I walked around the pond and on the bridge on the northwest corner of the pond saw a
mucousy white blob that in the late winter I would call an otter scat.
Unfortunatey the park staff had brought equipment down to reset the bridge that had been roiled a bit by high water in the spring so the grass around it was all matted down making it difficult to determine if an otter had revisited the latrine that I found in the grass a few weeks ago. No other otter signs. I even checked the latrine above the entrance to South Bay and saw no signs of otters there. So...., I went home, wet, and drawing no conclusions.
September 4 headed off for the ponds at 5pm to check on otter scats and then wait for beavers to come out for the night. In the woods a bit beyond Otter Hole Pond I saw a glowing stand of chicken of the woods,
an orange beacon attracting even closer admirers, a slug. 
I sat on the rock at the south end of the Second Swamp Pond dam and nothing seemed to be happening there. Then when I got up to go down and check the otter latrine in the middle of the dam, an osprey flew off one of the low dead trees in the middle of the pond. This summer almost everywhere I sit, an osprey is perched nearby and I usually don't notice it until it flies off. As I followed a path in the grass of the dam, I saw a fresh fish part, rather neater than what otters usually leave behind,
But a foot from the pond water is a mostly likely place for an otter to tear a fish a part. Then at the latrine in the middle of the dam, I saw a fresh otter scat
aAnd while it smelled like there were more, I couldn't see any. So one otter at least is still visiting, and given the narrow path from the latrine to the pond, I can't be sure more than one otter is doing all the visiting. 
The wind was calm and the pond water perfectly still, which, on the one hand, makes it easy to see any ripples, but, on the otherhand, makes a hiccup from a minnow or frog seem like a major development. I went up to the north shore of the Lost Swamp Pond and while I fancied that I saw
a trail in the grass, there were no otter scats along it. Ithought there was a new scat next to the dam, but it certainly wasn't fresh. A beaver, however, seems to keep in touch with the dam by pushing up a bit of mud, grass, a log, and even rocks,
bBut only at the west end of it. It is as if a yearling just can't wait for the colony to start packing fresh mud and logs on the dam for the winter and has to make some effort now. I sat down in the grass with a good view of the lodge where I think the beavers are living. Five ducks, who when I came up to the pond started swimming off, thought better of me (ducks sense your presence when you are 300 yards away) and swam over in my direction. Then an osprey flew in from the north and perched on a dead tree behind the dam 
with a fish in its talon which it began pecking at like it was really hungry -- osprey are often nonchalant about eating what's in their talon. Judging from the flicking tail, the fish was quite alive, another indication of how hungry the osprey was. This was not a fish it flew around clutching for half the day, and it took about twenty minutes to eat. I noticed with a close up video that the bird twisted its head as it pulled apart the fish. Then I watched the ducks again -- too small to be mallards, and not marked like wood ducks,perhaps they were teals, though even with video I can't be sure. I also got up to check on the Upper Second Swamp Pond, nothing was happening there. I was intrigued with how worn down are the trails up to and through the dog bane on the slight slope. One has even been worn down to the sandy soil.
Uneaten dogbane stalks float in the water. After a pleasant hour watching the birds, I got up again, checked the pond behind me, and then the otter latrine at the upper end of the Second Swamp Pond, nothing there, but when I came back up to walk around the Lost Swamp Pond, I noticed things had changed. A muskrat, I think, was out in the middle of the pond. I checked the mossy cove latrine and there was nothing new there. I sat on the rocks with a good view of the pond and then saw something swimming into the pond from the northeast. That thing dove and soon enough I saw a beaver emerge and go over to forage the grasses in the pond off the point up in the east end of the pond. I often see a beaver there, but did it come in from the northeast? Once again I was unsettled by the thought that a beaver from the Upper Second Swamp Pond colony which had moved up to a collection of channels I call Paradise Pond (which I should check in the next few days) is invading the territory of the Lost Swamp Pond beavers. I waited another 10 minutes but was getting hungry. I decided to go home by going back down to the Second
Swamp Pond dam. The last year the mother had only one pup I saw them swimming there in the gloaming. On the way I noticed that the beavers had harvested some branches from the old maple that finally blew over.
They climbed up some rocks so they could get into the crown of the maple -- showing a bit of discrimination. 
I continued on to my rendezvous with otter and pup, but they didn't show up. Saw several deer on the way home -- some are losing their bright coats preparing for winter.
September 5 I headed off to the ponds after working on the house, speeding my way over by riding a bike to the state park entrance. My plan was to take the East Trail into the woods then go along the rock ridge to the Paradise Pond, the collection of channels where the Upper Second Swamp
Pond beavers concentrated their activity this summer. As usual the chicken of the woods is popping out here on the trunks of dying red oaks -- not yet as florid as the array I saw yesterday. 
I could have crossed the valley to the ridge without looking down at the diminished East Trail Pond but as I neared the pond, I heard a hawk call, and I decided to see if there were any new bird feathers on the slope just above the pond, remains, I think, of a hawk's meal. A small flock of ducks flew off the pond. It wasn't easy finding the old otter trail down to the pond, though it struck me that something had used it. Then as I went down to where I had seen the feathers a few days ago, I saw the picked clean and bleached back bone of a duck and smeared next to it appeared to be otter scat!
This was puzzling. I didn't suspect an otter of eating the bird, the bones were rather old, but I worried that another animal was spreading poop that looked much like otter scat. So I went down the trail to the old otter latrine at its base hoping to find more scat, and I did, a huge
smear with a small squirt next to it,
with an otter scat smell that took my breath away.
I moved closer to the pond and picked my way through the tall grass, and certainly otters could have made their way through it, but....
The pond is hopping with frogs, so maybe that is what the otters are eating, and maybe they get enough in the grass without swimming through the thick duckweed on the pond surface, but that doesn't seem likely to me. Of course, I eagerly clicked into my old otter tracking habits and
went back up the ridge and down to the creek, the old otter route to Otter Hole Pond and the Second Swamp Pond dam. However, I didn't see any scats nor any otter-like scuffing around at the old latrines. All the mud was overgrown with plants so I couldn't look for prints. I did get to enjoy another, and rather late blooming clump of cardinal flowers.
I didn't forget about Paradise Pond, but decided to first check the north slope of the Second Swamp Pond for scats. There were none on the lodge at the base of the rocks and it didn't look like anything had tried to roost among the thick set of vervain, thistle and jewelweed on the lodge. However, at the little grassy clearing fashioned by beavers early in the summer just up from the auxiliary lodge, I saw an extensive array of otter scats, several just up from the pond,
several more centered in small grassy flat
and then more up the slope.
Most of the scats were loose,
black and scaleless
but I saw two knotted with fish parts.
I also saw one old scat. As I sat on the slope above it all, I was bathed in the redolent smell of otter scats as I gazed up and down the pond.
I waited for a few minutes and then, forgetting Paradise Pond, headed down to see what the otters might have done at the dam. When I got to the otters' favorite latrine on the dam last year, now rather overgrown with vegetation, I saw a trail of scats coming up from the thick grasses over the old creek
and then heading into the thick
vegetation on the edge of the dam.
Some scats were older than the others so if I had walked just a bit father out on the dam yesterday, I would have seen half of all of this.
There wasn't anything new at the latrine I checked yesterday, but a little beyond I saw a bullhead head up on grass a foot from the pond water.
I took a close-up of the head as I found it,
then flipped it over to get a view
of how an otter cut the head.
Are the curious sacs maggot eggs? Obviously more than a mother and pup left all these scats. As I headed up to the Lost Swamp Pond, I reasoned that if I found as many scats there, then I was probably tracking that group of three males who decided to head to the ponds. If there was
nothing new at the pond, then the mother, as I once suspected, had more than one pup and perhaps a female helper too. A family group like that might be more prone to confine their foraging while the big males would roam in and out of all the ponds. Once again I flushed an osprey off a tree and set ducks off this way and that. I kept my nose to the ground, and found no new scats. I saw some pressed down grass next to the Upper Second Swamp Pond dam but that proved to be evidence that beavers had turned their attention to that pond and were mudding up the dam.
I headed back the way I came and
picked some chicken of the woods. Now, to see the otters.
September 7 I headed off to the ponds on a sunny, warming afternoon but checked the old dock latrine along South Bay in case there might be signs that the otters headed back to bay. None, but the bay is getting rather shallow and denning at the end of the cove might not make much sense. I went up to the East Trail Pond to see if there were signs of another visit from the otters. Well up in the woods above the pond,
I saw two large black poops that
looked much like otter scat.
I know otters do go up along the ridges, but I've never see otter scats high on a ridge this far from a pond. I poked the poop and thought it had a strange filmy consistency, but had to admit that frog skin purged by an otter might look like that. Indeed, one thing that might bring otters up the ridge would be trying to catch frogs in the shorter and thinner grasses. There were no scats to be seen near the pond and I sat near the old scat to see if they had aged differently than otter scats in the last two days. I must say that like otter scat they lost much of their volume, but aging otter scats usually
reveal many undigested parts of the prey and these scats didn't.
These scats certainly didn't seem like raccoon poop usually berry-laced at this time of year. As I pondered the poop, I saw a deer browsing in the tall grasses behind the pond, then flushed another deer browsing in the shady valley. Woodpeckers were about and a larger complement of
mallards, but I was struggling to stay in the otter zone. I had no doubts that the scats I saw on the north shore of the Second Swamp Pond were otter scats. I sat above that latrine, but no otters appeared, tand hen ascertained that no new scats had been added to the latrine in the last 48 hours. These scats were aging properly revealing bones and scales.
I checked an old latrine close to the auxiliary lodge and there I saw a fresh raccoon poop looking just as raccoon poops should with berries and a tubular shape.
I walked along the dam and saw no scats there either. This shook my theory that the otters were making themselves a home in this pond. There were more trails through the vegetation on the dam, and the bullhead head left behind was gone. I didn't see any raccoon poop. So perhaps otters
had come through again and just not pooped. That raised the expectation that they moved on to the Lost Swamp Pond, which an inspection of the north shore quickly dashed. I lounged on my usual spot with a good view of the beaver lodge out in the pond. The golden heft of the September air was irresistable. I had to sink under it and harvest other observations. The small ducks were still about and I got better video of their preening. Then as I prepared to leave I heard a hum from the beaver lodge and then saw ripples
a small beaver came out. I'm always curious to see where beavers go when they first come out, but I think this one knew I was there, and generally floated with its head in my direction. Then there was a huge shock wave coming from the lodge that raised bubbles from the bottom for a half a minute. A large beaver surfaced after that graphic demonstration of how shallow the pond had become. Then large as it was, I lost sight of it until five minutes later I noticed that a stump down in the pond had two ears. By that time the small beaver was weaving in the water just below me. I got a nice photo of the two
beavers and their lodge.
I would have liked to stay, but had more latrines to check. There were no scats at the mossy cove latrine and no signs of otters, only the usual geese, around the lodge in the southeast corner of the pond. On my way to the Big Pond I told myself that given their liking for the South Bay marsh the otters would much prefer the grassy Big Pond to the Lost Swamp Pond. Well, I found no evidence that they did and while I waded through the vegetation on the dam, I forgot about otters and enjoyed the flowers as the purples and violet flowers faded and the yellow burr marigolds prepared their entrance
The seeds of the blue flag iris, one of the early bloomers here, were about to drop.
Then as I headed home I saw a different kind of turtlehead flower in the ditch that leads to the Doublelodge Pond.
More things to look up. As I entered the woods, one of those many pointed bucks I saw the other day scampered off. And I saw two more deer before I got home.
September 8 I didn't let a blustery southwest wind keep me from kayaking to South Bay on a warm sunny day. The beavers remain active at the willow lodge. Though the water is shallower it is easy to deepen a channel in the mud and there is a channel leading to the beavers path up the
side of the lodge. There wasn't much more work on the willow nor at the stand of alder a bit up the shore. They are feasting on the ash near the point stripping much bark off the trunk and leaving many stripped sticks in the water. I'd like to see how
many beavers are coming for this meal. I saw three herons and twoof them were still molting. There were less signs of beaver workon the trees on the north shore of the point, but several cut rhizomes. I wished I had the camera to take a photo of two
truncated lily roots bobbing in the water next to a perfect water lily. It is nice that these beavers don't seem to have a taste for the flower, only for its roots. I took a small root home and got a photo of it showing the beaver's bite.
While I saw no signs of otters, I did smell the same pungent odor coming from the huge willow behind the rock latrine that I smelled when the otters were active. But it smells more like something dead, than the usual otter scat smell. I drifted down the north cove as far as the mats of cut and dying grass at the end of the cove. Then three mallards entertained me by going bottoms up to find a meal around a small cattail clump that was drifting in the water. I looked for the jelly globs on the plants again and didn't see any where
a week ago they had been on everything. I saw few globs floating on the water, and took some home for a photo.
I pulled up some grass and saw many black things sticking to it.
I enjoyed paddling up and being blown back, looking and feeling the water. The water was warmer where the plants were thicker, and in some canyons formed in the underwater forest, minnows swam. Then I paddled over to a raft of bright green algae floating on the water, and that felt very warm. I was about to pick up a brown leaf floating in the middle of the algae then I saw that it was a painted turtle heating up. It was loath to go and I could have had a chance at picking it up, but, I never do that. The last time I was here the globs seemed to have spread further up the bay, and today I found that that more recent growth was still thriving. I even saw a curlycue wildcelery encumbered with them.
Some milfoil had lost all its leaves and only had globs. And the grasses had the black specks I noted before and the globs.
The globs in shallower water probably have a harder time hanging on when the river gets rough. I checked all the willows along the north shore of the bay and one main trunk hanging over the water was well stripped. The beavers also cut down another ash which fell conveniently in the bay. I'll get photos of the beaver activity when I come out in the boat. No osprey today, and only two cormorants out in the deeper water.
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