July 24 In other summers, hot spells have been conducive to contemplating nature, since it was difficulty to cut firewood. But this year the combination of heat and bugs kept me lying low. I devoted the few comfortable hours of the morning to sawing and splitting wood. My pile of firewood for the winter is growing.
To be sure, sometimes as I work over the wood, I see how insects manage that habitat, like this series of gray casings where several pupae were hoping not to be disturbed.
I happened to peel off just that bark that was protecting them. Meanwhile, Leslie has been getting manure from a nearby farmer. When she unloaded her buckets at our manure pile above our lower garden, she saw a baby painted turtle. It was so beautiful she put grass in a bucket and put the turtle there and called me. I got a photo of its spotted neck,
and I gently turned it over and took a photo of its colorful bottom.
I took the turtle to the nearest pond, the Third Pond. I unloaded the bucket on the slope of the dam, which has no vegetation on it. The turtle scampered right into the water and then seemed to be stunned. I trained the camcorder on it and with the sun dappling the water next it, I got the impression that the little thing was floating mainly by surface tension and its very slow movement was propelled by solar winds.
It was not alone. There was a larger painted turtle floating in the middle of the pond, but it had its head high and shell tilted down in the water. After about 3 or 4 minutes, the baby turtle used its legs, and in another 3 or 4 minutes, it dove into the water and surfaced several feet out into the pond. Now it looked more like that adult turtle, with head up and shell down. It soon dove again. The second video clip takes the story to its dive.
Then I headed down to the Deep Pond, sawing down a dead ironwood on the way. It appears that one beaver cannot subdue the summer’s growth of vegetation in the pond. Where I sometimes swim in the deepest part of the pond is getting narrower as the vegetation comes up.
Of course the pond is more shallow this year because the beaver has not built up the dam. The pond is still muddy in the southeast corner where I have seen the beaver foraging.
I saw some muddy water right along the shore but it is more likely a browsing deer did that.
Likewise a plant pulled out along the shore was probably the work of a deer.
Judging from how the lodge looked, there is no reason to think the beaver is not using it, but today I didn’t see any leftovers in or near it.
There is still a trail in the pond marked by water cleared of vegetation that leads from the lodge out to the deep part of the pond.
On my way back to the tree I cut down, I walked along the apple trees, which appear to have plenty of small apples, and I saw a porcupine sleeping in the top of one apple tree. I assume it is enjoying the apples, but perhaps they are still too green for to eat.
Before dinner it is our custom to sing songs for a half hour. Since we have been eating at home during the hot spell, we were looking forward to our concert tonight. I got off three songs and then heard some wood thrushes teaching and learning the elements of their intricate and intriguing song. So I hung up the guitar and we listened. Thrushes can throw their voices and are rarely seen in the thick leaves. They are small relative to the impression their song makes. So that there were more than one thrush out there is just speculation, but why shouldn’t they be doing the same as the towhees, old and young, I heard and saw earlier in the day? Blue jays came through, also more than one, also noisy, but no intricate lessons to teach them their song. That seemed to drive the thrushes off. I got the guitar again, but then wood thrushes started up, and it was time to eat dinner. After dinner, I went down to check on the Deep Pond beaver, hoping that because of the cooler temperature, it would be out in the pond earlier. I also hoped that because of the cooler temperature, the deer flies would quit early -- no. As I pushed through the honeysuckles that conceal my trail to my chair next to the pond, I saw a blue heron poised to strike just behind the other side of the dam. To get to my camcorder there is a little tear of Velcro and that was enough to send the heron up and away. I got to my chair, to the delight of many many mosquitoes. I saw some ripples where the heron had not been, even closer to me, and soon saw that the beaver made those. It surfaced close to where the heron had been and soon swam over to where the heron had stood and the beaver started eating lily pads.
I could fancy that I did the beaver a favor by scaring the heron off. I tried to get some video of its munching which has the Blair Witch Project effect, not for any aesthetic reason, but for a scientific one: to show how often the hands holding the camcorder had to twitch to fend off the mosquitoes.
I continued my walk down the road, mosquitoes didn’t follow but deer flies picked up the chase. I didn’t see any muskrats in White Swamp. Back in the house, as it grows dark, we usually hear the whip-poor-will. A few nights ago I heard two. And then we usually hear the coyotes, and their chorus of yelps and howls has become more varied as their pups learn their parts. Tonight they proceeded it what seems to be a pattern, coming up our inner valley and then taunting the domestic dogs of our neighbors. Our neighbor the butcher dumps his waste along a ridge running northeast of us and he must be freshening up his piles because the coyote pack seems to stay up there rather than come down our road. All in all, a very musical night.
July 25 today our drought broke. It began raining at 6am and continued until a little after 10am, no downpours, but certainly at least a half inch of rain. We enjoyed being confined in our house under the trees and both ventured out when the rain was light. Late last summer I stumbled across two dead beavers and a dead coyote pup. I was able to collect and clean the bones. I prepared a space on the glassed-in porch where we store wood in the winter. I planned to make some sense out of the bones on some cold winter day when enough sun shown through the porch windows to keep my fingers warm. Silly idea and it never happened. I moved the bones to our little cabin on the land just up the ridge from our house. It has become my library, auxiliary reading room, workshop, etc., and guest room. There are two built in beds or sorts. Since we have no guests looming on the horizon. I took the bed off one of the ply board platforms and spread out my bones, careful to separate the beavers from the coyote pup, and careful to separate the beavers I collected last year. I also have bones from beavers collected two and three years ago.
Fortunately or unfortunately, I’m not sure which, I am pretty much content spreading bones out and making a tentative try to assemble them in the proper order. I took the precaution of wiring the vertebrae of the female adult beaver that died in the Teepee Pond.
Once the vertebrae break apart making sense of the animal is difficult. Fortunately, I found the vertebrae and pelvis of a beaver three years ago that had been buried in snow for a couple months. All was held together by gristle that was cured enough so that it never smelled. Using that as a model I could properly attach the pelvis to the female’s vertebrae. Doing that has some meaning for me. I general see the head and jaws of beavers, and, when I see it, I am quite taken with its tail. Now I can see the articulation of all that nondescript bulk that forms the middle of a beaver. When I see one groom its middle, I just see rolls of fat. Today I was able to compare three pelvis bones. The adult female had by far the largest. Consulting other books I might be able to tell if the other two are smaller because they are males or juveniles. My hunch is that they are males. I can identify the kits pelvis bones, but I’ll have to glue them together, and in doing that might, like those who put dinosaurs together, have to put in some man-made filling. All the kit’s bones are hard to put together. Only a couple vertebrae are intact, the rest are in pieces. But the amazing thing about the kit’s bones is how small they are. In the photo below, what remains of the skull and pelvis of the kit are encompassed by the pelvis of one of the males.
The kits died in early September when it was probably about 4 months old. Seeing how fragile the kit’s bones are, I find it difficult to reconcile the rough treatment adults often give them. But as kits go, this one had been rather rambunctious and the aggressor in all its shoving matches with its sibling. But after laying out the bones, I was stymied because I didn’t have the glue to put the kit back together again and I either misplaced, or have mixed up with other bones, the leg bones of that beaver. I also laid out the bones of the coyote pup,
But here again I seem to be missing some bones. I can do one comparison with these bones. Years ago we found the skull of a large canine, probably coyote. I also want to rearrange these bones just as I found them on the animal’s fur surrounded by green grass.
"The sun came back out and in the afternoon we were able to do a little work. In the late afternoon, the thrush prevented me from singing again.
July 26 on my way to saw ironwood below the Third Pond, I sat at the Third Pond and no sooner sat down than a muskrat came out of the green grass of the now dry portion of the pond, gained the water and then swam to a point right below,
dove and disappeared. I think muskrats make holes into the bottom of ponds that link up with burrows in the bank. Either that, or I didn’t see the muskrat surface again and run into a dry burrow into the bank. Then I got to watch a large shore bird probe the mud and water with its long beak.
Its head kept twitching and its beak rarely seemed to nab anything. Then it moved to where it ate something big enough to swallow and got several bites, tadpoles I assume, perhaps enough to make a meal.
The eastern half of the pond has been dry for a couple of weeks, but it wasn’t until today that it dawned on me that I could walk over and check the beaver’s burrow into the east bank of the pond. I took photos of where the muskrat disappeared, first standing on the west bank looking down at the pond,
and then from the grassy flat east of the remaining pond.
I’d say the pond is one fourth its size of two months ago. What willows the beaver cut along the north shore of the pond are hardly noticeable. I went through the button bushes
and saw that there is still a little puddle of water in front of the burrow, so the beaver probably did some dredging.
In other summers I never noticed puddles lingering here. The water is probably still muddy because the muskrat probably used the now well protected burrow. I saw the trail through the grass that the muskrat used to get back into the pond.
And so that the trail divided as it headed deeper into the grasses.
Of course, deer and raccoons have likely been down here too. While I can still easily see the evidence of the beaver cutting a couple dozen thin willows, the stumps are sprouting new shoots,
with the exception, so far, of the only large willow.
The beaver may return to this pond when it refills with water, though in the past beavers here only stayed for a few months and moved down to the Deep Pond. I went down to the Deep Pond because when I was looking at the pond from the road yesterday evening, I thought I saw a log pushed up on the bank lodge that I hadn’t noticed before. Actually, an old log already there got pushed out a bit making it visible from the road. The beaver probably did that.
I didn’t notice anything else new around the pond, not that I would be able to notice the beaver’s browsing on all the thick vegetation in and just around the pond. I did marvel, once again, at all the water lilies. As I walked back around the pond, I saw an angle for a photo that captures many of them.
Then after lunch a thunder storm rolled in and we had periods of very heavy rain. Driving back to the island we saw blue skies to the south as well as rain clouds that had just been over us, and coming from the west well as another intense cell of rain which we had to drive through. I had to slow to 10 mph just so I could see the road. The cell was not much more than a half mile in diameter. After dinner back on our land, I walked down to the Deep Pond. The front that brought the rain had moved through and some trailing cumulus clouds glowed in the setting sun.
The deer flies and mosquitoes were not as bad as usual so I sat in the chair by the Deep Pond dam, and saw rippling at the far east end of the pond. I waited for the beaver to surface and it did, swimming through the deep part of the pond, which is the only part of the pond without vegetation clogging the surface. The beaver moved into an area of pond weed and began pulling a meal towards its mouth and jawing away. It slowly made its way closer to me and ate some more pond weed,
but it didn’t get as close as when I saw it on July 1. Back then the pond was more open. I don’t think there are that many more lily pads now, but there is much more pond weed.
Meanwhile, as is often the case, I was hearing thrushes singing sweetly, as well as a catbird sounding a bit peeved. I noticed that some of the thrush song came from a wood thrush perched on top of a dead tree up on the ridge west of the pond.
With the camcorder, I could see the motions of its beak as it sang, and I think I could hear some of the notes it threw out in the direction it faced that sounded like they were coming from tree some 50 feet away. I could also hear calls from a thrush much farther away, unfortunately not well captured in the video.
I was too far away to get a good visuals of the bird, and the camcorder twitched to the tune of the deer flies and mosquitoes that were around me.
July 27 I got a chance to take an afternoon hike on the island. For the next two weeks we plan to spend four or five nights on the island, and I’ll use that opportunity to try to see if the East Trail Pond beavers have kits and to try to figure out where the otters are. So to prepare for that, I thought it best to use the few hours I had to spare today to check the South Bay otter latrines and to check on what foraging the East Trail Pond beavers are doing. I went off on Antler Trail and didn’t take a photo of the dead grasses up on the plateau, nor the reviving moss. We did have rain yesterday. I noticed that the black raspberries that looked so promising a month ago had mostly dried up. I saw one worth picking. Down at the end of the South Bay cove I saw a small otter scat and some twisted grass by the edge of the trail.
An otter had been there, but I can’t say that a family of otters had been there. I headed up the East Trail. Under the tall trees of the woods, I was sure I was hearing a scarlet tanager sing. I crossed the ridge so that I came down to the middle of the south shore of the pond, and I saw that the pond still looked in good shape despite the meager rainfall we’ve had for the last month.
I walked down the shore toward the dam and saw a muddy trail coming from the pond, but there were certainly no fresh beaver prints on it.
A few yards down pond I saw that the beavers had come a few yards on shore to gnaw on a small maple tree. There was a muddy trail in the pond, and fresh work on the maple.
Many of the roots of the maple were exposed, and had been for some time, since they had bark. A beavers had stripped the roots here and there.
The trail in the water looked like it had been fashioned by the beavers by eating their way through the plants growing out of the pond.
A couple yards down the shore, there was another small maple that the beavers half girdled and half cut.
Since the beavers haven’t cut the trees down, I assume they are the less desirable red maples. Judging from how brown the pond looks along that shore, the beavers are finding more to eat out in the pond.
I walked down to the dam where I didn’t see much evidence of beaver activity, except that the pond behind the south end of the dam was clear of vegetation. The cattails are thick behind the north end of the dam. The vegetation well below the dam is beginning to yellow.
I retraced my steps and then went around the west end of the dam. The water has retreated from west end of the pond. The tree they cut down into the water a couple months ago and stripped is now mostly high and dry.
The canal and trail going into the wood, where I had been seeing beaver prints, looks unused.
As I walked along the edge of the pond, green frogs keep leaping into the water. So I trained the camcorder on the pond as I walked along the north shore, and tried to capture the excitement. I may have gotten the half of it.
And when the frogs stopped jumping, I saw a garter snake at my feet perhaps miffed that I scared off a frog it had its eye on. The snake also retreated out into the pond. I sat in the shade of the north shore enjoying the lush green and the potential for many things to happen.
But nothing of note did. I still wanted to check more otter latrines along South Bay, so I headed back to the South Bay trail, veering off enough from my usual shortcut to stumble onto a classic hole at the bottom of the trunk of a huge red oak with a talus slope of porcupine poop skirting it.
The larger poop balls were farther away from the tree leaving what appeared to be worn down poop balls.
This suggest to me that another animal cleared out the large poops because porcupines generally seem comfortable with their poops in their den. There were no signs of otters visiting the docking rock latrine, and instead of continuing down the bay, I veered up to check Audubon Pond. Before getting up to the pond, I was distracted by four ospreys in the nest on the power poll. One adult quickly flew off and I thought it flew back with a fish in its talons. I thought it was going to fly into the nest and share the fish, but it flew right over it. So it seemed that it was trying to coax the three ospreys in the nest to fly. Ospreys often fly around with fish in their talons. But the other ospreys seemed rooted to the nest. Then I noticed another adult osprey fly over and then a large black backed gull. Perhaps the fledglings were waiting until the adult sorted out a defense of their territory. I sat on a rock waiting for other developments. When the adult landed back in the nest, it kept up its shrill calling, but the other ospreys remained rooted to the nest.
As I walked along the Audubon Pond embankment, I saw a muskrat swim up the little pond below the embankment and disappear into a grassy island in the middle of the pond. The water in the pond below the embankment was very muddy suggesting muskrats and maybe even the beavers were foraging there.
As the water level dropped in the pond, the extent to which the beavers have filled the metal cage around the pond’s large drainage pipe became clear. Now the mud around the drain is sprouting grasses.
I scanned the ponds for fresh beaver work and didn’t see any but I know the beavers have been cutting trees in the shady woods west of the pond. I went back down to South Bay and checked the otter latrine above the entrance to South Bay and I saw a new swirl of a scent mound in the grass,
and I saw a trail in the grass coming up from the rocks that form the shore of the bay.
But I only found one scat, none too fresh.
This looked much like what I saw at the end of the South Bay cove suggesting that one day, one adult otter took the trouble to renew its claim to the bay. The otter pups, if there are any around this year, are just getting old enough to make their presence felt, and a generous array of scats is what I usually notice. So what I saw today is not encouraging, but not quite discouraging. I should check out more possible latrines along the shore of the bay.
July 29 several years ago, thanks to the beavers in the First Pond, we learned to appreciate ironwood as firewood. The beavers cut many ironwoods and generally only took some branches off the crown, leaving the rest of the tree for me to cut up and split. I’ve now reached the stage in my firewood collecting this year that I am ready to collect the ironwoods the beavers cut around Boundary Pool. But before I do that I want to get more photos of how the beavers left the valley, though as I headed for the pond, I had a bow saw in hand. Since there were no ironwoods around the Last Pool lodge, I didn’t walk around it and began my inspection walking down the canal connecting the Last Pool to Boundary Pond. With the water getting lower in the canal, I see more tokens of the extent of the beavers’ dredging. They gnawed through some thick old trunks as they buried them in the muck they dredged.
I never noticed them doing this. It was almost dry enough for me to take a photo looking into the hole the beavers made into a moss mound next to the canal.
I’ve taken a photo of that hole before, but didn’t notice the collection of cut logs on top which suggest that a beaver was careful to secure this burrow. There was another pile of logs on the back side.
It may be interesting to see how beavers fashioned the inside of this refuge and what they may have left behind. The beavers cut two ironwoods away from the canal along the shore of the pond when it was in its prime. One ironwood was virtually untouched by the beavers after it was cut.
I cut away the branches of the crown, the first step in getting the trunk ready for segmenting and carrying out. Then there were two ironwoods that were stripped of their crown and the trunks conveniently a foot off the ground or on the ground ready for segmenting. Of course there are other trunks lying on the ground. In the photo below, I probably won’t cut up the elm that still reaches the shrinking Boundary Pond channel.
But I may cut up the ash trunk that the elm is lying on. Along what was the far west shore of the Boundary Pond, there is a clump of ironwoods mostly girdled and some cut and long dead but still standing.
There are also some standing and dead trees that are uncut, dying from being flooded for three years. It will be tempting to cut down one beautiful ash tree.
Or I think it is an ash tree even though its crown is much fuller than the usual ash tree.
But before the beaver pond this tree was growing in optimal conditions and perhaps even an ash could expand its crown. My other problem in wood identification are the many beaver cut and stripped logs. The ones in the photo below struck me as being ash logs,
But when I sawed and split them, I could see they weren’t ash, more likely poplar.
I saw an arrangement of moss mounds and cut trees,
That looked like the after photo of a before photo I took of the same view before the beavers came.
That’s how the area looked on May 8, 2003. Some trees that were cut are showing signs of some form of renewal, though none of the ironwoods. The beavers left part of a bitternut hickory trunk hanging from the stump. Now the remnant log and stump are bristling with bitternut hickory shoots and leaves.
I don’t think this will amount to much, and I’ll probably take the nicely sized bitternut hickory log. But in the meantime, I saw a spring peeper nestled in those large leaves. There are two cut ironwoods that, if the remaining pond doesn’t dry out, will be my bridge to the lodge and the cache pile, if I want to make a particular study of them.
I fear I may give up what warmth these ironwoods might provide because they certainly make a striking counterpoint to the mounds of logs that make up the lodge and cache. I didn’t explore the ridge west of the pond, where there are probably a few more ironwoods. From below I could see one sugar maple dead because it was girdled and half cut by the beavers.
I will probably cut that down. So, my firewood tour completed, I turned my attention to the dam. Water is still draining out of the pond but the water behind the dam is not low enough to reveal a hole. However, the muck above the area where the water likely has found a hole of sorts looks like it has been dug into a bit by an animal.
I don’t think the beavers had done this in the process of dredging muck to build up the dam, though I could be wrong about that. The beavers seemed to avoid dredging right behind the dam since there is flat ground proportioned properly to the stumps behind the pond.
Earlier I had thought of looking for a hole in the dam from below the dam, but the chance to do that has ended. The vegetation on the low side of the dam is even swallowing up all the logs the beavers pushed down there.
There were no ironwoods on the east shore of the pond, but holes in the east bank of the shore lured me over to take a closer look.
I always suspected that the beavers had a way to disappear over here. The first year they had kits, they swam over here underwater and then seemed to disappear. That suggests that once through the hole a beaver could find air space above the water.
If this area dries out a bit more, I’ll try to get my head in there, or at least my camera. Looking from the outside, it looks like some roots in the hole had been gnawed.
But I had explored enough today and turned back to recross the dam, which of course is quite easy now along the back slope of the dam, largely bare of vegetation and dry.
Meanwhile the clouds were thickening and I went up to the Teepee Pond to cover some of the wood I had sawed there. This little pond got its name, that is, what I call it, Leslie calls it the “Second Pond,” because the first structure we made on the dam was a teepee of canvas that covered a jury-rigged room walled with glass and screens. We first put the structure on a mowed flat area between the two ponds. Then, when the beavers moved in, this area got flooded in the spring after they built up the dam and we abandoned the area, centering our activities more around a cabin we built in the woods. Since the beavers left in 2005, the flat area between the ponds has not been flooded, nor mowed and soon even the muskrats stopped eating the lush grasses there. Now the grasses are gone and in dry summers the burdock and Queen Anne’s lace predominated. But this year we had a very wet spring and a very sunny summer and there is a nice variety of plants in this small area, including Joe Pye weed for the first time.
Which make a nice color compliment to the pinker flowers of the swamp milkweed that a bee was enjoying.
The goldenrod is just coming out catching up to the lush boneset.
Meanwhile the pickeral weed is still blooming in the old canal.
The last time I was here I saw deer prints going by. Today I saw muskrat prints.
I sat in the chair by the pond to wait for the rain. A big green frog climbed up on a log floating in the water and joined the vigil.
It started raining when I was back in the house, and then it came down in torrents, dumping about 3 inches on us. Curious to see how that affects my study of dry beaver ponds.
July 30 after sawing logs, I walked around to see how the heavy rain changed things. The Deep Pond that was beginning to be choked by vegetation now looks almost clear of it.
The water level is up at least a foot, maybe two, and now the question is: will the beaver work on the dam to keep some of this largesse in the pond?
The Third Pond has completely filled up and water is running over the dam.
Will the beaver come back? I checked the Last Pool too. Water is running from the valley into the pond.
But the pond is by no means filling up, at least around the lodge.
However, the canal down the middle of the Last Pool has filled up nicely, though certainly not overflowing.
The water is flowing down to Boundary Pond.
It will be interesting to see if these drained ponds regain a semblance of being ponds again. We are getting a preview, maybe, of how the area will look after the spring thaw next year. In the evening I first sat next to the now once again full Thicket Pond just in case the beaver moved back. No, but as I sat watching a noisy water thrush danced on a maple branch just above me.
Never got such a close look at one before.
Then I went down to the chair by the Deep Pond dam and I saw the beaver swimming in the far side of the pond. At first it looked like it was going to swim into the lodge, but instead it veered toward me and soon was right in front of me chewing on vegetation. I wasn’t exactly sure what kind because my view was blocked by thick fan grass fronds.
The beaver kept working along the vegetation behind the dam taking advantage of the deeper water to get something other than pondweed or lily pads -- at least that is my guess. At places it dove into the water briefly to get at what it wanted to eat. Eventually it disappeared and I guessed that it was up on the dam grooming, but it crossed my mind that it might have gone over the dam and then up to the Third Pond! So I walked along the west shore and didn’t go far before the beaver splashed off the dam and swam toward the middle of the pond.
Over the years I’ve learned that beavers have a sense of decorum and can get quite upset when I do something out of the ordinary. So I quickly retreated to my chair to demonstrate that I knew my place. The beaver swam back toward me, nose working to get a sniff of me -- maybe it didn’t notice I was there before,
and soon it was out in the pond eating some more, not far from me, but it was getting dark and the mosquitoes were showing that they knew their place too -- after my blood.
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