September 17 to 21, 2011

September 17 to compensate for not having any stories to follow out in the swamps, I’m finding old photos that highlight stories I was following years ago. I’ll try to do some before and after analysis, which may help elucidate how beavers change their environment in the short term of 10 to 20 years. Unfortunately, I didn’t take consistently good photos in my early years, though I have some good slides but at the moment I can’t find the slide projector. I began observing the swamps on a weekly, sometimes daily basis, in 1994. From 1994 to 1998 I kept journals by hand and finally got a computer in 1999. I’ve transcribed most of the early journals and even managed to put some photos in them, though back then I didn’t correlate my writing to the photos as I do today. For some reason I also had the odd quirk of taking some photos in black and white. So, in my pile of old photos, I found the print of what I called “pinetree lodge” which is a black and white photo I put in my journal, to wit:

So, Leslie and I set out to see what pinetree lodge looks like today. It was along the creek that drained what we called the First Swamp. In the early 90s the beavers built several dams below the Big Pond coming closer to South Bay. I began to see beavers on a consistent basis in the fall of 1994 in what I called the First Pond. The virtue of that pond, to my mind, was that it flooded a dirt road that ran from South Bay up the valley north of the Big Pond and up into the private land east of the state park. That road was well used even by me, as a cross country ski trail. In the fall of 1995, I happened to be sitting by the pond looking at the only beaver I have ever seen that had gray facial hair when two guys roared off the South Bay trail on ATVs planning their usual race up the dirt road. The beaver pond brought them up short. “Damn beavers,” I heard one say and they turned around. I have a photo of the pond blocking the road, obviously taken in the late fall or early spring.

As best I could estimate, here is the same view today:

The creek flows in the foreground in both photos, and today there was still a little water in the creek,

though none was backed up by the old dam. Which scarcely exists. I think the beavers left this pond in 1995 so I am showing how the area looks 16 years after the beavers left. However, I don’t have any photos showing what the area looked like before the beavers came. I do have a photo showing the First Pond at its peak of beaver development, with a lodge growing on the south shore, which suggests that before the beavers came it was wooded which is what I recollect. We had hiked around this area since 1976.

However, it was by no means a pristine woods. From the 1870s through the 1930s this portion of the island was pasture land. Between 1976 and 1994, when we had some acquaintance with the area, there were enough small trees to make it difficult to walk up along the creek. Most of the trees in the flat that were cut and flooded by the beavers were probably no more than 10 years old, and thus well sized for the dam and lodge. There were a number of larger trees 30 to 40 years old, and a couple big hardwoods that shaded the old pasture. All the trees on the flat behind the dam were cut down or died from girdling and flooding, and save for some feeble ash trees no live trees remain today.

That’s the view from the old south shore of the pond looking north. Here is the view at the east end of the old pond looking west.

Really, much as I love trees, it is a small price to pay for putting a crimp in that road, which was revived briefly immediately after the beavers left but with sun drenching the flat, the thick vegetation made if difficult to reestablish a road. Walking through it is also difficult because just behind the dam the ground remains uneven with holes here and there and rotting logs to trip over. The beavers didn’t cut many trees on the slope. I was always puzzled by the survival of so many birch.

The beavers were here a relatively short time, perhaps three years. That surprised me because they certainly were active when they were here, not only building a lodge but a burrow deep in the bank. I sent my 9 year old son in there with a camera.

I looked for that burrow a few years ago and it wasn’t there. No sign of it at all. The beavers built pinetree lodge probably in 1994 and it was built at a spot where the creek narrows before it flows into the flat that became the pond behind the dam. Here are the before and after photos:

The lodge was a bank lodge and after 17 years one could not, at a cursory glance, tell that a lodge was there. The trees up slope from the pond remain as does the tree next to the pine. All the trees on the other side of the creek in 1994 photo were cut down by the beavers in 94 and 95. The trunk of the large tree in front of the lodge in the 1994 photo has completely rotted away.

But if you look hard you can see rotting remnants of the old stump.

Around the pine tree, which appears to have been well fertilized by the decaying lodge, there are still some stray logs.

According to my old journals, I took notes on the trees being cut around the pond. If so I might be able to go back in the late fall before the snow falls and better see the remnants of the beavers work. But then I would need some lessons in identifying rotten tree trunks. The trunk of one of the bigger trees the beavers cut still retains some shape. My guess is that it was a red oak.

The beavers brief foray down the valley ended with a retreat, not complete abandonment of the valley. They went back to what I called the Middle Pond and had some presence there until 1999 even though it was smaller than the pond down creek that they had fashioned in 1994-95. Here too, no trees ever grew back in the flat.

Look closely, and you can still see the contours of the old dam.

Here's how the Middle Pond dam looked in the late fall of 1995.

I suspect this dam lasted longer because it was maintained longer and packed with more mud. Armed with old photos I'll try to figure out how a dam rots. Unfortunately I don't have old photos showing what the pond looked like before the beavers came. To the best of my recollection there were many small trees in the flat.I am pretty sure this is a photo in 1995 looking down the valley from the Middle Pond dam.

I really don’t know why small trees have not grown back in this area, while, to the best of my knowledge, many did grow up after cattle no longer pastured here. (One hundred years ago or so, there was an abattoir along the South Bay trail, and you can still find the bones of the slaughtered cattle.) My suspicion is that pasturing didn’t kill the larger trees so the grasses and low shrubs did not grow back so thickly after the pasturing ended. The beavers cut or killed large shade trees by girdling, plus their dams collected silt making the valley more fertile. The low vegetation came back so thickly that trees have not had a chance to grow back. A growing deer population likely made a difference too. When the vegetation dies back in the fall, I will look for old stumps. I found one a bit up on the bank of the old creek, in the shade from trees higher up on the slope. Obviously the ground covering vegetation was not so thick here to choke off the growth of a tree.

I’ll have to think harder on why flats cleared by beavers invariably become meadows. We walked along the slope south of the creek which, of course, tilts toward the northern sky. I always enjoyed sitting up in the shade, often sitting on one of the granite outcrops, so beautiful then and still beautiful today, waiting for beavers to appear.

Standing at the east end of the old Middle Pond and looking down creek, the north shore looks well wooded. The beavers here had never gone up the ridge much to cut trees, unlike other beavers I’ve watched in other valleys.

My guess is that the ponds in the lower part of this valley were simply not big enough for the beavers. The beavers’ comfort zone is best measured by the size of the pond, and that a series of smaller ponds, as they had in this valley, simply doesn’t give the comfort as one very large pond. In this valley, the beavers always had a much larger pond to which they could return, and they did, though it is has been abandoned now since this spring, for the first time in many years. I’ll delve into the history of the Big Pond on another day. Because of it size and shallow depth it hosts acres of pond vegetation that the beavers (and deer) eat, and fashioned from an old hayfield in a much larger flat expanse, it is surrounded by willow thickets. Those thickets provided small woody fare though to my surprise the beavers never seemed to enjoy the willows that much. Our history lesson done, Leslie and I tried to lose ourselves in the meadow around Big Pond.

I took one more photo looking back down the valley and from that distance, the lower valley looks more like a place where beavers might go rather than a place they abandoned 15 years ago. I hope I live long enough to see them return.

This time of year, we start looking for closed gentian flowers. We didn’t find any but we did notice another purple plant, almost as beautiful as the purple asters. New York ironweed has established itself in some of the lower parts of the meadow.

We also went over to the Lost Swamp Pond, where not only did we see the juvenile cormorant who has been there a couple months. We saw another cormorant sunning itself just 50 yards from the usual resident. On the way back along Antler Trail, Leslie noticed some shaped mushrooms.

While it’s nice to have some grasp on how a valley changed 17 years after beavers left, I wish I could tell a story about what happened to the beavers. In that time I must have seen at least 30 different beavers in the valley, and in that time I have only seen two dead beavers. Only one winter, 1996-97, did I see evidence of poaching which I blew the whistle on. The neighboring valleys, save for that winter of poaching where the Lost Swamp Pond may have been trapped out, always had beavers. The valley extends only another mile up stream, so I suspect many of the beavers tried their fortunes in the St. Lawrence River, six miles wide with, as they say, a thousand islands in the way, though very few of them are as accommodating as this large island.

September 18 typical day at work for me, which means that I sawed and hauled down at the Boundary Pond. I didn't extend my studies of the depleted pond, but it is difficult not to see something interesting. At this time of year the hepatica leaves get their true color, liver, and a few goldenrod blooms set it off nicely.

Taking a break from sawing I was struck by two examples of regrowth. The first has nothing to do with beavers. In January 1998 there was an ice storm that brought down limbs, trees and left not a few trees bowed over. Many of the latter responded by sending branches straight up from the bowed trunk. A bitternut hickory by Boundary Pond was girdled by the beavers and I planned to cut it down for firewood, but, so far, those thrust-up branches still have a few leaves, so I’ll spare it.

The other examples of regrowth was right by the Boundary Pond channel. As the beavers moved up the valley they soon cut the winterberry bushes, even though not seeming to really relish it. The beavers didn’t seem to go out of their way to cut the bushes, they seemed to cut them because they were in the way. Since they grew near the water the beavers first navigated they were quick to disappear. One winterberry survived in a strange way. The branch of an elm tree that the beavers cut pinned down one of the winterberries, just like the ice stormed bowed other tree trunks. Here too, the tree sent branches straight up.

Meanwhile all the beaver cut winterberry is sprouting out new shoots too. But I think it is too early to tell if the groves of winterberry will be as thick as before the beavers came up the valley. I also looked for closed gentian where we usually see them but didn’t see any. After dinner I strolled down the road and looked over the Deep Pond. I saw the beaver munching away in the far side of the pond.

September 19 we headed off in the boat to check on otter scats along the Picton Island shore. There was a good south wind and I hoped the northeast shore of Picton would be protected from it. And so it was as I began rowing down it to the west. A bit of the south wind bent around the point to help me along. But too soon the wind began biting the other way, from the west, so I motored down to the west end of the length of shore I inspect and rowed back to the east. So I approached the middle from both ends. There were no otter scats on the flat rocky shore nearer Quarry Point, and I didn’t start seeing scats on the rocks until I reached the area of jumbled boulders, an area suggesting how disorderly the quarrying operation was -- which ended, I think, about 100 years ago.

That the otters preferred that jumble to the more easily negotiated shore suggest to me that I am seeing the scats left by a group of adults, not a family with pups, because I don’t think pups can as easily climb up on such boulders and poop.

That’s another one of my instant theories that I hope is wrong. Then the wind shifted and I motored to the west end of the rock jumbles and rowed back to where I had been. Earlier in the summer I saw some scats at this west end, but none today. I didn’t see any until I rowed up to the angled flat rocks that stick out in the water like bulletin boards and which the otters seem to use to mark there claim to the jumble of rocks to the east. I docked the boat up against one of those rocks and got out to take a photo.

The otters had graced a nearby rock with even more scats, some looking fresher than others.

From a distance I thought the bleached scats might have crayfish parts since otters never seem to digest crayfish with the black veneer fish parts usually get in their bowels. But in all the white remains I didn’t see any claws.

Early in the summer we saw plenty of fresh scats around a pool behind the jumble of rocks along the shore. We saw scats on the big rocks along the shore

So I went back to see if there were new scats around the pool. Despite the water level of the river going down, there is still some water in the pool, but I didn’t see any scats around it.

Rowing a bit more to the east we saw more scats on rocks that were far easier for the otters to get to them for me.

And then the wind from the west picked up and I was blown by another promising latrine, only getting glimpse of what looked like the freshest scats we’ve seen.

I was satisfied with what I saw and now I have to get out here at dawn and try to see the otters. But I would have liked to have seen fresher scats. We went to our land in the afternoon where I worked again cutting up trees the beavers killed for firewood. To get to that job, I took the circuitous root, first checking the Deep Pond and then going up and over the ridge. The beaver continues to in a way map its presence at the Deep Pond by how it eats the vegetation in the middle of the pond.

But I still think by studying the shores of the pond, I get a better idea of what the beaver is doing. Why does it trim the vegetation going into the bank if not to use one of the old burrows in the bank as its den?

But looking back at the slope, I don’t see any signs of the beaver going up on the bank, not that they have to go up on the bank where they burrow, but over the years I’ve watched beavers, they often do just that especially to better protest the entrance of the burrow with sticks, which is what this beaver did at the burrow in the Third Pond, but not here.

I took the photo above at a spot where I think the beaver did climb up on shore.

But the trail didn’t go far, certainly not to the nearby woods where the beaver could cut some trees. That's where I went and then up the ridge. Of course there is little blooming in the woods now. Only the mushrooms had some color,

And the falling leaves. At my work site, where I was mainly hauling out the logs I had cut out, I spotted a nice moss covered rock to sit on during a break. But when I got close to it, I was sure it was a fairy’s seat, ringed with herb Roberts.

I found another rock to sit on. When I stopped work, Leslie insisted we look at the changing trees at the Third Pond. She took me over to the south shore so we could look over the larger willow that the beaver cut and see the blushing maples on the far shore.

The muskrats seemed to be building a lodge in this corner of the pond under a bush, and I tried to get another photo of it.

I must say I don’t see any other signs of the muskrats being here. I crawled under the honeysuckle bushes trying to get a close look at the old burrow and didn’t see any mud raised in the water there. The honeysuckles are up on the bank. Buttonbushes and willows are down in the water along the shore. And at one point some goldenrods from the hill got down close enough to the buttonbushes, now with their buttons a dull red, to invite some photos.

There were a few purple asters near the buttons, too.

Meanwhile the birds are not too active, but now and then I hear weird variations on familiar songs and calls, like a young blue jay or catbird is just getting the hang of what it is supposed to sound like. The peepers and tree frogs finding their voice seem to have no doubts about how they are supposed to sound.

September 21 yesterday at the land, Leslie picked up a little salamander from the road and put it in a tank and this morning I took a photo of a beautiful little red eft,

And then I let it go on some wet moss between a commodious wood pile and even wetter low ground. During my walk down the road, I took a look at the Deep Pond and saw that the beaver pushed some mud up on the dam near where I sit.

That looked to be a serious push of mud, perhaps a sign that the beaver is thinking of the winter ahead. A touring raccoon managed to lay its poop right at the edge of the mud heave.

When we got back to the island I went off to get better photos of the old first pond of the first swamp and then make a slow way to the East Trail Pond via the New Pond, Beaver Point Pond and Otter Hole Pond and then sit and wait for beavers to appear at the East Trail Pond. There are no beavers at the other ponds, where I had spent many evenings watching beavers, because there is virtually no water left in those ponds. But first I wanted to add to the photos I took of the old first pond in the first swamp chain. I took a photo of the woods that remains west of the old pond,

which gives a semblance of what the whole valley looked like before the beavers moved down. Then I tried to get a photo better corresponding to the 1994 photo of I have looking across the pond as the beavers worked there.

I’m still a little off the mark. I walked onto the flat where the old pond was and looked back at where I think the lodge in the photo above was.

I have a curious black and white photo from November 1994 of me standing on the lodge.

There was a pretty good drop off from the bank to the creek which allowed the beavers to make the burrows in the bank which make bank lodges safer. I didn't discover the burrow until the pond began draining away. The photos above shows that the beavers cut saplings around the lodge and not many grew back but they spared many larger trees up the ridge, but then they didn’t stay in the pond long. I walked over the remnants of the creek and then took a photo from the middle of the old pond looking up creek:

The beavers briefly had a pond below this one but that dam scarcely lasted one winter, as I recollect, and no trees died from the flooding.

I walked down there and looked back and took a photo of the dam that had formed the first pond. There are plenty of rocks there, which I think invited the beavers to make a dam there.

While there are fewer trees to see looking back that way, the vegetation there is lusher than what grows under the trees below that dam. From that dam to South Bay the little creek runs without impediments. I noticed some cardinal flowers. I missed seeing them below the old East Trail Pond dam this year.

I think the old dam was where there is a slight cliff and using my imagination I almost could see how that dam worked, but not really.

It’s fair to say that the beavers brief foray below the first pond dam had no lasting impact on that area. The official East Trail of the Nature Center used to run from the South Bay trail up and down a slight ridge and then on a narrow boardwalk across a wooded flat that was wet in the spring, over a narrow creek, and then to a knoll. Then from the knoll to higher ground to the north there was another boardwalk over sometimes wet ground over to the woods below a ridge. The trail continued on rock up and over the ridge to another boardwalk crossing the East Trail Pond. The first boardwalk, through a damp woods and over the creek, was flooded by beavers in the late 90’s when they made what I called the New Pond. Today the New Pond is a meadow.

It was in this area that I first grasped how beavers can both open up an area and make it more wild. We humans automatically assume that a woods is more wilderness than any area cleared of trees that becomes a meadow. Beavers showed me otherwise. It was much easier to walk through those woods 20 years ago than it is to walk through that meadow today. When they are in good repair, beaver dams can be convenient, but with the beavers gone, the dam is impossible to walk on. I can identify it at least. Most wouldn't and would try to avoid getting tripped up in it.

Then we humans naturally think of a meadow as flat and only made soggy by rains or snow melt. Beaver meadows are roly-poly and rather difficult to walk through, thanks to the channels and canals the beavers dredged. The remains of dead and truncated trees don’t help you feel sure footed

And then when you look down. It’s easy to lose the sense of level. Standing trees and plants emerging from perceptible ground rather enhances our sense of order even though no natural ground is ever perfectly level. But when there is not order at tree level and the ground level is also topsy turvy…

So I searched for that plank that went through the old wooded flat and soon found it a bit tossed about which, I suppose is a testament to the power of the water rushing down the valley during the Spring thaws.

I only saw one section of plank and that plank didn’t cross what water remains, and those puddles are mostly grass covered. As I got closer to them I heard frogs splash. I had to dance a bit but I got across with getting my feet too wet.

I looked down at the west end of the pond, not without emotion. Back in 2000 the beavers had a lodge down on the north shore and a large family. I slouched behind the fallen trees on the south slope and the kits would swim right by me and right up to me. It’s then that I first noticed the blind beaver, an adult who kept bumping nose first into trees. Here is a view of the west end of the New Pond in 2000.

And here a video clip of my beaver watching there in September 2000. The night I saw the family's three kits up close. Having a record of enchanting evenings like that underline for me the sad truth that a beaver pond is an almost magical gift in any given valley and rarely a permanent feature and often never survives 3 or 4 years.

I hope to make a more particular study of how the beavers changed this area. Here's how it looks today.

If I have the time, I want to go over those videos again, as well as find what photos I might have taken of this area when the beavers first moved in. As I moved up to the knoll between the New Pond and Beaver Point Pond, I took photos of remains of beaver cut trees in hopes of finding photos of when the beavers first addressed those trees. It was here that I first saw evidence that the beavers cut down shag-bark hickories, which rather surprised me. It only cut down one and 3 others still stand.

Porcupine pine hotel pond is in the background, and now a meadow. I took a photo of the remnants of what I called Beaver Point Pond dam.

I gave the pond that name because of the many hours I spent lying on the flat rock of the knoll watching the beavers. One day four kits, with the express approval of their parent, practiced swimming up to me and slapping their tails. Here is a photo taken of one beaver swimming up pond in the late 1990s.

Now the old pond is the most dry of all the meadows.

I can offer several theories for that, and perhaps I will, but I should walk all through the meadow when the vegetations dies back and collect what evidence there might be to support my theories. I should have the best before and after photos of the northwest end of the pond where the beavers had their one real lodge here. They also fashioned a lodge in the dam. I took a photo of that when the water was low.

For now I tried to find the boardwalk that crossed the old flat to the high ground to the north.

That a boardwalk was here might suggest to some that the beavers must have been here before the boardwalk was laid. But that is not the case. The boardwalk was a low, thick plank designed to keep hikers dry in the spring. The planks here were still in order,

probably because no stream ran through here. When the beavers were here, the planks were only topped by water near the knoll. I had many adventures trying to decide how to leap across. I walked up the north shore which is still well wooded despite a good bit of beaver lumbering there.

I took a photo of Otter Hole Pond dam.

When I first started taking video here in 1997, I used to let the camcorder dangle as I walked along the top of the dam. Not sure I could do that today. Otter Hole Pond now meadow does have a few pools of water in it caused, I think, by the beavers staying here longer. I saw the beavers’ incursions and retreats from the lower ponds, but they had created Otter Hole pond prior to my interest in beavers which started in 1994. The other thing I have to investigate is why there has been no regrowth of willows and aspens here which might invite the beavers to come back. I finally got up to the East Trail Pond a little before 6pm and I walk slowly from the south end of the dam around the west end of the pond and then sat up on the rocks of the ridge north of the pond. I had plenty of new beaver activity to chronicle beginning with a maple just up from the dam.

The beavers are nipping the branches of the crown which should provide a measure of their activity in the next few weeks. I didn’t get too close to the work so as not to alarm any beaver that might be lurking nearby in the pond.

The pond looks more shallow and the muddy water where the beavers are active now seems to mark a channel through the emerging vegetation.

Despite the pond seeming shallower the beavers are cutting more trees up pond. One maple with a leafy crown fell conveniently into the pond.

Then there are three trees in the process of being cut.

A little beyond them I saw a cut branch in the pond so the beavers must have cut another tree down that I didn’t see.

Seeing all this work encouraged me to think that the adult beavers are beginning to fatten up their kits in earnest preparing them for the long winter, but I still haven’t seen a kit here. Indeed the last time I was here in the early evening I didn’t even see a beaver. I climbed up the ridge without getting too close to the pond. I could see a large tree, probably a maple, that the beavers cut down which fell up the ridge. The beavers had gone up the slope to eat the bark on the trunk.

So I began my vigil, and to minimize disturbing any beaver that might be out lurking under all the vegetation in the pond, I didn’t tour to the north slope to look for new beaver work. However looking over my shoulder I saw where a beavers had climbed up a steep slope and cut down and began eating the bark of a good size tree, probably a red oak.

As I studied the pond I noticed that I could tell how much the water level in the pond has dropped by the white stain on the wall of cattails between the lodge in the middle of the pond and the south shore of the pond.

Looking toward the dam I could see more vegetation behind the dam and, I think, exposed mud.

I did see something stir there, four wood ducks, who seemed to have no trouble floating where I thought the pond was getting too shallow.

From my perspective on the ridge the best place for the beavers to begin their evening meal was at the maple trunk down below me. The northwest corner of the pond was relatively clear of vegetation.

Well, I didn’t see a beaver, but I did begin to hear gnawing, and then a branch pulled briefly through the water, then more gnawing. As best as I could tell the gnawing came from somewhere under the mass of vegetation between me and the lodge in the middle of the pond.

When the gnawing seemed to move toward the south shore. I could picture exactly where a beaver might be, but couldn't see them. I looked so hard in that direction the four wood ducks flew off from the shore. They had made it almost half way around the pond without my seeing them. A beaver could do the same. So I walked back around the pond, quickly and quietly, staying up on the trail, well out of a beaver’s way, but I saw none, didn’t even see any ripples. Dark as it was getting, I could still see clumps of black trumpet mushrooms along the East Trail.