July 19 we were away for a few days to the suburbs of Philadelphia which does not lack for wild animals. After dinner as I looked out of the dining room window, I saw a buck foraging in the front yard, then another and yet another. I went outside and tried to surreptitiously take video of the three bucks.
But they soon saw where I was. True to the nature of bucks they did not panic when they looked at me.
One walked back across the yard. The other two walked to and then down the street.
In the wilds I've seen two bucks foraging together peacefully, but never three. We also saw orchard orioles from the window of the television room. When we got home today our top priority was to water the garden. There was no rain while we were gone. Then I checked the Third Pond. Which has shrunk to a pool no bigger than a small bedroom.
Of course, the water was throbbing with desperate insects, boatmen and whirligig beetles, and tadpoles were nippling the water as they came up from air.
I’m not sure if I’ll mount a rescue mission for some. I am curious to see how long the crayfish stay in the puddle, and how many salamanders are still there. I went down to the Deep Pond taking my trail through the cool woods. The pond bottom in front of the beavers' burrow on the southeast side of the pond looked clear and there is no vegetation floating there.
That area has looekd like that for a while but since I was last here a week or so ago the beavers have put thin logs and branches on top of the burrow.
I assume they did this to better conceal a hole on top of the burrow. All of the leaves on the branches are dead so the beavers have not brought any up here in the last few days. Also the water outside the burrow seems low. The beavers probably moved in when the water was covering the dirt below the grass line.
My guess is that the beavers, if they are still in the pond, moved back to the lodge below the knoll where they had spent the winter and spring. With the lower water level, more lily pads are exposed, though not many lilies are blooming.
Given the drought conditions, these beavers would be wise to stay here, but beavers have never taken my advice.
July 20 throughout the early summer I’ve seen the Canadian Geese congregating where the road runs by White Swamp. Today I took a photo of one crowd just coming out of the swamp vegetation into some clear water next to the road.
They were angling to get to the road and move into Val’s pasture which, to me, seems rather over grazed by both geese and cattle.
The water level in the swamp is getting low. I can easily see bottom and lowest parts of the few trees along the swamp are easier to see too.
Back on our land the field beside the road is filled with blooming elecampane which the black and yellow swallow tails tremble over as they gather nectar.
In the evening I went down to the Deep Pond and waited for the beavers to come out. After I sat down I saw a deer on the bank across the pond. It soon saw me and lowered its head as if trying to get a really good look at me.
Then it brought its head up high, stamped its front feet a couple times, and with two jumps was back in the woods.
Then I waited in vain for beavers to come out. From waiting to see kits these past two weeks, I am reduced to once again wondering if the beavers are still here at all.
July 21 I got done my watering chores early and rather than work on firewood for the winter, I resumed working on one of the more ambitious trails on our land. I went down the ripple rock trail, across the valley and up the ridge. The little pool below the ridge is dry. I checked the pool on the ridge and found that dry too. Thanks to the drought vegetation has stopped growing and even begun shrinking back. Many leaves on shrubs and smaller trees have fallen off. Perhaps because of that I saw a trail going away from the pool on the ridge, going the direction I wanted, toward my old trail off the ridge to the southeast. I don’t remember ever making the trail but I may have. It was in pretty good shape. Then heading down the ridge toward the farm fields, I had my work cut out for me. The last time I got down to the half wooded flat below the ridge, I couldn’t find an old deer trail. Today not only did I find the semblance of one,
but there was the bleached skull of a large buck on it.
I could tell it was a buck because a hunter had yanked the antlers out of the top of the skull. The way ahead did not look very clear.
I managed to cut through honeysuckle bushes and get to the old apple tree. Back in 1998 we got some apples from it. Parts of it are still alive even exhibiting some dramatic dips and turns,
But I think the tree is too isolated to be productive. There is no cross pollination. I managed to find segments of my old “Appleweg Trail,” but most of it was either impassable or indecipherable.
Not too long ago the trail led to a relatively clear rocky flat but now the junipers and honeysuckle bushes there have doubled in size and it will take some thinking to recut a trail. I decided to save that for another day. This might be an important part of the trail. Moving quickly from our house, I might be able to reach this treeless flat slanting toward the morning sun in a little less than 15 minutes. Today I decided to move on and check the trail we take to go down to the boundary of our land where we usually see closed gentian flowers in the fall. I did a little clearing on that trail and then came back up and worked a bit on the old trail through the Juniper Jungle to the Turtle Bog. Of course, the bog was completely dry
which can be demoralizing but I soon saw evidence that that some of the wood frogs that hatched here managed to survive. One jumped away from me at my feet.
I did see a lot of holes in the now dry bog bottom.
I saw some raccoon prints and even a coyote print.
We think that at least a pair and maybe more Blanding’s turtles hibernate here. A few years ago when the bog was getting shallow Leslie said she thought she saw a likely spot for turtles to burrow in. I think I saw the same or a similar spot today. The mud appeared soft and there was no vegetation.
There are also cave like places along the shore where animals might hide.
But we’ve never seen a muskrat here, and only evidence of a few visits from beavers. We had a good spring for growing and in a few spots instead of grass sprouting up, there are water plants now petering out from the lack of water.
There were also lush patches of ferns all along the sides of the bog.
This bog usually dries out in the summer but it always fills up quickly with the fall rains. I suppose the well rooted turf helps that. I can walk in places that were covered with water just a few weeks ago without the my boots sinking in. Then I moved down to what we call the Bunny Bog because in the early years here we saw rabbits there. The “bog” is really a series of vernal pools surrounded by ferns, nannyberry and winterberry making it hard to see, unless you can walk along the bottom which is easy to do now because it is all grassy and almost dry.
Some of the stands of ferns are taller than me.
This area is as close as we get to a mangrove swamp because where the winterberry flourishes, most of the roots are above the dirt and flooded for half a year.
The elevated roots also cradle some moss clumps.
Like the Last Pool, this area was logged, but more recently, probably a few years before we bought our land in 1998. And unlike at the Last Pool, most of the logs, pine mostly, were taken out. There are a few chunker logs rotting away. About 10 years ago I cut down a large ash tree and rolled the logs out with a wheelbarrow. The trail I used for that is still in good shape and I used it to get to the road. Where the road swerves, a neighbor gets a slice of the land on our side of the road. Then where t straightens it abuts our land again and I waded through woods and then a little meadow to get to the small vernal pool above the First Pond. That pool is dry. The First Pond still has water covering half its bottom and the exposed bottom is mostly pond weed.
There was a muddy pool of water next to the muskrat burrow that goes through the bank to the Teepee Pond.
As I walked along the pond, many green frogs jumped for deeper water. But most of the frog calls came from the Teepee Pond. I sat on the bank and thought I saw one frog pop up in the muddy puddle
I think the photo above shows the heads of five. When I got to the Teepee Pond, I was more interested in the pickerel weed than the frogs. There are far fewer flowering stalks and the plants still in the water seem to be bowing lower to keep closer to it.
Stalks with seeds are there for the taking, maybe later. The plants are still too beautiful to disturb,
I sat on the bank where I have an intimate view of the flowers and bees that use them. I saw many smaller pollinaters and then a bumble bee.
I also saw a hummingbird moth, I think they call it, which you can see at the end of the video below. There were several birds flitting about, mostly catbirds. Topping the melodious chatter was a cardinal. I saw one small painted turtle swimming on the pond surface, faster than usual and seemingly with a purpose like he was late for an appointment.
Nice hike and it reminded me that I have a lot of trail work to do.
We headed back to the island early enough and the day was cool enough for me to tour the ponds. During droughts the rocky plateaus fare poorly, everything sere but the taller trees.
But as I continued along Antler Trail, I saw that some junipers seemed to be thriving up on the rocks.
The meadow that I cross was still green but the golden rods weren’t blooming much. There were only a few flashes of yellow.
The mosses were not faring well and in one stretch of rock facing the southern sky animals had scratched the dead moss away to get down to dirt.
Walking through the woods, there were green leaves above, wilted or brown leaves around eyelevel and sparse vegetation below. But once out of woods, the trail that dips down and over a rivulet and then goes up and over to the Big Pond dam was all dense green vegetation.
I couldn’t see my old trail. Endless sun on wet ground makes green. Just the tips of some of the shrub branches were getting brown. During a drought when ponds go dry, I abandon the usual paths and walk in the dry ponds. So I veered down off my usual trail and walked up the little pond below the Big Pond dam. The dark green grass marked what had dried in the last month. I walked up where the dark green met the lighter, and drier, green plants.
When I got up to the Big Pond, I saw three herons in the pond and got a photo of two as one flew off.
In the next instant those two were flying off. The nearer heron looked to be in over 2 feet over of water, probably in the channel of the old creek. I came up about in the middle of the dam and when I looked to the right at the south end where the original creek was first dammed, I saw a wood duck family scampering over the pond weed trying to get away from me. The mother led 8 tiny ducklings. This was a common sight a month ago and I worried that it was late in the year to start a family.
Not that the ducklings were incapable. Indeed I saw that they were able to go faster over the vegetation and even get in front of their mother who found it slower going over the matted vines and leaves.
In my video I veered away from that family because I saw a family with larger ducklings swimming up the north shore of the pond. While I was looking away, the ducklings got so far ahead of their mother that she had to fly to catch up with them. I did get a brief video of that and while I was taking it didn’t notice the ducks moving behind the tall grass along the shore.
The deer flies kept me from taking a longer video. When I took my official portrait of the pond, the ducklings were out of sight.
Of course, a full pond presents a rather simple picture, since we can’t see what is happening under the water. Ponds under drought conditions begin to reveal both the history of the pond’s development and how it may be evolving into a beaver meadow. Unfortunately 18 years of mostly staring at full ponds has not trained me to give any learned commentary on the variety of plants growing up on the dam and in the silt behind the dam. I’ve watched other ponds abandoned by beavers and recollect the rushes and cutting grass spreading below the dam and the cattail disappearing on the dam. But I don’t recollect vervain spreading so much below the dam.
But those ponds dried while there was a normal course of rain during the summer. This year’s drought has left a thick crop of pond weed out to dry which seems to be preventing other vegetation from sprouting up. I remember some ponds drying under normal rain conditions filling up with bur marigold blooms by late August. I don’t think that will happen this year.
Again I abandoned my usual trail and walked up the just dry edge of the north shore, somewhat surprised at how stunted the grasses seemed there.
However, on the drier side to my left, there was a stunning line of tall vervain plants. I don’t recollect that plant, one of my favorites, putting on such a show.
In other years when I walked along the dam, I used to love going slowly through the vervain and taking photos of as many of its pollinators as I could. This year I could spend a whole day walking up that line of purplish blue flowers. On our land I’ve been examining how beaver canals possibly made the land drier once the beavers left. To the best of my recollection this area was an old farm field, hay field, I assume. So I think beavers could not do anything to improve the drainage and make it drier. In this case their canals leave a token of wetness even after they leave. However the enormous load of silt in this pond will, I think, leave a level bottom save for what remains of the old creek down the middle of the pond. There is a slight depression still holding a puddle in front of the lodge along the north shore. Credit the beavers' habitual dredging around the lodge for that.
However, the high and dry lodge is surrounded by grass at the moment. I didn’t walk around the lodge to try to figure that out.
I continued walking along the side pools of the Big Pond until I got to the boundary line of the state park. I knew walking along that would bring me right to what I call the middle dam of the Lost Swamp Pond. I lost track of this area by 1987 when Ottoleo was born and we didn’t hike much and rediscovered it in 1990 or so when I saw a huge expanse of water stretching behind a relatively narrow 12 foot high dam. Seeing it took my breath away. However during a drought in 1999 I saw that there was a smaller dam behind the magnificent one that the beavers had breached as the water rose behind their new dam. The beavers needed to slow the flow of water to make it easier to build that high dam. Now the old middle dam just looks like a slight rise. There is water where the beavers breached that dam years ago.
During the drought of 1999, I took some photos of the ponds. Here is the pond today looking up from just above that old middle dam.
Here is a photo taken from below that middle dam back in the summer of 1999.
There was more water in the pond, and once the drought ended beavers flourished in the pond for another 11 years. I think we hiked in this area back in the late spring in the late 70’s or early 80’s. A photo taken today still suggests how the land looked then. The view below is from the far northwest corner of the pond. Judging from the dead trunks in the foreground the west end of the pond was then a woods.
Those woods made the dry ridge in the right of the photo seem easier to get to than it was. So once or twice we attempted to hike from the ridges forming the east shore of the pond going over a flat area of what we then called “buck brush” but which was probably dogwood and willow shrubs. We soon found ourselves almost knee deep in water with no logs or rocks to find refuge on. A photo I took in 1999 shows the old stumps of a thicket of shrubs.
Two interesting points: here is how that area looks today. Those stumps that were a foot high then are gone and only thin stumps a few inches high remain.
Either silt covered the bigger stumps or the beavers cut them down over the past 11 years. I think it’s the latter case. The other interesting point is that when we hiked in the area before the beavers made the pond, we got no sense of a stream. I recall looking for a stream knowing that streams have banks that are usually dry. So before 1999 the beavers, even while flooding the area, in a sense drained the area at the same time by deepening the creek. The beavers flooded a wet land that already existed, and over the years rather subdued the flooded vegetation. So that while the beavers made the original dry field that became the Big Pond wetter, they made the wet half of what became the Lost Swamp Pond drier. The woods in the west end of the pond, some trees killed by flooding and others cut down will be a wetland for a good long time. I think there, where there was no creek, the beavers dredging channels will leave a legacy of vernal pools. All that explains my pleasure at looking at dry pond even though I wish beavers were still there. I did see that drying ponds can come at the cost of animals that use them. On the old pond bottom I saw half the shell of a dead and bleached snapping turtle with a large clutch of broken eggs spilling out from the shell.
The pond between the old mid dam and the main dam still strikes me as viable for more than just ducks.
I looked hard at the lodge where I thought a beaver might have moved in and cut leafy shrub branches along the shore and brought them over to shade the lodge. If so, the beaver hasn’t added any branches recently; all the leaves were dead.
I walked around the west end of the pond and took a photo from the southwest corner looking over to the dam along the north shore. If the drought gets so bad that I can see what channels the beavers dredged here, it would be very interesting.
The one part of the huge pond not easy for me to get to this time of year, and it is on private land, is the northeast corner of the pond. Judging from the thick pale green vegetation there, beaver channels have drained that area efficiently.
As the pond grew, the beavers had to build a long low dam along the north shore there to hold back the rising water. They built a lodge in the middle of that area, and judging from walking there in the winter the beavers dredged channels to the dam, but I’ll have to check old notes on that. When I came down to the pond, some herons flew up from the shallow water and one perched on the tall dead tree behind the dam, joining an osprey who was perched on the other side. When a crow perched at the top of the crown, I decided I had to take a photo.
As I walked up the north shore toward the dam, all three birds flew off; crow first, then heron, then osprey. As I noted the last time I was here, the pond just behind the dam is deep, probably over my head in places. There are thick mats of water plants, milfoil, I think, around the edge of the deepest water.
A beaver could live off that and other pond vegetation for a while. I certainly didn’t see any evidence of a beaver or muskrat, the latter I did see in the pond the last time I was here, eating anything along the shore. There were also no signs of any animal up on the dam or on the lodge near the dam, not that I walked on the dam over to the lodge. I have seen muskrats using that lodge and the lodge in the middle of the pond. I think they have to because all of their burrows are high and dry.
The Upper Second Swamp Pond is completely dry. The principal source of water for this pond is the Lost Swamp Pond. So the lack of water here is a gauge on how efficient the Lost Swamp Pond is at saving water. If the Upper Second Pond dam was in repair there still might be a little water here. But otters and muskrats made the dam rather porous and it was a hastily built dam. The beavers were making an attempt to thrive in the old fields behind the dam but couldn’t raise the water here high enough to join with some secluded pools about 100 yards away
So this is a dam that served for about 10 years and if beavers don’t return will only leave a little ridge of fertility in a large valley. However the Lost Swamp Pond dam which has been there for around 30 years, and has survived many otter and muskrat incursions, will probably permanently change the land behind the dam unless humans destroy it. To get to the East Trail Pond, I walked down the woods north of the Second Swamp Pond. I checked the vernal pool on the north side of the rocky knoll north of the pond where a beaver spent a month or so in the late spring of 2011. It was completely dry. I saw the litter of sticks the beaver collected and stripped. I have never seen this pool in the late summer and back when the beaver was there I wondered if there was a ledge in the small cave the beaver dove into. But I didn’t see any.
When it dove in there to hide from me it probably just kept its nose just above the water where there was some air to breath. I crossed the old East Trail pond on the remnants of the old board walk and then from the new bridge over the inlet creek, I took a photo of the dam. The water was low enough to show how much silt flowing down from Shangri-la Pond has built up behind the dam. There was muddy water behind the dam. Something had been foraging there, muskrat, beaver or deer.
I took a photo from up on the ridge north of the pond, showing channels through the vegetation to the lodge, and the relatively open water around all the dead cattails in the southeast corner of the pond. The water was too deep there in the spring or the beavers ate too many cattail rhizomes during the winter.
The middle of the pond had the most vegetation, but from my winter skiing and hiking here and from watching the beavers the last two years, I know they have channels through out the area.
Since two beavers here have been out after 4pm, I did some hard looking. I didn’t look hard enough because I didn’t see the beaver looking up at me until it dove and swam under the dense foliage of nearby shrubs. In about 5 minutes, I saw it swim slowly into an opening and look up at me again.
Then I heard a beaver tail slap the water in the upper part of the pond. I didn’t think it was because of me, and, in a few minutes I heard hikers on the trail south of the pond. Meanwhile the beaver below me, after getting an eyeful of me, dove. I twice saw a welling up of air bubbles and then it must have gone in one of the many concealed channels but I didn’t see it, nor see a wake.
Then I quietly walked along the ridge toward where I heard the tail slap. I saw ripples in the water, but the beaver dove before I could get a good look at it. As I continued around the trail, I saw why that beaver slapped its tail. Two hikers had two dogs. Then from the trail I saw some beaver work just off the northwest shore of the pond. There was one thin girdled stump, a larger tree half gnawed and the low stump of another tree, all recent work.
When I got down to the pond edge, I saw that the trees the beavers cut down and the tree they were cutting were all pine. Plus they had girdled the long exposed roots of the largest pine nearby.
I have often seen pines cut and girdled but nothings quite as emphatic as this. It is said that the Indians said beavers ate pine bark as medicine during pregnancy. Even though any kits here were born over a month ago, I’ll take this as a sign that the mother beaver here did have kits.
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