July 22 My hoping to see beaver kits in the Deep Pond has degenerated into wondering if any beavers are still there. Today after my water pumping chores, I walked around the Deep Pond hoping to see signs of beaver activity. Walking along the high bank of the east shore I saw an animal print in the mud below which could have been left by a beaver.
Or it could be two raccoon prints one almost on top of the other. Raccoons are more prone to walk along the shore. A beaver might assume that position to nibble a stick, and there was no evidence of that. I took a hard look at the logs and branches covering the burrow and I didn’t see anything different from the last time I saw them.
There is a channel in the water leading to the bank lodge under the knoll that was clear of vegetation so perhaps the beavers moved back into the lodge there.
However, that channel led to what I previously decided was the muskrats’ side of the lodge. I didn’t see any inviting trails back into the woods where there are many maple and other saplings. If the beavers are still here, I assume they are eating what they usually are eating when I have seen them: roots brought up from the pond bottom and the meadowsweet leaves. Last summer when the one beaver gorged on lily roots, I would usually see some remains from such meals floating in the water. Not so this year, but there are not many lilies. However, four are blooming at the mouth of the inlet creek, not far from where the beavers have done most of their stick nibbling.
No evidence that the beavers have foraged around or under those lilies.
July 24 Of course whenever I can, I sit by the Deep Pond in the evening hoping to see the beavers. What I saw tonight is typical of what I’ve been seeing since we got back from our short trip south, a muskrat nibbling in the middle of the pond that
quickly swims and dives into the burrow in the east end of the dam.
Coming down to the pond in the evening cheats me of another pleasure, hearing the wood thrushes singing around our house between about 8:15 and 9pm. We saw two nests around our house this spring made by vireos and phoebes. We saw at least one vireo fledglings fly off and one of its parents flying close behind. But no vireos have been singing around the house. We didn’t see any fledglings in the phoebe nest. The scarlet tanager that sang for hours in the trees above our house has finally stopped. And so have the veeries who we often heard in the early evening. It would be nice to hear them all sing together, but if the others leaving allowed the wood thrushes to move in, it was worth it. Since I wasn’t seeing the beavers as the sun set just after 8:30, I started going down to the pond latter, after the thrushes sang. In response to the drought I flipped a large plastic garbage can lid on the ground in front of our house and filled it with well water. During the day I saw a robin almost use it. Then the thrushes started using it. On the 26th we had almost ¾ inch of rain and I worried the thrushes wouldn’t need the bird bath. But on the evening of the 27th, they were taking baths between their songs. Unfortunately when I had the camcorder trained at the inverted lid, they didn’t come down and only gave snatches of songs and calls from up in the trees.
Going down to the pond late meant I couldn’t video what I saw but I only saw a muskrat or two. I finally saw one swim into the bank beaver lodge below the knoll. So perhaps the muskrats alone are keeping a channel clear of vegetation in front of the lodge. I also resumed cutting trails. I take the cameras but they mostly get in the way. No new ripple rock discoveries. Off on the trails I hear towhees singing and also blue jays. The last to chime in has been a cuckoo. At night we still hear the whip-poor-will, and twice I flushed a bird about the size of one and with the same erratic flight as I walked up the road. The barred owl has been progressively hooting closer to the house at night, and I hear many bits of its song as if it is teaching the owlets slowly.
July 25 I had a chance to kayak over to South Bay. As I paddled down the south cove, a Caspian tern dove into the water and got a small fish. There weren’t many geese in my way. Perhaps they are just beginning to fly again. I wondered why no herons flew croaking out of the trees along the shore as usual. I paddled down to the willow latrine, as I called it when otters were about, not expecting to see much but needing the shade to get a break from the sun. I paddled by several blooming lilies as well as the yellow spatterdock. The carpet of lilies that fills the back of the cove begins at the willow latrine, but it was clear paddling to my shade. I didn’t see any beaver or otter signs, nor any porcupines in the tree. I did see a small green frog in such a curious position I thought it might be dead. It seemed to be propped in the mossy bank with its head and front feet exposed and its back under a layer of moss. I paddled close enough to see its chin just throbbing, so it was alive. As I paddled out of the cove, two herons in the trees finally woke up, and croaked as they flew off. I saw a couple crows near the water as I rounded the point. I thought there might be a dead fish they were scavenging. Probably not. I saw three more crows and two had red honeysuckle berries in their beak. Evidently they come berrying and perhaps for a drink and a bath. When I paddled here a few weeks ago, I enjoyed relatively clear paddling to and around many luxuriant clumps of lilies. Now there are many more blooms and because the water level is dropping some of the lilies are on stalks a foot out of the water. Three days later I took some photos from the shore.
Most of the lilies seemed to be perfect blooms and most were crawling with black aphids. As I paddled around a rock often marked by otters, beavers or muskrats, I flushed a mother wood duck and one almost grown duckling that managed to just fly away. There were no signs of animal visits to the rock. Then I paddled between the lily clumps and where I had to part some lilies I saw how the edges of many of the large pads had curled up which seemed to concentrate the hoards of aphids on each pad.
Of course there were yellow jackets here and there too. Here were a thousand islands each with over a thousand aphids. Too bad I don’t bring a camera when I kayak. One piper landed on a few pads. I looked for bryozoa but didn’t see any. I was about to conclude that there wasn’t as much algae as usual and then I realized that while most of the cove had clear water where I could see schools of small fish, along the north shore the algae seemed old and had settled on all the under water vegetation giving them an almost sickly yellow coating. Of course if bryozoa were under there I couldn’t see it. While I had little troubling paddling, underwater the going might get sticky for a beaver, muskrat or otter. I still kept my eye out for signs, but didn’t even see any lily rhizomes floating on the water. Finally when I got beyond the algae zone and into deeper water I noticed that a beaver had stripped some bark off and cut a branch off a larger branch that fell off a tall maple and almost landed in the water.
But as I continued paddling along the north shore of the bay, that was the only beaver work I saw. I saw two kingfishers, but didn’t notice any ospreys. I was out between 1:30 and 3:30 and perhaps many of the birds were taking a nap.
July 28 I’ve been keeping an eye on the Third Pond and it dried up a couple days ago.
Over the years we have tried to rescue tadpoles as the pond dried, but we’ve so busy watering the garden and the days are so hot that we left the tadpoles to their fate. Indeed when I got down there this morning, the stench of death was gone and I saw no remains in the pit of the pond, as it were.
The only fresh tracks on it were a bird’s.
A raccoon had been out there before the bird but the mud in the “pit” had swallowed the raccoon tracks. I could walk anywhere on the pond bottom except on that “pit” and I began by inspecting the area of dead vegetation in about the middle of the pond where I saw a raccoon pulling a large frog apart with its teeth. Say this much for raccoons they don’t leave anything behind.
So first I enjoyed the contrast between the ground cover. The grass grew up through the shallow water late in the spring and a smaller plant, not sure what it is, grew later.
Usually meadowsweet takes over and dominates the whole dry pond. We’ll see. I can’t say that I enjoy the dramatic contrast between bright green grass and dry mud, but it is striking.
But then I got to what passes for work for me, trying to figure out what this little man made pond, deepened a bit by beavers who spend a few months some years, means to beavers and muskrats. There are also turtles to think about. I bent down in front of the burrow in the back of the pond, which the beaver and muskrats use. It is protected by long willow sticks and flanked by two shrubs that beavers usually don’t eat, honeysuckle and buttonbush.
The buttonbushes conceal the burrow from the general view. The taller tree is a willow scared by the beavers.
I think the buttonbushes are slowly taking over the pond, which is curious because they are the last shrub or tree to leaf out in the spring. The willows still flourish especially at the south end of the pond.
Last year the beaver here left in mid-June and this year a beaver was here for just a few days before going down to the Deep Pond in April. I last saw a muskrat here on June 21. As the water level in the pond lowered they stopped using the burrow in the east bank and used a burrow on the west bank. I found a channel to that bank.
When I looked behind and under the buttonbush concealing that bank, I saw a couple small holes in the bank.
I’ll have to take a closer look here to see how the muskrats managed. Now that the pond is dry, I can see the full size of the silver maple trunk that fell into it in the late spring, after the beaver left. Evidently it wasn’t to the taste of muskrats and turtles, only a few of the very end of branches were nibbled a bit. I guess we’ll keep it as it is and see what happens to it next year when the pond fills up again.
I headed down to the high east shore of the Deep Pond. The Joe Pye weed is finally tall enough, up to 8 feet, to dominate the flats. There’s a nice patch around a spring at the foot of the ridge east of the pond.
From across the pond, I took a photo of the burrow in the bank that the beavers had been using.
If muskrats abandoned the Third Pond once the entrances to their burrows were no longer mostly underwater, have the beavers abandoned the Deep Pond now that the entrance to the burrow they had been using is mostly out of the water? I studied the pond bottom outside the burrow and while it was evident from the lack of vegetation and outlines of a channel that something had been swimming in and out, I can’t say that something had done that in the last day or two.
One of the lilies in the pond was now close enough to the shore for a portrait. Here is something the beavers could eat that is left uneaten.
The water in the inlet looks just deep enough for a beaver to swim there, but no signs that one had.
I walked up the inlet, and saw no signs of recent beaver activity. I took a photo of the grand flank of Joe Pye weed there.
I hopped across the inlet and went up and over the knoll without flushing a beaver out of the bank lodge under the knoll, something I was often able to do last summer. No signs of recent beaver activity either. Not sure why the beavers would leave the deepest pond around, but it seems they have.
Back on the island, the afternoon was cool enough, low 80s, for a hike to the ponds. On my way to check Audubon Pond, I took photos of the lily pads and lilies in South Bay. This year some of the pads are curling up along the edges, creating a little universe for aphids.
The north side of South Bay had a good bit of algae. One lily looked like it was being sucked under by it. Of course, the sun was going down and it was probably folding up for the night.
I checked the otter latrines and saw no signs that otters had been there. I did see a wet stick that a beaver had cut and nibbled a bit up on the docking rock, as I call it.
Perhaps a beaver cut it off the large windfall maple branch that I noticed on the shore a bit up the bay. Many of the trees on the south slope of the headland, above the otter latrine, have dead leaves.
One of the trees over the latrine has lost all its leaves -- tough to capture that in the photo below.
There were no signs of otters having been in the latrine, though I didn’t look for scats under the dead leaves. I haven’t been to Audubon Pond in a couple months. Judging from the new logs and several cut honeysuckle branches with green leaves on the lodge, the beavers are flourishing.
My guess is that the beaver use the honeysuckle branches to make shade. They don’t seem to eat the leaves or much of the bark -- not sure about the berries, but they often cut the honeysuckle before the berries come out. However, the beavers here have left some leafy branches bobbing in the water in front of the lodge. I could stretch my guess to explain that by saying it looks like the leaves help hide the channel into the lodge made easier to see by the low water.
I’ve long had the impression the burrows the beavers use here are high in the bank and close to the surface of the ground, which is why they keep hauling logs up on the slope to cover what is probably the top of their den.
I know next to nothing about burrowing but I do know that this embankment was made with the material dredged from digging the pond with heavy equipment just over 40 years ago. No trees have ever grown on the embankment and there are probably no rocks. I imagine burrowing into natural slopes lead to rocks and roots that gives some stability allowing longer and deeper burrows. These beavers must have sensed greater chances of cave ins. Muskrats had always burrowed here. These beavers moved into this burrow, I assume a muskrat burrow that they expanded, two years ago. Meanwhile below the embankment where beaver developments were bulldozed down by the park staff, all is grassy green.
The beavers showed no evidence of having any quarrel with the changes. They got back to work cutting trees along the hiking trails. Then I noticed that something was vying with the iron cage the park put over the pipe that drains the pond. A snapping turtle only managed to get one plant from the lush green protected by the cage.
I walked through the woods west of the pond and the two large ash that were girdled and one partially cut looked the same as the did at the beginning of the winter.
I went farther into the woods where the beaver had cut some trees in a vernal pool that, as I recall, kept water into the fall. I think the beavers have come back here since the end of winter. There are two small elms cut down. They had started to gnaw the larger one at the end of November, and were cutting both at the end of December, but the pond froze and they were still standing through the winter.
The beavers were busy for a while but never hauled away the small log they finally cut.
The largest ash that they cut last fall fell between the vernal pool and the pond. The beavers stripped some bark off in the fall, but this year insects seemed to use the whole trunk turning the gray bark brown with little holes.
Or at least I guess that’s what caused it -- another thing to look up.
Although it is well shaded by a bending hickory there are no signs of the beavers using the bank lodge on the west shore of the pond.
I didn’t see any beaver work at the bench on the north shore nor the lodge near the bench. Looking across the pond, I got a good photo showing the breadth of bank lodge behind the embankment.
Continuing along the north shore, I saw a trail up into a thicket of bushes and didn’t think to investigate because I was looking for trees the beavers might have cut. The beavers likely cut those honeysuckle branches in that thicket because that is probably the only area with honeysuckles. Then I headed off to the East Trail Pond taking the South Bay trail and East Trail. I approached from the south and stopped when I saw a beaver floating near the south shore eating something. A down tree trunk blocked my view of it and I only got a short video of it swimming away down the south shore of the pond into the corner where there is a patch of ghostly dead cattails.
As I moved forward to sit just above where the beaver had been, a muskrat swam into that area and dove into a burrow, delivering vegetation, before I could get a video. Where I saw the beaver and muskrat had a bottom that was clear of vegetation and several channels through the vegetation leading to it.
I waited another half hour to see a beaver or muskrat. None appeared so I had plenty of time to frame a photo of the dead cattail area,
And looking up pond toward those pine beavers had been cutting.
Then I am pretty sure I got a very brief glimpse of a beaver pulling a cattail toward the lodge. Leaving the pond, to go home to dinner, I walked down to the dam and took a photo of some cut cattails behind the dam.
I keep talking about the patch of dead cattails. The beavers and muskrats did a bit of foraging there last summer, but there are thick stands of live cattails below the dam. With so few live cattails in the pond, it is much easier to see the lodge in the middle of the pond.
The last time I left the pond from the south shore I was startled to find a cut ironwood at the precipice of the ridge. I went home that same way. The cut ironwood had not been pulled closer to the pond. Then up on the ridge, I was startled to see that the beavers had cut another ironwood.
While the tree was down, it had not been cut off the stump, and no branches had been cut off and hauled down to the pond. In my early days of beaver watching I could never figure out why they went all this way, did the work and took nothing back to the pond. But now I know that a beaver moves away from a tree when it senses that the tree might fall and then if it doesn’t fall right away, the beaver is usually off doing something else. Obviously beavers have been up here several times, but they might not come up here again and drag these trees back to the pond.
July 29 For the last 9 evenings, whenever I could I went down to the Deep Pond after dinner and sat until it got too dark to see and sometimes saw muskrats but never saw beavers. So tonight, getting the dinner dishes done earlier that usual, I went up to the Teepee Pond before going down to the Deep Pond. There was more excitement up there. As I moved to my rock with the good view of the pickerel weed patch on the north shore of the pond, a heron flew off the pond. Then three doves kept flying from dead tree to dead tree calling out odd variations to their usually predictable song. Obviously a young dove or two was learning what being a dove entailed. Then I sat on my rock. Needless to say, the pond has lost a lot of water.
In the patch of pickerel weeds that I admired so much, most plants are high and dry and those still in the water seem to be bending low as if they thought they could crawl out to deeper water.
It would be nice to know if the muskrats were still here. But the muddy water in the middle of the pond is more likely to be from raccoons pawing about than muskrats doing anything. Sitting where I was, I didn’t think any muskrat would come out into the pond. So I went up to check the First Pond. I saw two raccoons, one certainly a baby, hustling away into the tall grasses. Then the heron I flushed from Teepee Pond flew out of a tree heading toward White Swamp. The First Pond has two pools of deeper water, both muddy, thanks to the raccoons.
I went down to the Deep Pond, hoping to keep a vigil later than usual because a bigger moon was providing more light. I didn’t see any beavers. I enjoyed the moment when the green frogs and bullfrogs started calling, and then more mosquitoes than usual seemed to take advantage of the moonlight to feast on me and I went back to the house.
July 30-31 I combine these last two days of July because when I wasn’t pumping water or hauling future firewood, I was examining the lower part of Boundary Pond and its dam. Due to the lack of rain and drying up of pools of water, the pond was revealing its secrets. On the 31st I went via the Hemlock Cathedral, always shady and surprisingly cool even with the hot south wind. Then I went over to the west rim of the plateau where there were many small ironwoods with dead were dead leaves on the ironwoods.
That didn’t keep a flock of chickadees away. Their calls were tentative and they seemed fascinated with looking at me, so most of them were probably fledglings.
When I went down to the Boundary Pond on the 30th, I came down the shady east shore which leads to the deepest pool of the pond and what was the deepest pool in that section of the valley before the beavers moved up. There was only one small puddle of water.
I walked over to the main channel of the pond. It was dry with vegetation starting to grow on the bottom. There are no deeply dug channels here like the main channel through the Last Pool.
The light wasn’t the best for taking descriptive photos and the one below doesn’t quite capture the layer of lumber extending north from the lodge proper. It looks like the beavers had room to swim under the logs.
The pond bottom will have to be much dryer before I can get down on my knees and check that out. Now I can finally get a complete view of the east entrance to lodge and it looks like the beaver dug through a slight hill of dirt,
and that allowed them to get to a gap between small mossy mounds that they built the lodge on and around.
The typical freestanding lodge is built by chewing out chambers under a heap of crisscrossing logs eventually topped with mud. Beavers often build around a tree. In this valley there were flat almost open areas but the beavers chose to build both this lodge and the one in the Last Pool by using the moss covered mounds in the valley. It must have allowed them to make the lodge faster but especially in this lodge it may have led to interior arrangements that kept the family inside divided which would explain why I heard so much whining from inside the lodge. The kits may have gotten cornered around a mound out of sight of their parents. It may not have been one happy family sleeping together. Up in the Last Pool, I can once again little rolls of higher terrain that I call mossy logs. Here the vegetation on top of what was probably originally a huge tree trunk is more varied, not that much moss and even small trees growing up out of it.
I’m getting the impression that what these beavers did was cut underwater channels through these dirt rolls formed by old tree trunks so that their pond could more easily and secretively navigated.
However as I examined these little cuts I can’t see any remnant of an old trunk.
That said, I also don’t see any rocks suggesting that retreating glaciers or ancient floods had anything to do with it and I think the area too remote to have been farmed. One small mound had a tree trunk coming out of its side, but my guess is that it is the second tree to grow out of it.
I apologize for a superficial investigation but the deer flies rather love moist bottoms like this. If we don’t get much rain before it cools and when deer flies disappear, as they always do, I'll take a much closer look. The beavers understood this habitat and briefly created a huge pond in what is no more than the vernal watershed of one fork of what eventually becomes Mullet Creek. As I stood there I saw that the many frogs being left high and dry in the old pond also understood the arrangement of things. All but one hopped away and disappeared under mounds, overhanging logs, and tall grass.
Most were quiet as they hid, most must be leopard frogs. On the 31st I came down to the pond from the Hemlock Cathedral and first took a photo of dam which is now a huge wave of green vegetation with a short trailing skirt of vegetation along the flat in back of the dam. Most of the old bottom was brown.
Down along the pond, I took a photo of west entrances to the lodge, keeping my distance because I assumed the mud in the pool and channel on that side of the lodge were still very soggy. Just like the other side of the lodge this side was built over mounds of dirt that the beavers probably didn’t have to burrow through.
The major decision the beavers must have had when they built this pond was where to center the lodge in between the mounds, as well as which trees to cut and which to save. I’ll try to study and reedit my 2007 and 2008 photos of this area and even do a history of how these beavers moved up the valley from Wildcat Pond where I first saw them in 2007. There was no longer a pool of water behind the hole in the dam.
So I tried to patch it. I stuffed three logs in the hole, then scooped up muck behind the dam and larded that behind the logs and then put a rotting stump over the patch.
I don’t have too much confidence in this. The hole was dug, I am pretty sure, after the beavers left. A beaver would be able to fine tune the patch once water backed up behind the dam. I won’t be able to. I have not walked below the pond for awhile and I trusted the all the channels to and pools of the old Wildcat Pond were dry. I could see that the grasses were high, but I had long pants on and bug repellant.
Old dry beaver ponds are difficult to capture with photos. Essentially, in a half wooded valley like this one, a meadow is simply inundating the stumps of trees cut by the beavers back when water backed up behind the dam and inundated the valley. At this time of year the boneset and goldenrods begin to bloom. Maybe the photo below captures the essence of a beaver meadow. All new vegetation is brought down to the level of the beaver thanks to it leveling the trees.
I did manage to walk down the old main channel a bit but well vegetated beaver channels are tough going, too many downed logs not easily seen to trip over. Here’s what walking down the channel looked like just as the beavers began dredging it in 2008. The photo is from the 26th of May.
So I angled over to where I knew the upper pool of the pond was. It was now dry but judging from how stunted the vegetation there is, it probably had some water in it a couple of weeks ago.
I am not sure if there was a pool of water here before the beavers moved up the valley. The lower and main part of the pond looks about the same in terms of vegetation. I don’t think beavers here only a few years could dredge so wide an area, but they may have dredged around the two mounds sticking up in the middle of the pond.
The winterberry on the little island in the pond not far from the lodge had been quite tall before the beavers came. This is one case where the beavers cutting winterberry did keep the plants from growing back with any vigor.
The lodge was quite grown over with vegetation. I think they abandoned this lodge in 2008.
Getting down to the dam was a struggle, the vegetation was so thick, and I could only point the camera down to where I knew the dam was. It was covered with high shrubs and growing trees. There is a good gap in the dam and I never quite figured out how it got there, save than by the beavers neglecting it.
I took a photo of the stump of a beaver cut tree which was relatively high which was the only indicator of the what the depth of the water once was. I assume a beaver cut the tree while up on the ice.
I took a photo from the east shore of the pond, my “classic” photo showing the meat of the pond, the lodge behind the bush and then the cliff where I often sat. Sitting up there in the evening I saw a bobcat walking down the east side of the pond in September 2007.
There was more regrowth of vegetation on the east shore, including a nice clump of birch saplings coming out of the roots and stump of a big birch the beavers cut at least 5 years ago.
This is not our land and I only started becoming familiar with it once the beavers established themselves after they moved up from a pond below this one (which I didn’t investigate today.) I don’t think I can argue as I have in regards to the Last Pool higher up the valley on our land that the beavers left this part of the valley dryer because of their deep channels. In this case what dredging they did probably made the pools of water they left behind bigger. That‘s the impression I got in July 2010, on the 21st to be exact.
In the large view of what the beavers did here, there probably was an old road that ran up this valley, for logging and hunting. If so the beavers have made it difficult to rut up a new road and they've left a nice pattern of meadow/woods/meadow/woods. Walking back up the valley, I saw a mushroom,
A rare sight this dry summer.
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