August 1 while walking by the Deep Pond this morning, celebrating the rain we had last night, Leslie noticed the pond looked muddy in places and she saw an animal sitting up in one of the exposed bank burrows. The animal turned around and went into the burrow dragging what she thought looked like a beaver tail. Yesterday we had put two small aspen branches out in the pond, along the low west bank where I’ve seen the beavers come up to get meadowsweet. This morning I saw that those branches were gone and I couldn’t see them anywhere along the shore. They were small enough for a beaver to almost eat whole, not just strip off the bark. So I threw a larger aspen sapling into the pond off the west bank.
I didn’t see any other signs of beavers being in or around the pond. I went back to the road and then up to the Third Pond, which collected a small pool of water from the rain we had last night -- much too late for all the tadpoles.
Then I went to the Deep Pond via the trail in the woods and approached the high bank of the Deep Pond so I could look for fresh beaver signs there, especially remnants of those aspen branches we threw in the pond yesterday. I didn’t see them, but as I walked above an exposed bank burrow protected by some shade,
I heard something plunge into the pond. I saw bubbles in the water and a beaver soon surfaced and swam toward me in a beaver’s typical wary weaving pattern.
Last summer all my early encounters with the beaver occurred when I was sitting in my chair by the dam. Then one afternoon when I saw it as I stood up on the high east bank of the pond and looked down at it, I was almost certain that I was seeing another beaver. I had that same feeling today. The beaver in front of me looked smaller than the smaller of the two beavers I’ve been looking at since the early spring.
However, it acted like it was thoroughly familiar with me, swimming closer and closer, and showed no inclination to slap its tail.
At the end of the video clip below, I could see its belly as it drifted below me and its tail serve a rudder and its webbed feet provide the power as it slowly swam back below me.
I took photos of where it had been sitting, and the water there looked muddy.
And I took a photo of the lower burrow where I know the beavers had been staying. The branches on top looked just as they did over a week ago.
Then I retreated to a chair I have at the edge of the woods from which I can see most of the pond but not the near shore below the high slope. So I couldn’t see the beaver as it continued to swim back and forth and it could not see me. Soon enough its ripples stopped and I had the impression it was back up in the shaded burrow. Then it slipped into the water and judging from the ripples it swam along the shore below, and I thought maybe to the other lower burrow they had been using. It certainly didn’t stay long there, and swam back over to the higher burrow and the ripples stopped again. If this is the male of the same pair of beavers I was seeing here two weeks ago, then perhaps the female and kits have moved into the shaded burrow, and because it is completely above the low water level of the pond, the male has to stand guard. Since I stopped seeing the beavers in the evening, I’ve walked along this slope a few times and no beaver reacted like this one did today. So, maybe we’ll see what’s what soon enough. While I sat in the chair waiting for the beaver to make its next moved, I enjoyed the many birds enjoying the damp, cloudy morning. A bird about the size of a robin with a white breast made a wild flight over the pond like it was after a dragonfly. Then it perched on a dead branch up on the knoll,
then, I thought, it flew into the honeysuckle bushes after berries, but the bird the flew out from the bushes and that I could follow with my camcorder was smaller and yellow.
This was catbird territory but I didn’t notice them. Some flickers flew through and I heard towhees behind me, and perhaps they were the brown birds that flew quickly by me, over the pond, and away. So as not to disturb the beaver I retreated to the woods and then climbed the steep ridge going along the boundary line of our land. This is our biggest pile of rocks. I generally go up the ridge on our neighbor’s land but since I am trying to take all this sandstone seriously I better start sticking to our land and climbing these rocks.
I went over the ridge to the trail that goes from where I cut trees last year and then to the Third Pond. As I walked I heard a deer stomp out of the bushes, snorting all the way. After feeding the beaver aspen branches, I noticed some cut aspen branches on the trail.
I assume they were nipped off by a porcupine, and maybe that deer bit off a few of the leaves -- I saw that several were nipped off. Of course, I came down in the evening. Two muskrats were in the pond, but no beavers and the aspen branches I offered were still where I had left them.
August 2 we had enough rain so my watering chores for the garden are suspended. So I am back to cutting trails and moving firewood, more of the latter. We might not be here much in the winter and so will need less firewood, but it can be embarrassing stumbling over cut trees years later and finding that wood that was once good has rotted. This is especially the case this year because in fall, assuming we’d be here all winter, I cut some live trees, including a white oak above the First Pond, though it was certainly half dead. On my way up to resume cutting that I up, I took photos of the Teepee Pond.
This pond was dug by humans many years ago as they searched for dirt for the road over the ridge to the south, County Route 2. The Town Supervisor owned this land and four pond were dug -- each increasingly deeper until they found the best dirt (now our Deep Pond) and the name of the gravel road that forms the north boundary of our land was changed, named after the Supervisor, of course. The east end of the Teepee pond is the deeper end, in the foreground of the above photo. In the drought of 1999 all but a deep hole in the east end of the pond went dry. I even tried to save the day by digging a deeper hole in the west end of the pond which didn’t help any. Once it was dry We tried to dig that end of the pond deep, which didn't help any.
Walking up the south shore of the pond, I saw where the muskrats had some burrows.
I assume that because of the low water level they are gone, but I have no idea where they went. Muskrats also leave when the water level is high and I have no idea where they go. One of the pickerel weed clumps on south side of the pond still has water around it, and the plants look pretty good.
The shallow pools of the First Pond are quite muddy, I assume because of raccoons foraging.
The other muddy pool of water is outside the muskrat burrows at the northwest corner of this little pond.
If this water were a foot deep, I would credit muskrats for clearing the vegetation on the pond bottom. So maybe I am hasty in assuming that the muskrats have left. But recently I did see raccoons running from the this little pond. Looking over the pickerel weed patch that is now high and dry in the canal between the two ponds, it looked like something had stripped the seeds off parts of the plant.
There were also stems thick with seeds, which didn’t look that good to eat to me.
Then I got to work on the dying white oak I cut down in the late winter. After dinner I went down to check the Deep Pond, and I as I came through the honeysuckle branches between the road and the pond, I saw a beaver in the pond just behind the dam nibbling off the bark, twigs and leaves of the aspen branches we left in the pond.
I didn’t want to bother it so I went over to my chair which faced the lodge and the burrows on the east bank. It was even hard for me to keep an eye on what it was doing. But I was soon distracted by three baby muskrats. They are about half the size of adult muskrats
And are most adept at making quick dives.
The other dives the little animals made were less dramatic than the one above which, I think, was directed at me. Then as it got darker two of the babies began rolling in the water with each other, in a fashion. Otter pups genuinely play with each other. They are not distracted by such things as eating. But these muskrat babies always had some vegetation in their mouth as they bumped and moved together. They are rather high strung. I saw three eating near each other,
And then three quick splashes as they simultaneously dove.
They just as quickly surfaced and started nibbling again. As I left the pond in the near dark, I saw something nibbling away where the aspen branch had been but it was an adult muskrat, not the beaver. Not sure where the beaver went.
August 3 two brief showers and two hours of light rain the past few days helped put a puddle back in the Third Pond, so I walked down to the Boundary Pond dam to see if my patching the hole backed up any water. No.
There was a larger puddle in the low pool behind the east end of the dam.
But the pool behind that had very little water.
We need a lot more rain before my dam patch gets tested. Going up to work on the white oak above the First Pond, I saw a towhee eating seeds on the ground.
I hear towhees far more than I see them, so it was nice getting a video.
On hot humid days we linger on the island and often have dinner. Tonight I got back in time to check on the Deep Pond. At 9pm, a big aspen branch that I left that morning was still untouched.
No beavers in the pond, nor muskrats.
August 4 First thing in the morning I checked the aspen branch I put along the west shore of the Deep Pond. No beaver had touched it. As I sat pondering that, I saw bubbles a bit beyond the branch, and then a snapping turtle raised its head out of the water. Today was less hazy than usual and I braved the chop caused by Saturday boaters to paddle around the headland in my kayak and see what is happening in South Bay. While I am not on the river as much from a combination of hot weather, high winds, and other chores, one can get a sense of what is going on from just being around the river or swimming every day off our dock. I’ve noticed the usual progression of midges, and now we have the tiny beige practitioners of endless Brownian movement. The masses of black bugs that scoot along the surface water are back. I saw them when I was swimming but not so much as a kayaked today, though when I reached South Bay I saw a mass of insect casings floating in the water, perhaps what the black bugs emerged from. The osprey fledglings are out of the nest, though let me quickly add that most nests now seem to be on power poles along roads. Off our dock we hear a lot of those appealing osprey shrieks especially when the wind picks up. The usual heron is around Goose Island across from us. We hear fewer calls from the loons, but have heard calling loons flying over us, which I don’t recall ever hearing on a regular basis in the summer. I have seen flocks of geese flying and, of course, grazing in the river including the cove in front of us. Only once did ducks come into our cove and only three. They struck me as used to begging from humans. But I missed the cormorants as I paddled around the headland. The water level in the river has been dropping thanks to the drought. That’s normal but this has been a strange year for the water level. It rose quickly in January and then since there was little river ice or general snow, it stayed at a constant level until the late spring when they slowed the outflow at one of the down river dams. We had a slight rise in the water level, then that stopped and as the drought continued the water dropped and now it is at about a normal level for late August or early September. The early rise and more or less constant level for several months seemed to please the water lilies and the fish. The algae grass which I think the fish like seems to be flourishing. The seedy water cucumber plants, which the geese like, don't seem to be around. Algae didn’t do well. No bryazoa yet. Today I enjoyed the endless examples of aphid infested lily pads. The yellow jackets have been joined by ladybugs and small wasp-like flying insects who I assume are feasting on the aphids. Before all the aphids were black but now there are hoards of beige ones. If I had a camcorder with me I would have hovered over shooting “footage” of this world unto itself. No turtles about so I think I missed seeing the map turtles this year, though from a description he gave me I think Ottoleo saw one last month out in the river. Along with the young osprey flying high, some young kingfishers were learning the ropes in the lower trees along the north shore of the bay. Their frantic flying flushed a green heron off its perch. I didn’t see any signs of beaver activity, nor signs otters or muskrats. But little fish were swimming under me most of the times I looked down.
August 5 if it wasn’t for my inability to account for the two beavers, I could simply chronicle the drought assisted onset of an early fall featuring a loss of leaves and unusual heat. One of the beavers first appeared in May 2011 in the Third Pond and then after cutting many slender willow trunks, or perhaps more properly up shooting branches from a common root, the beaver moved to the Deep Pond by July and feasted on lily pads and roots. It wintered there without amassing a visible cache of cut branches so I assume it lived off the roots during the winter. In late March 2012 another beaver spent no more than two weeks in the Third Pond and them moved down to the Deep Pond. In April and May I got the impression that the beavers had befriended each other, with mutual grooming and what appeared to be frequent communication. In June I stopped seeing the beavers in the evening, but when I was about to conclude that they were gone, I saw one beaver during the day. Then on July 11 I saw both beavers in the evening but not together. I got the impression that they might be minding kits in a burrow so that only one beaver went out at a time. We went away for a few days and when we got back I stopped seeing beavers until we put aspen branches out and I saw one beaver on the first two evenings of August. Then even with aspen branches in the pond, no signs of beavers. When I sit by the pond in the evening I have fleeting glimpses of muskrats; in the morning I usually see snapping turtles stick their head out of the water, and sometimes, like this morning, I can see the top of the shell.
When I walk around the Deep Pond looking for beaver signs, I always see other interesting things, like this year's crop of flowering arrowhead which so far is not as pervasive along the shores as it was last year.
I finally got a photo of a plant with flowers, more violet than the photo below shows, that's been blooming for at least a month.
Then along the back of the dam where I expect to see beaver activity, I saw none. There is an easily examined patch of the smaller lily pads and I keep waiting in vain to see them produce flowers. I see now that it is not shaped like a northern water lily so I assume these are undeveloped white water lilies.
I suppose in plants growing in a bunch from buried rhizomes don’t need to flower as regularly as other plants. Nothing has subdued the vegetation on and just behind the dam. Bushy jewel weeds are growing right down to what I call fan grass.
This year there is no vervain on the dam. There are Joe Pye weeds, boneset and goldenrod, and tangling into the berry-ladened honeysuckle branches and the blue flowers of nightshade.
There was a small cut honeysuckle branch in the water but I noticed that when I saw the beaver eating the aspen branch 4 days ago. So I think the leaves on this branch have stayed green because the branch is in the water.
But if the beaver or beavers are here they are not eating the vegetation I can see. They are eating the underwater vegetation which I think is primarily pond weed and milfoil. Outside the burrow in the east end of the dam there is a wide area of the water cleared of vegetation. I should monitor this and get a feel for how much clearing a muskrat family can do and what must be the work of the beavers.
When I saw the beaver eating the aspen branch behind the dam, it may have gone into that burrow since I didn’t see it swim back to the burrows in the high bank or the bank lodge below the knoll. Of course, it could have simply gone up on the dam well concealed by the honeysuckle bushes. I pushed my way through the honeysuckles in order to keep going along the dam. I didn’t see any evidence of a beaver being under them or moving through them. However, in the mud behind the dam, a bit to the east of the burrow, I saw what looked like a paw print. That struck me as shaped more like a raccoon print but next to it was a depression shaped like the webbed foot a beaver; interesting but not very persuasive.
While I was hovering over that, I saw a large frog half out of the water.
While pondering that my foot went through a burrow. No muskrats let alone beavers scurried out into the pond. Once safely off the dam on the other side of the pond, I took a photo looking back at that end of the dam where there is so much water cleared of vegetation. In my observations beavers are more prone to persistently forage in one area of a pond. Muskrats do wear down paths to a burrow.
I continued up the east shore of the pond parsing the lush vegetation with my eyes. Though there is a drought, the lower slope down to the pond is kept moist by one spring at the base of the ridge. There were even patches of ferns here.
On the higher part of the slope, ferns were showing the affects of the drought.
The stunted growth of vegetation and the dying of many leaves is easy to see up on the knoll.
There were no signs of beaver activity around the burrows where I thought the beavers might be living. The largest patch of water lilies in the pond, near the burrows where the inlet creek comes into the pond, looked unmolested with one lily blooming.
Then I took a walk on the now dry Third Pond. Grass is beginning to grow up from the cracked mud.
Walking along the pond bottom I noticed a trail dug on the bottom leading to a hole that probably led to a burrow almost underneath the chair I would sit on to watch the muskrats.
Over the years I always enjoyed buttonbushes and annually took close-up photos of their “button” flowers, but recently I’ve noticed that buttonbushes seem to survive beavers better than other shrubs that grow in their ponds and I got the notion that maybe they flourish because of the beavers. In this pond the beavers eat the thin willow branches or saplings that seem to grow back. Given that beavers are never here more than a month or two and usually there is only one at a time, the willows should easily survive. But now I wonder if the buttonbushes might be crowding them out. Buttonbushes are the last shrub or tree to leaf out, so even if beavers liked to eat their leaves, and I don’t think they do, in this pond they come out after the beavers leave. I took a photo of willows growing through the buttonbushes which of course give the impression of the willows moving in by moving over the buttonbushes.
But I bet the buttonbushes crowd out the willows here.
August 7 yesterday as we drove up the road by our land heading back to the island, Leslie spotted an owl in a tree near our neighbor’s dump. We got out of the car and I trained the camcorder on it.
In 30 seconds it showed how easily an owl can turned its head and then flew off.
This morning after having not seen the beaver or any signs of it on the 5th and 6th, I saw the head of an animal go from the bank lodge below the knoll into the water and disappear into the pond. I waited 10 minutes and nothing surfaced. The head looked more like the head of an otter, and otters are more likely to completely disappear in a pond than either muskrats or beavers. That sighting inspired me to head down to White Swamp to see if I could see any signs of beavers or otters in the pond behind the dam just up from the swamp or around the lodge on the near shore of the swamp. A beaver that left the Deep Pond might have left signs there, as might an otter coming to that pond. When I got down to the back of the pond that the beavers built by damming the creek that flows down from the Deep Pond, I could see that the pond had shrunk and I saw no new beaver work. I didn’t get a very good photo of it. (For some reason the light on a sunny day between 9 and 10am is terrible for photos with my camcorder. I should have taken photos with my other digital camera but I had to make a quirky repair which makes it more difficult to use and when deer flies are about speed is of the essence.) Then I went over the ridge separating the pond from the swamp, and went down to the beaver lodge. There were no signs of beaver activity on or around the lodge or the area of the swamp, relatively clear of vegetation, surrounding the lodge.
There was only one duck in the area, and a couple herons flew off as I came down to the swamp. I am sure if I sat for a long time, things would have happened, but I had work to do. I went back up the ridge and then walked along it and down to the dam. The path over the dam looked used, but not necessarily in the last few weeks.
The pool of water below the dam was muddy, but not that behind the dam. The former can just mean water is flowing through the dam; muddy water behind the dam, in the absence of heavy rain, suggests an animal raised the mud. I saw remnants of old otter scats on the dam, but they were left this summer since I didn’t see any otter scats there when I checked this dam in the late spring.
I took a photo of the placid pond behind the dam and saw no freshly nibbled sticks nor any other sign that beavers had recently been there or had recently worked on the dam.
While the pond behind this dam extends to the west the deepest part of the pond is along the east shore where the creek runs. If the beavers in the Deep Pond came down through this pond then if they left any signs they would likely be along the east shore. The only possible sign I saw was muddy water where the creek narrowed, and one possibly nibbled stick floating on the water.
The last time I walked along here was April 12, and my impression was that beavers had just worked on the dam and were still cutting small trees around the pond, and that they were mostly likely denning in the lodge back on the north shore of White Swamp. Every time I came back down here since then I only investigated the west shore of the pond. Today I saw that the beavers had cut an ironwood on the east bank of the creek,
Since there were dead leaves on the tree it was probably cut down in May after the ironwood leafed out.
The beavers that cut it gnawed off some of the bark on the trunk but the branches, which they generally trim off ironwoods, were hung up too high. I don’t think the Deep Pond beavers had anything to do with this because in May I was seeing them both in that pond whenever I looked in the evening. As I continued up the creek I didn’t see any more beaver work, old or new. The creek narrowed and was mostly covered by thick vegetation. Where I could see water or mud I didn’t see muddy water nor beaver prints.
About 50 yards below the Deep Pond where the grade of the slope increased, the creek was dry.
Then I got to work sawing up the ash tree that we cut down back in the winter just behind our cabin, which is just over a slight ridge from our house. While sawing I was intrigued by the patterns on the face of a sandstone rock on the next ridge up, not quite ripples.
I saw that there was a piece of the rock face that was loose and I pried it off to see if the ripple pattern went deeper. It looked like it did, but a more immediate manifestation of change was the nest of ants I disturbed.
This year by prying into rocks I discovered that the rocks are the nurseries of the ants which are all over our land. Just as I was about to start our pre-dinner guitar strumming and singing, Leslie called a halt. There was a porcupine sleeping on a big basswood limb just outside the house.
When I went down to the Deep Pond after dinner, I thought I had evidence that the beaver, the last one I saw, hadn’t left the pond. But as I sat watching the pond I didn’t see a beaver and only one muskrat briefly. I did see a snapping turtle which appeared to be eating smaller leaves almost floating on the surface of the pond. Then it surfaced and sniffed the air.
The frogs only managed a feeble chorus but the night time mosquitoes were as active as ever.
August 8 on my way down to the Deep Pond, I walked along the Third Pond bottom and saw three small holes where the bank begins to rise which reminded me of holes I’ve seen crayfish crawl into.
I got a closer photo of the mud tinged a pinkish orange.
Down at the Deep Pond, I walked along the higher slope that forms the east shore of the pond. In between where I was walking and the water, I saw that the grass was depressed much like how a sitting beaver would mat the grass.
Then higher up on the slope from that impression, I saw a honeysuckle cut like a beaver would do it.
The leaves on the cut branch were still green.
Farther along the slope there was a patch of dirt that I think was a turtle nest but the vegetation may have been kept down by a beaver sitting there. It is at the area where a beaver plunged into the water the last time I saw a beaver here on the 1st.
In the whole corner of that end the pond, the only beaver sign I saw was a nibbled twig floating in the water.
That could have been left by muskrats. However, I think little white stems like that are from honeysuckle bushes and I don’t think muskrats have developed a taste for them. Also arguing for a beaver having rooted in the area recently was how muddy the water there looked.
That said, when I walked back along the slope down to the dam, the water there was muddier, and I know that the muskrats swim there. However, if I accept the idea that one beaver at least is still in the pond, and I am beginning to accept that, then the contours of the cleared under water trails, their width and depth, seems to have been shaped by beavers as well as muskrats.
Thanks to the magnification of my camcorder lens, I saw what could be beaver prints in the mud.
I didn’t have my boots on so I didn’t get close and investigate. Well, this sifting signs is an intellectual challenge and favorable signs fire my imagination. Indeed now at one extreme, I imagine the female beaver dying or fleeing after her kits died, and the male keeping up a lonely, spiritless vigil for her return. I imagined the same scenario when the two beavers in the Lost Swamp Pond became just the one smaller one who I usually saw floating aimlessly and who never seemed to eat. The trouble with that scenario is that my imagining simply peters out since the remaining beaver is so furtive. Indeed, I had convinced myself that there was no beaver in the Lost Swamp Pond, and then I saw cut vegetation heaped up on the lodge in the middle of the pond, what a beaver would do in the hot summer, but I’ve seen no other signs of a beaver there. When in a quandary about tracking, I usually resolve to be patient, but that might not work with this disappearing beavers scenario. But I can’t think of what I can do, now that feeding the beaver aspen branches no longer works, to get the beaver or beavers to show themselves. I did something lively as I walked around. A black and yellow swallowtail fluttering over pink swamp milkweed blossoms
This has been a great summer for seeing swallowtails, and I rarely see one at rest.
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