August 12 I took my weekend hike to check the beaver ponds on the island but today I only went to the East Trail Pond. Our drought was almost broken by ¾ inches of rain but that’s not enough rain to change things in the almost dry Big Pond and diminished Lost Swamp Pond, but things there probably did not get any worse. On the granite plateau along Antler Trail enough rain collected to green the moss but the grasses are quite dead.
Some of the small junipers on the plateau were quite green. The smaller blue berry bushes had turned brown weeks ago. Now the larger bushes are succumbing to the drought. Some grasses are holding on or rejuvenating in low areas where the shape of the rocks helps collect water. Only the leaves of the smaller trees died. The mix makes for a good photo, as much as I’d prefer every plant to be healthy green.
When I came down to the south shore of the East Trail Pond, I saw the dead crown of a pine tree flat in the pond.
I noticed that the beavers were gnawing into the tree the last time I was here. I have seen beavers leave a pine trunk completely stripped of bark, but on trees about half the size of this one. No signs of them stripping the bark yet. The south side of the pond has less vegetation and because of that it easier to see how shallow the pond is.
However I could see that the beavers and muskrats had maintained a channel or two.
I saw two turtles up on some clumps of vegetation toward the middle of the pond. One shell looked well domed so perhaps it was a Blanding’s, but I couldn’t see a yellow chin nor any white speckles on the shell.
As I sat waiting to see a beaver, one slapped its tail near the lodge. I kept moving down pond but never got a good view of the water around the lodge, nor saw the beaver.
I noticed that one of the large trees by the dam looked like it was recently gnawed, “tasted”, might be a better word.
A good bit of mud along the south shore that curls behind the dam has been exposed by the drought. There are plenty of cut cattail stalks but all dead. I looked over the mud searching for beaver prints but the only impressions I could be sure of were made by deer.
There is a large elm, I think, just below the south end of the dam where the beavers renewed their bark stripping
To get to the north shore of the pond I walked up the steepest part of the ridge south of the pond where a couple weeks ago I saw that a beaver almost got the trunk of a small ironwood that it cut down the ridge. It is still hanging at the crest of the ridge.
Another ironwood they cut down doesn’t appear to have been trimmed or gnawed by a beaver. Beavers usually don't hang when a tree might fall and often leave the area so the wind or gravity alone brings the tree down to the ground. Then I walked down the long granite outcrop that goes down to the pool of water behind the old East Trail Pond dam. First I took a photo of the meadow that once was the middle of the old pond. It looks rather lush considering how little rain we’ve had.
Then at the bottom of the rock I studied the pool of water behind the dam. I’ve never seen it so shallow and I suspect the duck weed helps conceal just how little water there is.
I think a snapping turtle left its tracks in the mud, I assume, as it left the water. After I passed a small clump of asters, I decided I should take photos of the various plants in the meadow. A clump of goldenrod was the next clump of flowers I saw.
“Clump” is an unscientific word but it maybe important to make the point the some plants here are in relatively small bunches. Usually I see goldenrod and asters more or less evenly dispersed in the areas they grow in. My usual approach to taking photos of plants in a meadow is to show different plants next to each other like the steeplebush and milkweed in the photo below.
But they too weren’t spread throughout the meadow. Since the grasses were a bit stunted and dying back, it was easier to spot the other vigorous plants. Then I saw what looked like buttonbush breaking up a clump of goldenrods.
Buttonbush is probably the last plant to leaf out in this meadow but then it seems to intimidate every plant around it. The leaves on the small buttonbushes are quite large. Given the large and plentiful “buttons“, I assume the plants spreads by seeds not by growing up from wandering roots.
I saw some vervain plants. I have long noticed this plant and, to the best of my recollection, this is the first time I have seen it in this meadow which has been evolving since 2006.
That first summer after the beavers left bur marigold turned the valley into yellow bloom. But in 2008 that dry buckwheat vine was everywhere, and made this dispiriting photo back in August 13, 2008.
The dam the beavers built above the meadow has probably helped more plants thrive in the meadow. The dam is long and holds water back that can then slowly seep throughout much of the meadow in the late spring before the beavers finished patching the dam. But the summers of 2009, 2010 and 2011 were relatively wet too. The dam itself is quite lush with grass, and green cattails crowd the top and down stream side of the dam. I think the high water behind the dam before the drought killed off the cattails that had flourished in that area before the dam was built up.
Looking down from the foot bridge that crosses the inlet creek, I saw some turtlehead flowers.
I also saw a plant a beaver might have nipped floating in what little water there is under the bridge.
Over in the pond I saw three turtles on a log that all looked like painted turtles.
When I got higher on the ridge, I could look down on another large painted turtle.
Of course, I saw turtles here all the time in the spring. Then when the pond’s water level got higher I stopped seeing them because there was little they could climb up on. But then when the logs first started re-emerging a month ago, the turtles were still not to be seen. Now they are evidently eager to bask in the sun again. I kept looking for beavers too and didn’t see any. I did see that much of the pond bottom was cleared of vegetation. I wish the photo below showed that better.
I credit the beavers for doing most of that. They also did what only they can do, cut down a tree and its long straight trunk fell down right along the shoreline. The beavers have trimmed all the branches in the crown and carried them off.
Without leaves the tree is hard to identify. Judging from what I saw of the stump and cut bottom of the trunk, I think it might be red oak.
However, very little of the bark on the trunk has been gnawed and beavers usually get right to that when they have a red oak so conveniently placed next to the pond so this is probably a sugar maple. Beavers like the leaves and branches but less keen for the bark, or that’s my impression. This is something I should study more rigorously. While contemplating the trunk next to the pond, I looked back and saw that a beaver had climbed the rocky ridge I just climbed down and tasted a tree up there
The beavers also have cut a thin cherry tree half way up the ridge and have stripped a few feet of bark off the trunk as well as cutting and taking away the branches.
About 10 years ago I used to come out to the East Trail Pond on spring mornings to track otters. Often the beavers were out and I could watch 3 or 4 beavers stripping bark off a large cherry tree that they cut and that fell into the pond. On May 27, 2003, standing on the shore where that large cherry tree was I took a photo looking up pond. The cherry the beavers cut last week must have been a sapling on the ridge in the misty distance, a bit to the right, in the photo below. What a magnificent pond! I had the photo on-line and a photo editor at Field and Stream Magazine almost bought it, but decided it wanted ducks.
The dead trees in the pond then indicates how old the pond was in 2003. Beavers had been there for 20 years or more. Since this pond was in the middle of a rather extensive rocky watershed, I thought it would never lack water and unlike the Big Pond and Lost Swamp Pond, the old East Trail Pond was surrounded by woods. So I thought it would always have beavers. Given the successive abandonment of so many ponds that I’ve watched over the years, and the very modest return of beavers after five years, I am pessimistic now and think I am watching the last act. But maybe not. Old photos might reveal new growth, too. Was the lower part of the bank where the otters latrined last year covered with ferns years ago, or did otter scats fertilize their impressive growth.
The first large pine tree these beavers began cutting was on their winter path up the ridge to the red oaks they cut down last year. The pine trunk was half cut through. The tree is still alive and the beavers haven’t shown any interest in it since February.
There is quite a cascade of sap from the cut. I wonder if beavers give up on cutting a pine if it takes too long because too much sap gums up their mouth. As I headed up the ridge, I saw that a beaver came right to the edge of the pond to look up and sniff at me.
Then as it swam back toward the middle of the pond, it slapped its tail. That has happened to me countless times and I still jerked the camcorder when the tail smacked the water.
I waited for the beaver to surface and it never did, disappearing in the vegetation with hidden channels snaking through the pond.
I could make out on well used channel which was at the west end of the pond.
But before going down to check that out, I saw that I could get close to the branches of the shrub next to the rock cliff that forms the north shore that the beavers often hide under and sometimes eat. I have never been able to identify it.
I broke off some leafy branches and to make a long story short eventually identified it as winterberry. Leslie suggested that and told me to compare it to the winterberry on our land. I did that and found that its leaves were half the size of the winterberry there.
However, I found that the winterberry branches that shot up from trunks low to the ground and likely flooded when the beaver pond was full were almost as small as the leaves from the winterberry from the East Trail Pond.
The winterberry shrubs along the north shore of that pond have been flooded a couple years, and since beavers were here years ago too these winterberries may have been shaped by beaver predation and flooding. So instead of the trunks of the bush growing straight up, the trunks snake along the ground and what I am seeing are the many branches of these stressed winterberries coming up from out of the water. The photo below gives the idea.
During the winter the beavers nipped off some of these branches but never really changed the shape of these large shrubs. So these winterberries may have grown after first being cut by beavers in a way that makes their bark and leaves less palatable to beavers. But the resulting shrubs are still rather vigorous, small leaves and all.
I have seen straight-up, thicker trunk winterberries in this pond, and they have the red berries in the fall. I have never seen berries on these huge shrubs which is why I could never figure out what they were. When I walked from the muddy channel at the west end of the pond into the woods,
I saw a hornbeam that looked like it had just been cut down.
The beavers I watched at Boundary Pond on our land cut hundreds of small hornbeams but I never got the sense that they enjoy eating hornbeam bark. I’ll have to keep an eye on this one.
August 13 I went down to check Boundary Pond to see how it responded to the recent rain. It certainly wasn’t enough to cause any water to flow but I thought it might have been enough to form a little pool of water behind my attempt to patch the low hole in the dam. I walked down the east shore and as I approached the dam, I saw that water had pooled in the low areas behind the east end of the dam.
But I saw that the water in the middle of the pond flowed down into that side pool.
The area behind the patch I made in the dam had no standing water.
But not because water leaked out of the dam. Looking back toward the lodge I could see how the ground sloped slightly back to it and there was no pooling there.
If the beavers prized the deepest point in this part of the valley as the site for their lodge, they would have built it convenient to those pools at the east end of the dam. Evidently they appreciated the spaces between the higher mossy mounds in the middle of the valley more, or they understood how high the water would get if they perfected their dam and realized the pools on the east side would then be so deep that the amount of logs needed to build the lodge would get out of hand. I am leery of lauding the so-called engineering skills of beavers, but I do think they have a fine sense of how water levels. Humans seem loath to get their nose to the ground and seem much more interested in the view from their eventual seat. The contortions of our engineering perhaps arises from that obsession to look out upon something else more pleasing than where we are. Beavers are more level headed, forget about the view and curl up in a safe dark lodge with easy access to all they need with no need to look beyond. Looking back to the eastern end of the dam from that dry area behind the hole in the dam I patched, I could see a stretched of pooled water covered with the ubiquitous floating duckweed.
I walked back behind the dam skirting the tall jewel weeds that cover the dam. Walking back up the east shore of the pond, I saw a ripple rock half exposed along the old pond shore.
This ripple rock is oriented perpendicular to all the other ripple rocks I’ve seen. They are all parallel to the ridges. Does that suggest that these deep holes in the valley have a geologic origin as some rocks were turned around by retreating glaciers? There are white snakeroots blooming throughout the shady parts of the valley.
Just off the old flood plain of the pond, I saw a snakeroot plant about three feet high. Most are rather low to the ground.
I’ve seen snakeroot here every year, but this is the first time that I’ve seen mint in the valley.
There was quite a bit. There was a clump of tall golden rods arrayed around the truncated trunks of dead birch trees.
I’m noticing the golden rods are not spread out in recently formed beaver meadows. I suppose it takes time for them to seed out through the whole valley. The tickseed sunflowers have not reached their stride.
I saw a few clumps of white asters.
Of course, I should be celebrating diversity, but I would like to see each of these diverse flowers looking more vigorous. The first briefly dominating flower here, the swamp milkweeds, has gone to seed, which that plant manages quite elegantly.
Some vervain nearby, that had also gone to seed, rivaled the swamp milkweed in elegance.
I would like to be more scientific about this, but in the past we only paid attention to the spring flowers in this part of the valley. The upper part of the valley that beavers have not affected has plenty of goldenrods. Boneset, white and blue asters, and white snakeroots have always been in the valley. Usually the bur marigold takes over at the end to the summer, but it looks like the drought might prevent that. Probably the state of the flowers I am seeing now can be credited to the drought than to what the beavers may have done to the soil and drainage patterns here. I didn’t wade into the vegetation in the now dry Last Pool.
At the moment I don’t see any flowers there among the grasses and trees that are flourishing where the beavers didn’t deaden the earth with the stripped logs and sticks.
August 14 On my way down to the Deep Pond to look for signs that beavers are still there, I walked across the dry bottom of the Third Pond. Green plants are slowly growing up, almost everywhere now. In most years meadowsweet dominates here.
I checked to see how the patch of willows that beavers trimmed this spring and in the spring of 2011 was faring. One relatively thick willow had several green shoots each almost as tall as I am.
However, at the same time the willows are almost annually rebounding from the browsing of beavers, buttonbushes are slowly spreading below the willows. So far beavers have shown no interest in cutting buttonbushes or eating its leaves or seeds. I began noticing this two years ago, first seeing how buttonbushes seemed to be crowding out alders in and around Meander Pond on the island. Looking at some photos I took of Thicket Pond on the island, I think I can show that back in 1999 the “thickets” of Thicket Pond were not buttonbushes. There has been a changing of the guard and now that pond is almost all buttonbushes. So there might be a struggle going on along the shores of the Third Pond.
Buttonbushes are the last plant to leaf out in the spring so even willows cut by the beaver in the early spring had plenty of time to sprout new shoots, and generally that seems to be the case. However, over on the northeast shore where the beaver didn’t cut much willow there are a number of sparsely leaved willows towering over the buttonbushes, but that could be just from the drought.
Then I headed down to the Deep Pond. On the slope where I saw a cut honeysuckle branch, I saw what looked like a pat of fresh mud up on the bank and what looked like a narrow trail down to the water.
It struck me as rather tentative for beaver marking. However, the amount of pond vegetation eaten out in the deeper part of the pond is impressive. The circle of clear brown water in the middle of the pond keeps expanding. Of course, I know that muskrats are browsing out there.
The best sign that a beaver is still around was a cut sapling up on the southeast shore behind what I think is the last burrow the beavers used.
The animal that cut the sapling didn’t move it. Out in the pond water nearby there was a small fan grass plant pulled up by the roots.
Again, muskrats can pulled up plants like that, and they can also cut small saplings, though they rarely do it. I walked around the whole pond and saw no more possible beaver signs. I did see some arrowhead plants in the grasses of the shallow parts of the pond.
Last summer, when the water level stayed about the same, the arrowhead plants had flowers. In one damp corner of the pond, I saw a bodacious head of the goldenrod flowers.
August 15 I still come down at night and look for the beavers, and don’t see them. Tonight, the muskrats were out again. I saw one swim over and dive toward the bank lodge below the knoll.
The other ate pond vegetation in the usual fidgety muskrat fashion. I also enjoyed two blue herons flying directly over me. I often flush them from this pond when I come down to look for beavers. Tonight I probably kept two from eating and roosting here. When I walked down the road along our land in the morning, before getting to work sawing up firewood for the winter, I saw sumac along the road brought crashing down by the weight of insect galls and grape vines.
The gall I opened up was mostly empty, but there are so many of them on some of the branches of this little tree.
August 18 It was too hot to work on firewood, so after I pumped up water for the gardens, I took a hike on the trails I had worked on in the summer, and scouted areas I didn’t work. I crossed the inner valley, climbed up the ridge and then turned right and walked down the ridge heading south. I wrangled with a few freshly fallen dead pines and wondered to what degree I should move dead wood. I’ll probably only do it to the degree that it makes it easier to move along the crest of the ridge. Down above the Boundary Pond, the beavers had trails on the ridge two years ago. They came up to cut big poplars and little white oaks. When beavers cut trees in the moist valley bottom, vegetation fills in the blanks, so to speak, but not up on the dry ridges.
Since I had just enjoyed the flowers in the meadow forming in what was Boundary Pond, I didn’t study them today. I took a photo of the grasses.
Last year at this time, there was still a semblance of a pond here,
So I can’t compare this year’s meadow to last year’s. Last year there was water in the channel coming down from the Last Pool.
The only areas I can compare to last year, the first summer without beavers, are those flats flanking the channel. And in the shady areas I can’t say there has been much growing back.
Before the beavers came up the valley, the ground here was relatively bare, but there were small hornbeams everywhere putting leaves in your face no matter where you turned. But it is unfair making comparison because of this summer’s drought. The mossy islands in the now dry Last Pool are not lush, but they are holding on.
That said, I am not sure I want the valley to return to the way it was before the beavers came. Humans are suckers for views, and I am no exception. When beavers make a pond they made a valley more picturesque and I can’t resist sitting above and looking down on it. And once beavers leave a valley they leave better views through the valley. I can’t resist sitting on rocks and downed tree trunks and looking 100 yards up and down the valley. But as they develop a valley in their fashions beavers aren’t interested in a view. After 18 years of watching beavers, otters and muskrats, it’s finally dawning on me that their command of another dimension fully compensates them for their not having that perspective which so entertains us. They command the underwater world as long as the valley is flooded. When I walked around the Deep Pond on the 14th, I saw a few possible beaver signs. I went back today hoping to see more. The underwater area free of vegetation looked much larger today.
But along the shore, the trail of cleared vegetation there led back to a muskrat burrow.
The burrow above is on the north shore. The last burrow I know the beavers used is on the south shore, and today it doesn’t look as well traveled as the muskrat burrow.
But if muskrats alone are doing this, I am impressed by their persistence. The pond is rather deep in its east end with the water about 6 feet deep just 5 feet from the shore.
Even with this summer’s low water level, it is probably 8 feet deep in the middle of the pond. I saw another uprooted fan grass,
But I haven’t seem any of the lily rhizomes the beavers like to eat, pieces of which they often leave floating in the water. Scanning the lily pads in the pond, I saw some blooming pickerel weed along the north shore that I hadn’t noticed before.
So if beavers are here, they are living solely off the pond weed and milfoil under the water, and ignoring the lily pads and rhizomes which they really like to eat. Seeing pickerel weed reminded me that I had not checked on the Teepee Pond for a while. The pond still has water but almost all the pickerel weeds are high and dry and their blossoms faded or gone.
I sat there long enough to see the animals I scared off reappear. When I took a photo of a painted turtle I managed to capture the blur of a dragonfly flying over the pond.
Slowly more turtles poked their heads out.
They were all painted turtles, and small. I wonder what the larger Blanding’s turtles are doing. They hibernate in smaller ponds than this, in its current drought dispensation, so I suppose they will take it all in stride.
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