August 20 I had some visitors, a family of five, interested in the nature, so we paddled over to South Bay. The herons and ospreys were elsewhere, and the drama on the lily pads had about played out. There were still blooms. Fortunately, the painted turtles were up on the logs and herpetology is a specialty of the family. There was no fresh beaver work along the shore or in the water and I didn’t even try to look for otter signs. We went through the Narrows so they could see how far it was to Canadian waters. Then before dinner, I took them to the East Trail Pond. The family kept very quiet and I got them all on the rocky ridge overlooking the north side of the pond. As we sat, a beaver slapped its tail, a bit down pond just beyond the clumps of winterberry shrubs. I kept wishing it would come out in the open and it did swim furtively closer toward us, but, as luck would have it, I was the only who briefly saw it. It continued to make ripples under the shrubs but that soon stopped. So I began my lecture as we walked down to the dam. We saw plenty of green frogs, a bullfrog, and a frog I have not noticed here recently, a leopard frog. A few turtles were out on logs and clumps of grass. I saw one large one
And strained my eyes looking for a yellow chin, but it was a painted turtle not a Blanding’s. I also thought I saw another tree freshly cut by the beavers that fell out into the pond.
But second look, thanks to the photo, I think the beavers cut the tree I saw there back on the 12th, that fell parallel to the shore and as they gnawed the bark off the trunk moved the remaining trunk around now points out into the pond. I didn’t have a chance to take a close look.
August 21 I could only spare one day of exploring with our friends because the gardens need water. With each successive day with a chance of rain, we come up empty. My part in watering, pumping the well and delivering the buckets, takes about two hours. Then I usually cut or split firewood, but today I went down to the Deep Pond to look for beaver signs. I began close to the east end of the dam, I was startled to find a small beaver stripped and cut log lying in the vegetation along the shore.
Nearby there was a fan grass dub up by the roots and a mud flat which could have been were other grasses were dug up. It didn’t look like a scent mound.
In another flat of mud, I could almost see prints, and this “flat” had a little relief though certainly not molded like a scent mound.
I took a closer look at the beaver stick. It did not look like a beaver had just cut and started gnawing on it. The outer layer was mud not bark, so I think an animal fished out a stick a beaver cut and gnawed years ago and found something to eat on it. Presumably that animal is a beaver.
The vegetation out in the deeper part of the pond, which is now probably no more than two feet deep, has been heavily browsed. Maybe the beaver nosed into that old stick as it browsed the roots of the pond weed.
But muskrats are here too, though there are two lighter brown underwater channels over to the burrows that I know are in the dam, one for the muskrats and one for the beaver?
I walked up the east shore of the pond and got the impression that the animals were eating all the underwater vegetation.
Then when I got over to the bushy area behind the beavers’ last burrow, I saw where a small sapling had been nipped,
Almost certainly by a beaver. Looking back toward the pond, it looked like the grass and other vegetation had been walked on and worked on by a large animal, a beaver not muskrats.
The top photo below shows how the pond outside the burrow looked today. The photo below that one shows how it looked on August 18.
Clearly something has been eating the vegetation in the water, either muskrat or beaver or both. The water there is too deep and the bottom too sloped for deer to wade in and browse vegetation. However, the patch of lily pads on the west side of the burrow looks untouched since the 18th. The top photo was taken today.
When I got back on the road flanking our land, I walked down and looked at the dam of the Deep Pond. No signs of any beaver activity there but there was a direct trail through the green grass from where I stood to the pond.
I assume raccoons made that.
August 22 needless to say after seeing signs of a beaver using the Deep Pond yesterday, I sat down at the pond as night fell. I didn’t see anything yesterday evening, but today two muskrats entertained me. The two I saw were small and didn’t appear to be ambitious eaters of pond vegetation.
I don’t think they are devouring all the milfoil and pondweed that’s turning the usually greenish pond beige or brown.
While watching the muskrats, I noticed that little fish were jumping throughout the pond. At the end of the video above, I thought a muskrat thrashed the water and dove because a fish got in its way. Then I saw a muskrat munching away right in front of me.
A fish jumped up next to it.
And the muskrat made a thrashing shallow dive in the pond.
The video below shows what muskrats have to put up in this pond on a warm summer’s night.
But no beavers came out despite my renewed conviction that at least one was still using the pond.
August 23 On my way to the white oak I am sawing up from firewood, I saw several painted turtles on logs by the shore of the now rather shallow Teepee Pond.
Then I thought I saw one large turtle on a log farther out in the pond. Thinking it might be a Blanding’s turtle, I took photos using the zoom lens. What I saw as one large turtle turned out to be several small painted turtles with their shells and heads arranged so that I thought it was just one.
I went down to the Deep Pond after dark as the moon was rising, but it was not high enough in the sky to illuminate the pond enough for me to see anything in it. I heard two splashes, wild frantic plashes like the muskrats make. Perhaps leaping fish are still bothering them.
August 29 we were away for 4 days and when we left there was a 60% chance of rain on the day before we got back. No rain. So I was back at the pump. We can save our gardens but can’t do anything for all the wilting plants on our land. Not too much has died. I see no evidence of nature being in panic, save that more birds are using the makeshift bird bath in front of our house, and perhaps the three small raccoons and two small porcupines we saw near our house, rare sights there, were attracted by the whiff of wetness. Returning to my work on the white oak, I saw the painted turtles in the Teepee Pond roughly arranged just the way I saw them on the 23rd, looking like they were patiently waiting for the water to rise.
The pond itself maintains a semblance to its usual self. Unless we really don’t get any more rain, it will survive. The lessening length of daylight and the lower angle of the sun are rather telling in these northern latitudes.
However, the northwest corner of the First Pond is almost dry and probably would be if beavers and muskrats had not dredged a channel over there to allow access to the burrows in the bank, one of which goes to Teepee Pond. If I have the time I’ll poke a stick in the burrow to see what shape it's in.
There is still water in the rest of the pond and it too should survive. The pond vegetation looks well eaten, I assume the deer wade in here. There are probably turtles. There are certainly a legion of frogs here. I tried to find some bullheads here in the early summer. I should try again. Both these ponds are “bait ponds,” dug by a previous owner and stocked with shiners, for sure, and I presume, bullheads. The ponds almost went dry in 1999 but back then I knew nothing about the fish in it. Then one year after I began keeping an eye on the fish population, we had much cold rain in the spring and it wasn’t until the end of the summer that I could net up fish. Now the fish are at the mercy of herons, kingfishers and raccoons but I doubt if they ever eat all the fish in a pond unless the pond does dry up.
The ponds here may be too shallow for kingfishers now. I haven't heard one nor seen one around for a few weeks.
Back on the island, I did my duty and took a long put off trip to the otter latrines along Picton Island. Part of the reason I didn’t go there as often as usual is that I didn’t see many otter scats on my late spring and early summer inspections. However, I got a brief e-mail report from someone that four otters were at Picnic Point in nearby Grindstone Island. Otters are often mistaken for minks and muskrats, but otters often roam in groups of four. Because of the drought, the water level in the river is also dropping more dramatically than usual. The depth is more like late November than the end of August. Because the water is low the under water vegetation in our cove is easier for the geese to get at and a rather large flock is beginning to congregate. We can still swim and for the first time I noticed the water cucumber here. Good food for geese, I think. With the water lower I expected the cormorants to start foraging along Granite Slate shoal, about 30 acres of shallow rocky bottom just north of the main channel of the river. The cormorants usually got there in late summer as the water level went down. But I haven’t seen one out there since the early summer. Ottoleo fishes in Eel Bay and assured me that the cormorants were there. Today, as cruised up Eel Bay toward the Picton shore, I had to take a photo of the cormorants perched on a shoal.
Some geese paddled on by as I took the photo. Of course, Eel Bay is shallower than usual with some large patches of vegetation I had to keep the motor prop away from. As I approached the northeast corner of Quarry Point, I got a good feeling that otters had been foraging off it. I saw gulls, an osprey, a heron standing just off shore
Plus the smell of fish was in the air, however, that is not uncommon at this time of year even when the water is not so low. Needless to say the rocks forming the shore were well exposed.
I cut the engine and drifted to the spot where the otters usually scat and I saw a spread of scat on two rocks.
The wind was just picking up from the west rolling some waves onto the rocks so I didn’t dock the boat and get out and take a close-up. From what I could see with the zoom lens it looked like the scats might have crayfish shell parts in them.
All along this shore there are pools of water behind the beach of rocks. One summer, at least, I know that an otter mother schooled her pups in those pools. The deepest pool, and thus the one now most likely to still have water, is behind where the otters scatted. At that point there is a thick line of shrubs between the rocky shore and the pool. A bit farther a long the shore there is an opening through the vegetation.
There were some scats on two rock faces angling down to the water.
Then the shore bulges into a cascade of rocks. I saw scats on one that looked a bit old but right next to that was the head of a bullhead that looked fresh.
Behind this cascade of rocks is perhaps the most tractable shore with some large trees including a pine that years ago I thought was a center of otter activity, but I haven’t seen much activity there in the last few years.
I assume the mass of boulders is formed by the rejects from the quarrying that took place here in the early 1900s. These pink granite rocks are from 500 million to one billion years old. So its always fun scanning them for the droppings from the quicksilver otters. I’ve never seen an otter scat here. When I got close to them along this shore they either disappeared into the rock jumble or slipped into the water where there are innumerable cave-like area where they can peek at me.
It was easy to see that some of the scats were old, which in the context of this year's drought, means they could be a couple weeks old. But I saw one area where all the scats looked fresh.
Now I have to get out here at dawn and try to see the otters. In an effort to get closer to the scat, I got hung up on some rocks, thanks to the increasing waves supplemented by the wakes from the motor boaters who prize speed above all else as they enjoy the Thousand Islands. I tried shifting my weight around the boat and pushing off with the oars, but I could get off by getting into the water with a little lift here, a little push there. It felt good being so nautical again. My days of getting myself in trouble on the river are long over.
August 31 as another threat of rain passed us by, I wrestled with the white oak that I have been cutting and splitting for firewood. If I was 15 years old and about to try out for my high school wrestling team, I would say that I got a valuable workout, but I am almost 65 and exhausted myself using three old hand saws of varying sizes, a maul, an axe and two wedges to prepare a 8 foot section of a white oak trunk about 2 feet in diameter. It took about 2 hours and the labor was, like wrestling, as much mental as physical. I am more restrained now than I was a couple of years ago when I found myself rolling on the ground as I tried to grapple with a thick section of ash trunk in a little swail. By rule now I won’t get on all fours with a tree I cut down. I’ve been working on this oak for 4 days and so far I’ve found enough good angles and strength to keep making progress. Today I was side tracked by an ill conceived cut I made months ago when I first cut down the tree in the spring. And at one point I had a saw and two wedges stuck. White oak is the toughest wood to wrestle with, what ease there is in splitting relative to ironwood, is made up for by the heavy weight of the wood. I can see the wisdom of not cutting white oak at all but simply declaring it a god and dancing around it. Anyway, in my mind I won the wrestling match. That old oak might have another opinion. When I scouted out the oak in the early summer, I was entertained by butterflies, dragonflies and blossoms. Today I felt like I was alone surrounded by wilting plants desperate for rain. When I started banging the wedges with the maul, however, a bumble bee flew over to object. They don’t like that banging.
Since as we finish dinner now night's almost upon us, I went down to the Deep Pond at 6:30, a little more than an hour before sunset. As I came in from the road, a doe and her fawn leaped away from the southwest corner of the pond through the tall Joe Pye weeds below the knoll. I failed to get a camera on them but I walked over to take a photo of the corner of the pond they had just been foraging.
I expected to see that the deer pulled out some fan grass by its roots. I didn’t see any fan grass pulled out there. Then I looked to the left over in the pond and I saw a beaver placidly swimming in the middle of it. I retreated to my chair and started taking photos and videos.
The beaver did not react to me and I soon saw why. There was another beaver in the pond.
The two beavers swam closer to each other
And then even closer.
One looked to be on the tail of the other.
Then the one in front shook its head and the fur of its neck stuck up in a ruff.
So that is probably the beaver that came to the pond this spring. I frequently saw it shake up the fur around its neck, and I’ve never seen another beaver do that. Then the chase, if that’s what is was, seemed to flag. There was more separation between the beavers and they slowed down as they approached a bank burrow which seems to have been garnished with some protective vegetation.
The beaver with the ruff lingered by that burrow entrance while the other beaver swam over to the northeast shore of the pond.
The beaver slowed and I thought it might climb on the bank, but instead it dove toward the bank burrow over there which I thought only muskrats were using.
Meanwhile, the other beaver was no longer in the pond and I presume that it dove into the burrow that it had been facing. The beaver that dove toward the muskrat burrow was soon out in the pond again so it probably didn’t go into the burrow.
The beaver looked like it was trying to figure out what to do. Soon enough it started swimming toward the knoll, and as it got well over half way across the pond toward me, it seemed to smell me and made an abrupt turn.
It swam about as fast as a beaver can swim back to the other side of the pond.
It swam over to the burrow where I think the other beaver had gone into.
But it didn’t dive into it. It swam slowly toward the muskrat burrow but turned and looked back to the middle of the pond.
It was time for me to go back for dinner, and I had seen enough for the moment. I had not seen two beavers in the pond together since July 1. I saw one beaver in the middle of July and the beginning of August. I also continued to see a few beaver signs but certainly not what I would think two beavers would leave. At one point at the end of July, I was sure there were no beavers in the pond, then one appeared. Throughout August I noticed more and more pond vegetation had been eaten, but since there were still muskrats in the pond, I couldn’t be sure a beaver had done it. Anyway, four things could have happened this summer: both beavers have been lurking in the pond and now that fall approaches they are more active again; or, both beaver left the pond, one kept coming back periodically, and now they are both back; or, the beaver that was here last year left leaving the beaver that came in the spring, and now the beaver that left came back; or, a new beaver has come. That the beaver without the ruff didn’t slap its tail when it sensed me argues that is the beaver that was here last year who became so familiar with me. But earlier this year the beavers shared the same burrow. Why not now? As I walked away, I saw that purple asters were starting to bloom.
As I walked up the road, I also bumped into the deer I scared away from the pond. They retreated down the path they came up,
which was not a trail I’ve ever cut or tried to maintain.
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