September 1 Of course after seeing two beavers in the pond yesterday at 6:30, I went down to the Deep Pond before dinner today. No beavers appeared, but I had a chance to study the far shore which has been riddled over the years with burrows dug into the high bank. In the photo below, the openings to the two burrows toward the left side of the photo are exposed. On the right side, a burrow lower in the bank is hidden by logs and stalks the beaver stacked there.
That’s the burrow one of the beaver’s went into yesterday.
I saw the beavers here using this burrow earlier this year, and there was a minimal effort to protect the entrance. The recent change in the pond has been a beaver’s paying attention to another burrow that I always thought only the muskrats used.
Early in the summer both of the beavers here then used a burrow in the southeast corner of the pond, piling quite a few sticks on the bank there probably because otters and perhaps coyotes had dug some holes down into the burrow.
When there was a family of 5 or 6 beavers in the First and Teepee Ponds, which even when combined were much smaller than the deep pond, the beavers used as many as 4 burrows of which two were protected by logs. But there are only two beavers in the Deep Pond and their shifting from burrow to burrow confuses me, and I think it is evidence that the beaver that came here last year has left and another beaver has moved in.
September 2 today I made a point of walking around the Deep Pond and for the first time in several weeks had many beaver signs to try to interpret. There seem to be two active burrows being used by beavers along the east shore. On the lower north end there was mud up on the bank, sticks lining the bank down to the water and more sticks with leaves in the water.
There has been a brown trail, because the bottom has been stripped of vegetation by browsing, all summer, but this is the first time I’ve seen stripped sticks like this floating in the water in near the burrow.
There was a freshly cut sapling over the entrance to the burrow. I think it is a nannyberry, which beavers don’t much like to eat, so it might be for concealment rather than food. Before this cut, the beavers here had only cut honeysuckle and juniper branches, not usual sources of food either.
The beavers here this summer have survived by eating the pond vegetation, pond weed and milfoil. The angle of the late afternoon sunlight was perfect to show how much vegetation they have gobbed. Virtually all the clear areas below had vegetation a few months ago.
I took another photo showing the how clear the pond was looking toward the knoll, and because there were striking clouds reflected in the clear brown water.
I should add that the pond has never been completely filled with vegetation. The man-made pond is deepest just off the high east shore. The power shovel took dirt out from the slope as it dug down to water. During the process it hit a spring which was covered over until the digging was finished. Then dynamite reopened the spring and the hole filled up with water. That was over 25 years ago. When I first swam in the pond at the end of the summer of 1998, it was struggle to get through some 10 feet of milfoil along the high shore. The shallower areas were choked with vegetation. Now the vegetation along the deeper shore has been eaten back and cleared in the shallow areas. At least that’s how it looks to me. The few times I’ve seen beavers in the pond this summer they were not munching that vegetation which looked like mostly milfoil. Last summer, I saw them eating pond weed and lily pads, mostly the later, as well as lily roots. But looking at the photo below, I can almost picture the beavers eating there.
Then I looked down at the other burrow that I saw a beaver use two nights ago. Here too the vegetation close to shore has been eaten and there are stripped sticks and leafy bows on shore and in the water. But there is not as much evidence of activity here as above the other burrow.
And while I don’t think any animal is going into the now exposed burrow that two beavers had used in the late spring and early summer, something seems to be browsing the vegetation there and sitting on the bank of mud beside the burrow.
Farther along the well exposed shore over toward the inlet, I saw mud scents mounds.
In one a beaver matted down cut fan grass stalks in with mud.
The largest scent mound had little sticks and other vegetation. Usually beavers keep adding to their scent mounds to make them higher. This one seems to have plops of mud added to make it wider.
The beaver that came this spring made a high scent mound on the knoll above the bank lodge. The beavers used to do most of their nibbling in this corner of the pond. Most of this summer I’ve seen no evidence of that. Now the lilies and other vegetation there looked liked they had been eaten.
The inlet, even though it is very shallow, also looks muddy suggesting that a beaver has been there.
Walking along this shore I saw some beautiful swamp milkweed pods.
Some small bur marigold plants are beginning to bloom.
I walked back around the pond down toward the dam and saw what looked like a trail beavers might have made with several fan grass stalks subdued and grasses matted down.
I guess deer could have done that too. But a deer would not have nipped a nannyberry sapling farther off from the pond. No doubt the same one I saw over the burrow I saw a beaver use yesterday.
I took a close-up of the nannyberry leaves which was a good thing to do because checking the books I discovered that the "nannyberry" is actually arrowwood.
I got back down to the pond a little after 7pm and as I walked in, I saw a beaver swimming from the northeast shore toward the middle of the pond. It circled around and seemed to be jawing the surface of the pond.
When I see this in the late spring, I say the beaver is eating the tree pollen floating on the surface of the pond. So is it eating ragweed pollen now? Then it swam almost all the way across the pond, toward the bank lodge below the knoll.
It didn’t dive into the lodge but slowed down as if it were going to go up on shore where there seems to be a start of a possible scent mound, but then it turned around and swam back to the middle of the pond.
I thought it might have smelled me but instead of going back into one of the burrows along the east shore, it swam over to the inlet creek,
And began eating the vegetation crowded where the inlet meets the pond.
All the while I kept glancing away to see if the other beaver appeared in the pond. So I missed seeing the beaver I had been watching swim back in the pond. It swam slowly along the high bank but didn’t pay any special attention to the other burrows I’ve seen beavers use, nor did it seem to eat anything else in the pond though it swam by stalks floating in the water. Perhaps it was gobbing something floating in the water. Then a muskrat swam out from the dam into the pond almost in front of me.
The beaver swam over in that direction. The muskrat looked wary of it but the beaver didn’t bother it and swam over toward the knoll.
Then the beaver swam back over to the inlet and once again waded into the vegetation there, this time eating some stalks on the shore.
I headed back up the hill to my dinner.
September 5 I took my friend Doug on a hike to check on the beavers at the East Trail Pond. Walking along the South Bay trail, I saw a white spider under some blooming asters.
Was it camouflaged as a flower to catch pollinating insects? We had between an inch or two of rain two nights ago, and I expected to see more water in the East Trail Pond, but as we walked down to the south shore of the pond, the pond looked shallower than the last time I saw it and I didn’t get any sense that beavers or muskrats had been swimming in the south side of the pond.
Nor did there appear to have been much activity behind the dam where presumably the water level was a bit higher.
Then we walked quietly around the west end of the pond along the trail and then up on the ridge where we could study that end of the pond. Here too there were no signs, like muddy water or freshly cut trees, of recent beaver activity.
A tree, maple I think, whose trunk the beavers had been cutting that blew down over a week ago still hasn’t been trimmed by the beavers.
So we sat on the rocks overlooking the pond and waited for a beaver to appear.
While waiting I heard a large limb or small tree fall, but didn’t see or hear any beaver scampering away from it. Looking over in that direction, I saw that there had been more gnawing on a large maple by the shore. That tree had been tasted the last time I was here, a week ago.
So we moved quietly along the north shore for a close inspection of the beaver gnawing.
Judging from the color of the wood and the chips strewn about it looked like a beaver had been there the night before. I also saw the chips left when beavers cut up a smaller sugar maple that fell along this shore two weeks ago. The beavers have trimmed, segmented and stripped most of the tree.
Meanwhile my friend Doug was higher on the ridge and spotted a beaver out in the pond and pointed. I got a glimpse of it just as it dove and swam away under water.
So beavers are still here. I think the mother had kits this year but I can’t say that there has been a lot activity suggesting that there are more mouths to feed. A tree closer to the dam that they cut down a few weeks ago still has plenty of branches.
But I saw that a few of them had been cut off and hauled away.
Then as we walked back along the ridge, I saw that the beavers had made a new lodge much closer to the north shore.
It is much smaller than their old lodge and perhaps, for the moment, it serves the function of allowing the mother to get away from her kits.
September 6 While the heavy rain we had didn’t seem to add much water to the East Trail Pond on Wellesley Island, it did fill out the First Pond, though it hardly began to fill it up.
The Teepee Pond is twice as big, too, but still shallow.
The rain is probably too late in the season to give the woods and fields a pulse of new green, but I am finding the dry conditions have left some plants looking rather striking, like a false Solomon’s seal below.
I toured the lower ponds after lunch. Leslie was here yesterday and not only saw water back in the Third Pond. She also saw a muskrat in the pond. Today the pond looked like a big puddle hardly suitable for a muskrat. I wonder where the muskrat had been staying so that it could come here to check it out, probably the Deep Pond.
I headed down to the Deep Pond and saw that the beaver pushed up mud and grass stalks over the burrow that I saw one beaver use.
I can’t be sure if the beaver is merely marking its territory or bulking up the roof of its burrow. Of course, it could be doing both.
The bank here is relatively low and this burrow is probably only serviceable for a beaver because the water in the pond is relatively low. Judging from the grass stalks and other nibbled things in the water near the burrow entrance, a beaver finds the area comfortable. I think the water is too deep there for the beaver to haunch up on the pond bottom like they do on the opposite side of the pond where the inlet creek comes in. So the main attraction is a burrow entrance that is still concealed by the water.
But it looks like the beavers are eating their way to the shore everywhere with an assist I suppose from the muskrats.
The beavers alone are responsible for a patch of flattened grass along the shore. Over the years, especially when the water level in the pond is low, beavers have sat up on the bank concealed by bushes or high grass above them or they sat in the cave-like entrance to a very high burrow.
When I last saw the two beavers out in the pond together they seemed to be vying with each other giving me the impression that they were competing for the pond. That is a dangerous impression because I give each new wrinkle I see along the shore strategic significance. However when I last saw a beaver here, just one, it oriented its activity on the low shore from the inlet down to the knoll. Looking over there today, I can’t see any strategic wrinkles.
If there is a battle on the shorelines to raise mounds of mud and vegetation to claim possession of the pond, there has been no response on or around the other burrow that I saw a beaver use. Of the few branches piled on top of the entrance there only a few small ones have green leaves.
Judging from the muddy water and cut stalks floating in the water, a beaver has been foraging near the burrow I think the two beavers abandoned a while ago
As I continued around the pond, I saw that there was some change along the shore toward the bank lodge below the knoll, a scent mound in the making on the low shore just east of the lodge.
Of course, I am probably reading too much into every change I see around the pond. But why not? Indeed, I can even look at the pond now almost clear of vegetation and think that proves that there must be kits in the burrows coming out in the night when I can't see them and eating the pond vegetation.
Although it was two in the afternoon and no beaver was likely to come out into the pond, I sat in chair I have on the high southeast bank of the pond sufficiently set back so as not to scare any swimmers. I saw what I thought was a fish leaping up out of the pond, a common occurrence at this time of year. But the supposed fish kept moving forward in the air. It soon fell back to the pond and I saw that it was snake that had leaped up and that now was slithering on the surface of the water moving rapidly toward the south shore. Never seen that before.
September 7 I got the chance to check the beaver ponds on our land that had dried up. I found that the heavy rain we had a few days ago did put water back in the Last Pool canal.
However, very little water backed up in the Last Pool itself, though I didn’t wade out into the dry grass to see how soggy the bottom might be.
This dry summer could not be expected to add much green to the flats that once were the pond bottom, and it didn’t.
But the meadow that was the upper reaches of Boundary Pond shows how a drought can dull the late blooming flowers. Here is how it looked last September 8
And here’s how it looks this year.
The yellow bur marigold blooms seem to measure the moisture in the soil and this year they are huddled around the pools of water at the lower end of the pond that were the last to dry out this summer.
Standing behind the dam and looking over at the deeper pools along the east shore, which now had water back in them, the area looked lush green and yellow.
Just enough water lapped behind the patch job I did on the low hole through the dam, so I could claim some credit for the water that backed up to the lodge.
The blooming bur marigolds also concealed the extent of the flooding. I was careful to assume that they did not necessarily mark dry land and I managed to keep my feet dry.
The pink Virginia smartweed which grows in shallow water also added to the color, but there was not that much.
Despite the drought some or the larger plants grew quite well, appreciating all those added hours of sunshine. Some the swamp milkweed stalks were so thick the plant looked like a tree sapling.
The white snakeroot usually thrives in the shade but here along the sun drenched west shore of the pond there were some boisterous clumps of it.
From 2007 through 2010 when I came down to this pond in the fall, I was usually respectfully high on the ridge so as not to disturb the beavers below. I took a photo today which somewhat celebrates their memory. The absence of water reveals more of the glory of their lodge.
Here’s how it looked on September 9, 2010, when it was pregnant with beavers.
I set off on my path up and over three ridges and down to the Deep Pond, but before I reached the woods of the Hemlock Cathedral I saw a bumblebee worshipping the goldenrods.
I got down to the Deep Pond at about 6:15 and I thought that was as good a time as any for one of the beavers to be out. As I sat in my chair in back of the high east bank of the pond, I heard something move into the water below, and saw a sphere of ripples commensurate with a beaver’s heft, or a snapping turtle's. I hoped to see something swim out into the pond, but only heard a green frog yelp. Was that because a beaver heading to the nearby burrow swam too close to it? When I finally saw something swimming in the pond it was a snake, which is quite a pleasure to watch as it makes its dual pattern of ripples caused by both its head and tail weaving through the water.
I sat for just over a half hour. Dinner called, so I walked around for a few more photos of beaver signs along the pond shore, being careful on the way not to disturb a leopard frog that seemed to have its camouflage just right.
As I could see when I was sitting on the chair, a beaver had cut and hauled honeysuckle branches over to cover the top of the burrow, not the entrance.
There is also a new grass stalk up on the bank, from the other side of the pond I thought it might be a stripped log.
The beavers did a similar thing when they were in the burrow on the other side of the pond, lining honeysuckle and other leafy branches up on the sloping ground above the burrow. However that burrow has been dug into by coyotes over the years. While the new branches are honeysuckle, there is still an arrowwood sapling there too. The nearest arrowwoods are down by the dam so I went down and probably found the spot where it was cut.
There is bit patch of arrowwoods here but the beavers are not cutting them with any gusto. In the thickest clump I saw two little nips.
But out in the pond it looks like most of the vegetation just behind the dam has been eaten.
Of course, as always, I have to remember the foraging of the muskrats too, until the beavers start eating bark as much as beavers usually do, I assume the beavers are doing most of this.
September 8 we spent our last night at our land, at least for the next several months, and I didn’t miss the pleasure of sitting by the Deep Pond in the morning. Earlier in the summer, I sometimes saw muskrats in the morning. But today I was startled to see a beaver, swimming rapidly toward the burrow on the north shore of the pond.
Because the two beavers now in the pond seemed contentious when I saw them together, I thought that suggested there was a new beaver there and the one I watched last summer and fall and earlier this year had left. There is evidence that it is the same beaver: it looks the same and fancies eating the pond vegetation rather than finding bark to eat. And once the beaver got used to me last summer, it stopped slapping its tail at me. This morning the beaver slapped its tail.
That its head also made a splash as the beaver slammed it down for its dive showed what high dudgeon it was in, and it didn’t come back to the surface. I presume it went straight to its burrow. I went to my chair beside the pond and waited for a half hour and it didn’t show itself again. This doesn’t prove that I am not seeing the same old beaver. Last year, I never surprised it in the morning. From my seat low along the west shore of the pond, I took photos of beaver developments. I was relatively close to the knoll and had a good view of what looks like scent mound just east of the bank lodge below the knoll.
From my chair I had a perfect angle to show the honeysuckle branches on the slope on top of the burrow on the north bank.
I completed my tour to check on what the heavy rain did to our land by going up to the turtle bog. It usually goes dry in the summer and then fills back up in time for the Blanding‘s turtles to hibernate there. And I found most of the turtles’ home covered with water, but I doubt it is deep enough yet.
As I walked along the trail south of the turtle bog, I found a large area where all the juniper looked dead.
We have a lot of juniper on this ridge and having some of it die wouldn’t break my heart. If we weren’t leaving soon, and hence busy cutting firewood for when we do return, I might cut this juniper to guard against its reviving.
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