Yesterday I couldn't quite get a photo showing the whole pond. You can see the water behind the slight mud embankment to the right. That widest pool of open water in the bottom right hand corner of the pond is a lazy spring. One winter I first saw beaver poop when the beavers wintering in the small pond, a feat which amazed me at the time but which the beavers repeated for several more winter, squeezed out from under the ice and relieved themselves. The beavers' lodge is in the thicket in the middle of the pond. The thicket is formed by buttonbushes which leaf relatively late and keep no leaves during the winter. I first thought beavers moved to the pond to feast on the buttonbushes, but they've eaten nary a one. There are two canals going off to the left that aren't in the photo. On September 11, 2006, I got a nice little video showing how the beavers use the canal curling up northeast of the pond proper.
My hope in arranging my journals as a blog is that my experiences then become an easy click away. You can read my September 2006 activities when I took this video at "Journal 2006 part two" and as I write it is easier for me to access photos illustrating what I am thinking now. This system is not complete since all my history of Thicket Pond is not confined to the month of September. I plan to expand this blog to include August and July. I've already committed to sharing the other months of my journals in three other blogs Bob's Fall Journal, Bob's Winter Journal and Bob's Spring Journal. Time can't be flattered too much in wildlife studies, and I think we humans are too prone to obsess on the structural, sequential ecology of it all, and forget the stubborn eternity of each day locked in a particular moment in the earth's course around the sun.
That last line is pure bragadocio. I have a lot work to do to pretend to capture the eternity of a September day. I have hours of video yet to be edited and attached to the journal entries that inform them. For example, the secret to Thicket Pond which sits atop the watershed of two small creeks, is that the beavers did not dam water -- only that lazy spring was a constant source, they dredged out a pond around the buttonbushes whose thick leaves kept water from evaporating rapidly in the summer. Then they dredged canals to make it easier to get to the trees on the slopes coming down to the pond. Baby beavers usually have a goofy first summer, nosing into this and that, haphazardly trying to imitate adults. Not in Thicket Pond. On September 11, 2006, I also got video of a baby beaver dredging mud out of the canal. Dam can't do the work; all hands below, and dig!
This blog entry won't be my last word on Thicket Pond. At first I thought it a quirk of beaver development by a family that didn't read the ecology texts about dams, pond expansion, tree clearing, move on and let a meadow thrive in the rich silt left behind. Most of the other families I watched in other ponds played by those rules. Now I understand that in Thicket Pond I've seen the essence of beavers and the key to their survival. They are rodents who can dig down and survive. I even think a large remnant population of beavers survived the fur trade by living as beavers did in Thicket Pond. Trappers keying on dams and ponds missed them. So, Conservation movement, don't keep congratulating yourself on re-introducing beavers everywhere. But much more or that later, maybe even a book.
The drought in 1999, I thought, would drive beavers out of Thicket Pond for good. The drought came after the first winter I saw them there. I wanted to get a video of the dry channels under the buttonbushes. I assumed they had survived the winter by eating the buttonbush roots -- I saw no other constant source of food, and that soon the bushes would die off leading to meadow time. Of course that the bushes were still thriving during the drought somewhat checked that theory. The colony had moved logically up a series of ponds: the rather large Shortcut Trail Pond, now a meadow, and intricate series of canals I call Meander Pond, still viable as one beaver proved this winter, and marvelous Thicket Pond. I assumed their one winter there would convince them that they had reached the end of that line of ponds. So the video below is my take on their mean existence there.
I really had the wrong attitude, like I was reading a superfluous little bagatelle instead of the Ur-text of beavers. My journal entry is just as uninformative and reveals I was distracted by fawns rather than on my knees worshiping the mud the beavers dredged:
"I took my tour of the Thicket Pond. Even without water, it remained impassable. Perhaps Ottoleo could crawl through. Button bushes all over turning color from green to orange. Some of the channels were still moist but no water. I flushed a deer from in there and also two fawns on the little ridge above it. I went to the lodge and got my best pictures there. A huge opening under the lodge facing into the pond. I think there is actually a small pond area in the midst of it. I got a glimpse of it. Otherwise it is all channels carved between the roots of the bushes. A marvel."
Beavers wintered in this pond three more times. I blush to say I never really took that achievement seriously until the spring of 2006, when I realized that the matriarch and patriarch conceived kits during the winter.
I haven't give you any dimensions for this pond, and I won't. You can see in the photos that it is small, especially since the buttonbushes grow out of mounds of dirt. A beaver cannot navigate anywhere in the pond with making a turn after a ten yard swim. But watching a kit operate all alone -- I guess it had been relieved from dredging duties for that day, September 9, 2006, -- helped me realize what a perfect size this pond was for a young beaver.
Look at that old 1999 video again and imagine being a baby beaver swimming around in that comforting shade.
I plan to search old videos and notes to see if I can prove what I suspect, that the same pair of beavers lived here every winter, and for four years, the alternated between this odd pond and Meander Pond, which is a bigger spring fed dredging operation not relying much on dams. Then in 2007 the family moved on to a pond, where they dredged but also repaired and built up a dam. I think I saw them practicing for the move in Thicket Pond since they mudded up the embankment holding back the water much more than they had to, and even built a new lodge, then moved out next spring to what I call Shangri-la Pond just down the watershed to the east..
Last year I noticed one of the beavers in Shangri-la Pond had left, and then I noticed a beaver in the East Trail Pond dam down stream. Then that beaver left and I noticed a beaver in Meander Pond which is just down stream from Thicket Pond. That beaver spent the winter in that pond. This spring it was still there, back on March 24th, I got a very nice photo of the beaver's jet trail of mud as it swam out of its burrow in the bank.
Yesterday, I looked down at Meander Pond before I moved on to Thicket Pond and I didn't see any fresh signs of beaver activity around the pond. Then as I tried to get that perfect photo of Thicket Pond, moving closer to the pond, I saw that a beaver had half girdled the trunk of a swamp white oak.
And then down in the pond, on the route it would take from the lodge in the middle of the thickets to the oak it was girdling, there was a mark of mud and grass on a log in the pond
So on the day I went out to take what might be called an obituary photo for Thicket Pond, for ten years of tree cutting had depleted the food supply so much, a beaver showed me it was still alive as far as it was concerned. I'll soon see if that beaver moves into the pond for the summer, or whether, as I think, it is still doing its obligatory year's travel trying to establish another beaver family, before it can be accepted back in its old family still in Shangri-la Pond. But here I am counting out Thicket Pond again. Years ago there was a family there and one in Shangri-la Pond at the same time. Who knows maybe I'll see beavers in Thicket Pond this winter, ten years after I concluded beavers would never winter in this strange little pond again.
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