August 23 cloudy morning, cooler but still humid. I walked around the Deep Pond to see if I could see any signs of beaver activity. The boughs I left at the dam were still untouched, and my offering have never been ignored this long. So, has the beaver left? There were no new or freshened trails into the vegetation off the pond. I took the old paths with profit. This is really not the time to track animals through thick vegetation, it’s time to enjoy the yellow flowers. The sneeze weed and goldenrod rules.
Save where some modest white flowers were stretching up just along the water’s edge.
One would expect plants virtually in the water to have bigger, bolder flowers, but only the lily meets that expectation. These flowers were more like buttons than blooms.
I checked for the jack-in-the-pulpit seeds and at last they are turning red, and the stalk remains formidable though it is almost weighted to the ground.
I saw some prints in the mud and decided they were from raccoons. Last night a coyote or two came very close to our house, yodeling, yapping and then barking like a dog, but no sign that they walked around the beaver pond. I went over the knoll and then down on the lodge. I noticed a recently cut honeysuckle on the lodge, half of its leaves still green. I saw other green leaves but they were on plants growing through the gaps in the logs that form the lodge.
I stuck my camera in the gaps to get a view of the inside of the lodge and I got two interesting photos. One shows the lodge as pavilion like with the water easily accessible and the logs offering no more than shade, little protection.
The other shows how this pavilion forms off a large rock and then there is a entrance below the rock to what looks like a cozier and more protective section of the lodge.
Boulders are the hidden design element in many lodges. They are the one thing beavers can’t engineer. I continued around the shore and found that I was following a deer trail. I could attribute all the compressed vegetation to their tramping about. The inlet creek did look a bit muddy, but that might have been from the small fish darting up and down it. I need to bring a net down and try to see what kind of fish these are. But the deer sway has not been so big that I did not find myself standing shoulder to shoulder with cattails, joe pye weeds and now boneset
I didn’t see any beaver signs along the sloping shore. However down behind the east end of the dam I saw two of the fan shaped grasses pulled out by the roots.
Perhaps deer did that, or muskrats. Standing on the dam, I took a photo of the lodge on the opposite shore of the pond.
I need to be able to gauge if a beaver cuts and adds more leafy stalks to the lodge, mostly honeysuckle of which there is plenty around.
Back on the island, after a nice rain shower, lasting about two hours, I kayaked over to South bay. The clouds did not allow for the best conditions to spot bryozoa since I could not see that well into the water, and I didn’t see any. But I did see fresh beaver work. A beaver is spending much time gnawing the secluded section of the willow on the north shore of the south cove. I’ll have to walk around to it and take some photos. As I paddled up to it, a muskrat swam by pulling a two foot long flowering stalk. It didn’t take it into the old beaver lodge there, but into the nearby cattails. Then along the north shore of the north cove I saw several cut alders in the water. I tugged at one and found it quite long and weighty, say 12 feet long. The alders are cut and in the water, but I don’t see any stripping or trimming. It is like a beaver is planning ahead, storing food in the water for now. The beavers are cutting alders back in the cove, and I was ready to assume they were doing all their eating back there, then I saw one of the willows well up the north shore freshly gnawed by a beaver. I seem to concoct more theories in the kayak than I do when walking. I saw a couple of cut and gnawed cattail rhizomes floating toward the end of the cove and I wondered if the beavers uprooted the cattails that had floated into the bay this year. So I paddled over to a likely clump and was surprised to see the cattails were not flotsam after all, but well rooted to the rocky soil just off shore. Osprey were all about and since they crisscross the bay so much it is hard to get a count. I saw one skim the surface and it did seem to get anything; then it flew over me and I saw it had snagged a large shiner, probably discarded half dead bait floating on the surface of the water.
August 24 while sawing an ash log the peeling bark revealed an escaping millipede and what appeared to be a nest of babies, as well as the shell of another bug.
Three of the baby millipede moved off from the mass on their own.
Nothing quite so rude as peeling bark but the logs must be sawed, split, dried and burned. No shortage of millipedes this year. Ottoleo says he saw one that was five inches long. On the island I took a brief hike only to the willow latrine out on the north shore of the south cove of South Bay. On my kayak trips, when I don’t carry a camera, I’ve reported seeing where beavers have gnawed on the willow, and I saw a muskrat carrying a flowering stalk into the cattails next to beaver lodge there. So I took a photo of where the muskrat went.
Not sure why it doesn’t use the beaver lodge. I don’t think any beavers are sleeping there, not that that necessarily keeps muskrats away. Of course the muskrat might have a tunnel entrance to the lodge out in the marsh. Then I climbed over the huge hub of the willow trunk from which several large trunks grow out. The beavers are working on a branch closest to the mossy bank.
They cut the branch near a trunk, where they could conveniently stand on the mossy shore. They’ve also gnawed off the bank on that trunk and the next trunks out over the water.
Then while in the shallow water they almost cut the branch. Willow must be easy for them to gnaw into and a pleasure. Generally the willow keeps growing and survives the annual pruning by the beavers, though of late the beavers seem to be getting the upper hand. A few of the smaller willows along the shores of the bay have been quite done in.
I say “beavers” did this, when, of course, it might only be one beaver doing it. Between the end of the high boating season and the beginning of duck hunting, September, I might be able to stay out at sunset or get out at dawn and see what’s what. There were no signs that otters had used their latrine. Pity. It had a nice smell of mint. One year their fishy scat odor vied with the mint odor over on south shore of the north cove. I turned and took a photo of how secluded this beaver dining area is.
Most of the shore of South Bay is quite open.
August 25 as the summer ripens, I am more or less outside all day, but people crowd in and I find that I have an hour or two at most for the ponds and woods that I have to myself. I went to check the Last Pool and Boundary Pond at 4pm and planned to walk around and chronicle recent work and then sit in my chair on the ridge above the lodge wishing I could have been there when the beavers were out. But this small beaver world, probably not quite 100 yards long and no more than 30 yards wide, is so beautiful, so perfect with its now brown deep channel through the fertile woods, that the animals who made it can’t resist it, can’t seem to sleep during these days of its perfection when shade still abounds and the dredged channels reach so many possible meals. So after I fattened my file of photos of the beavers’ gnawing on the poplar crown in the Last Pool, I had to blink twice at what I first took as a log perfectly shaped like a beaver floating in the water where the pond widens below the old log dam long ago flooded over. Then the log raised its nose and I knew it was a beaver. I thought it was a kit and counted on its inexperience to lock it into my view long enough to get the camcorder out. Then I saw another animal munching in the frog bit, another kit, but not a beaver. No beaver could chew so fast. Then the beaver swam toward the muskrat, and, at the same time I saw two small wood ducks swimming toward the channel from down pond. Then the muskrat kit swam after them. Something splashed, the muskrat I think… I feared it was suddenly Wind in the Willows time with the young of the swamp animals conspiring to live their own story. But the beaver dove and the muskrat ignored it, as the ducks swam down the channel apparently unruffled. I expected the beaver to swim down the channel too, perhaps swimming under water most of the way, but instead it seemed to duck up stream. I took that as more kittish inexperience, but then a few minutes later, a beaver swam before me heading down the channel pulling a rather long elm branch, a feat no kit was capable of at this time of year. Then a few minutes after that I saw the muddy water break as another beaver brought down a smaller elm branch, which I don’t think a kit could do. This did not jibe with the story I’ve been telling myself about this beaver family. I got the feeling that two young beavers had left, leaving mother and father and three kits behind, and that father lazily eyed the kits and did the dredging while mother tended to come out late sometimes taking the runt with her to find food. Perhaps the beaver I mistook for a kit, is the yearling. I could guess why mother or father would be out so early. The elm they had been cutting just off the Last Pool channel probably came down. However, I thought the time for ferrying food to the lodge for the kits had passed and it was not yet time to start caching food for the winter. I hoped beavers would swim back up to cut more elm branches. Anyway, I stayed put because I still had a muskrat to watch. Unfortunately while I could see them and get some video, it wasn’t large enough to register in the photo I took of the scene from where I leaned on a hemlock trunk.
The muskrat story became more interesting when I saw another muskrat also motor munching the frog bit, but it seemed bigger. So as I waited for beavers to swim back, I tried to determine if I was seeing two muskrat kits or one and an adult. The one I saw first, that chased the duck, was definitely a kit, hardly making an impression of the frog bit as it waddled over it. Muskrat kits are prone to be skittish, fleeing when a bird flies over head, and their skittishness is infectious. Once, and only once, I saw five kits together and I have never seen such slapstick since as they fell over themselves trying to get back to the den after a duck quacked. But when the two muskrats I was watching did get close together, the kit seemed sober beyond its days. While there was no feint for parental affection, like a beaver kit would be prone to do, there definitely was no skittish byplay. No beaver swam back up and I continued my walk around the pond. I didn’t see any new beaver work. I did see a new flower, bur marigold?
As I walked below the dam, I saw a muskrat swim into the lodge. Not sure if it was the kit or the adult. The two wood ducks were swimming near the lodge too, still unruffled by the muskrats or me. Then I got up to elm they cut near the Last Pool channel. The beavers have not cut many branches yet, the crown looked full. They seemed so eager to get to work on this, perhaps it will be stripped in a few days.
Meanwhile, I was still hoping to see a beaver kit tucked under the poplar crown, but no. Indeed, as the photos I took show, the twigs and leaves have mostly been eaten. I saw where the mother beaver, I think, had gnawed on the trunk.
And walking out on the trunk, I saw where a beaver stood on the little island next to the crown and all but cut the one remaining branch.
A beaver has an interesting romance with a large tree. It begins girdling thick back and gnawing through the maximum circumference of the tree, the base of the trunk, and then after the tree falls it has many days to relish leaves, twigs and transportable branches. Now these beavers are back to gnawing into thick bark of the lower trunk.
Not surprisingly beavers often leave trunks unstripped, especially poplars where the contrast between the delicious twigs and the thick old bark must be great.
August 26 I had time to hike down to the Boundary Pond and sit where I saw the muskrats, beavers, and wood ducks the other day. Walking down the meadow above the Last Pool, I saw the dead leaves of a fallen birch leaning into a lush green maple tree.
I looked at the trunk and saw some beaver work I might have missed. The tree was cut a few months ago.
However, the trail to it seemed well used, especially as it neared the Last Pool. I’ve been lazy, making much of the beavers clearing the prickly ash around the poplars but not following the wide trail further into the bushy woods.
Then I went down and leaned on the small hemlock tree gazing at the portion of Boundary Pond that was so active at about the same time the other day, just before 4pm. I didn’t think there was anything there. Then one of the wood duckling paddled up nipping at the surface, probably catching bugs. That helped me narrow my focus and think small, then I saw a muskrat nibbling furiously in the frog bit on the other side of the pond. Unfortunately I didn’t see the other muskrat so I can’t be sure if this was the kit or the adult. It also didn’t move much. The wood duck swam with 10 yards of the muskrat but neither seemed to notice the other. Then a beaver swimming up the channel swam before me, looking a bit large. The wind was in my face, but the beaver still noticed me. Then a smaller beaver swam up before me, a kit. It also stopped and nosed in my direction. The larger beaver swam down to the kit and bucked its body making a splash, though not a tail splash, as it sank the in the water. The kit dove in fright and I never saw it again. It appeared that the adult beaver swam up the channel which encouraged me to think that it would go about its business, then it swam back into the pool in front of me, gave me some hard looks, and swam down the channel underwater until it surfaced about 20 yards away. I didn’t follow, but waited the ten minutes or so I’ve often found beavers take to turn the page, so to speak, but no beaver came back to check on me again. The muskrat continued its lonely feasting. The wood duck balled up in fuzzy sleep. I crossed up channel and checked the elm the beavers just cut and only one branch remained in the crown.
Then I was back in the meadow, richer in blooms than I have ever seen it. I saw a dragonfly rooted to come golden rod, took its photo but didn’t nudge it to see if it was dead or just in ecstasy.
Next I stumbled onto the first purple aster of the season surrounded by buds ready to bloom.
It will be a colorful fall.
August 27 Still no signs of beavers at the Deep Pond, so it behooved me to check White Swamp to see if beavers had moved down there. I flushed several wood ducks and saw several herons flying out over the pond. One landed in an open pool, then another landed and the first heron flew off and relocated. Despite the better than normal rainfall this summer the huge swamp looked a little low
Perhaps the plants are just higher. The swamp is too large for me to encompass, so I can only wonder if beavers aren‘t maintaining the dam the keeps water in. I think there’s been too much trapping here. On the mound by the shore I did see some wet greens more like what a muskrat might leave. Then I walked up and along the ridge to check the area where beavers dammed up the inlet creek and created a pond, about three years ago. There was no signs of beaver activity.
Where the muddy brown should be was all rich green vegetation.
August 28 I had a chance to tour the beaver ponds on the island and I headed over on Antler Trail, along the South Bay trail, up the East Trail and then angled through the woods to Meander Pond. It was early in the afternoon so I didn’t expect to see a beaver out. I checked all the trees they cut in the woods south of the pond. One big maple that they cut and that had been leaning finally fell down, thanks I think to wind and gravity.
I walked up into the crown, now all dead leaves, and didn’t see one branch cut by a beaver.
I think they have abandoned this area for now. Feeding the beaver on our land, I get the impression that beavers don’t relish the taste of maple leaves in the summer, so perhaps all of this cutting is being left for the fall. It always crosses my mind that the beavers have left, so I hurried over to the channel nearer the lodge that they had dredged earlier in the summer, and I found that it is still muddy.
They cleared away a bit more alder but not much.
I think these beavers life primarily on the vegetation growing in the channels of the pond. I walked around to the dam but can’t say that I saw signs of recent beaver activity until I got up to the rock cliff north of the pond where just above the split of cut maple trunks
The beavers cut a small choke cherry tree.
But didn’t seem to dine on it. I didn’t see any beaver work as I walked down and up to the lodge. I thought the pond must be lower so I could get closer to the lodge, and I did, but my feet soon got wet
That’s another indication of how much vegetation is convenient to the foraging beavers. The channels of the pond may be three feet wide but the water soaks a nine to twelve swath of grasses. Looking back up on shore I thought I saw a blooming fern, but it was a flowering vine with strange violet flowers.
I noticed this vine last summer along the north shore of South Bay. I walked up along the north shore of Thicket Pond and saw no signs of activity. If there are four adult beavers in Meander Pond then the Thicket Pond beaver joined them. If not, I don’t yet no where it went, perhaps the ends of the South Bay coves. I took some photos of the new Shangri-la Pond meadow. The channel in the west end looks like mud with no water
But there are pools in front of the lodge showing where the beavers dredged deeply to store their cache and maintain access to the long channels of the pond during the winter.
The north channel of the pond is now all soft green grasses
This fulfills the predictions of ecologists that beaver ponds turn into meadows after the beavers leave, but it bears noting that the beavers left under protest, as it were. They were on track for another winter and, in my opinion, had the survival skills to continue on after that. I crossed the East Trail Pond meadow which I haven’t done in a while. I saw one clump to yellow bur marigold but most of the meadow is a tangle of a weedy vine. Below the dam I made my annual check of the cardinal flower patches in the well shaded dry creek bed.
What a pleasure to see these seemingly delicate flowers survive.
As I walked up to the Second Swamp Pond dam, I flushed a deer who had bedded in the tall grasses browning with heavy seeds
Once on the old pond shore where the grasses didn’t have the muddy fuel to grow so high, the deer looked back a long while to see its tormentor. Then I turned and saw the pond where the grasses parted.
I tried to walk behind the dam, on the pond side, hoping the mud there had dried enough to support me -- not quite, so I had to arm my way through the cattail stalks and try to avoid the cutting grass. Looking back from the middle of the dam, it looked like the pond was large enough to be serviceable to more than just ducks.
I did see muddy water with nipped grass floating, probably muskrat work. I think deer prefer wading out and gobbing the thicker under water vegetation.
I went up to the Lost Swamp Pond and only saw one osprey, not that they are avoiding the beaver ponds. I forgot to mention that there was one perched over Meander Pond and there was a heron there as well. Plus there were enough ducks in the water behind Meander Pond dam to fly off in three waves. I didn’t see any new otter scats beside the Lost Swamp Pond dam. I saw no signs of beaver work as I walked around the west end of the pond, but at least one beaver is still there, judging by the just cut branch or sapling with green leaves in front of the bank lodge
I didn’t inch closer to see what bush they cut, probably honeysuckle for cooling shade, because I didn’t want to scare the beaver out of the lodge, as I’ve done before. The same flock of geese I saw last time was here, reminding me that the season for hunting geese opens in a few days, which often prompts many to come back to leave the river for the beaver ponds, though geese are not sought after much by “sportsmen” up here. From a distance the mossy cove otter latrine looked as scraped up as before, but on closer look I saw that an otter had recently come through
Leaving some strips of shiny black scats.
Certainly not the volume of scat they left in their last two visits, but scats are not a sure indicator of otter activity especially when I have access to only two latrines. The Lost Swamp Pond is the biggest pond I watch and I usually only walk around a tenth of its shore line. Walking away from the pond, I noticed I was walking through a clearing that had been thick with mayapples, amazing how completely they shrink away.
The Big Pond dam didn’t present as much difficulties as the Second Swamp Pond dam because deer had made a bit of a trail just below the dam. I saw a few tokens of beaver visits but I think the stalks cut close to the water was the work of muskrats
I was most excited by the emergence that vigorous flower that never quite blooms, pilewort.
I think it will be a good year for it. I finally got a chance to see how the strange brown poop at the south end of the dam dried out. I was right to suspect otter scat, with the brown washed away all that remained were crayfish shell bits and legs
Not the fare of skunks.
August 31 After a busy weekend I got a chance to get out on the river. I took Leslie and two of the people renting our place over to South Bay in the boat. Since I was in the boat I could take my camera. First I wanted a photo of the water lilies that have been so beautiful this summer.
And then as an added treat bryozoa, some rather large and rather ripe, not so much in the shallowest areas but up in the cove between the old otter latrine on the rock on the south shore of the north cove and the logs where the turtles often sit on the north shore.
We had a net in the boat and brought some large ones out, but they seemed rather used to begin with and the net peeled off a good bit of the colonial development leaving only the jelly to look at.
But they are still an impressive sight.
The hand touching the jelly belonged to an 11 year old girl. Yesterday morning we had a brief gale from the southwest which whipped up the waves. Since these bryozoa appeared so suddenly and yet are so large, perhaps they were brought in by the waves. But I suppose they can grow quickly when conditions are right, and the water in the bay was getting nicely warm. I didn’t notice any new beaver cuttings and couldn’t manage to get good photos of the old work. I took our new friends through the Narrows and there we saw green vegetation growing out of the osprey nest on the power pole above the west shore of the Narrows. A few years ago this nest caught fire, now it is growing shrubs.
I assumed the ospreys had abandoned the nest but as we motored along one flew into it and kept up some constant chirping.
Back at our land, I sat down at the Deep Pond dam. No hummingbird flew by but I did see a kingfisher, though just one, not the usual two I’ve been seeing,
And at last I got a good look at a muskrat as it swam from the knoll over to the dam.
It dove a good ways from the dam so I couldn’t see where it has its den. Given the amount of muskrat activity here last fall and in the spring, I expected a summer rich with their doings, but I bet I only saw one once in July and on the last day of the month saw one in August. Though no hummingbird appeared in the jewelweed on the dam, I had great fun trying to get photos of the other polinators visiting, bees and flies. I noticed a Japanese beetle and the same type of striped beetle I saw the other day. Out of twenty photos this is the only one in focus
though somewhat mysterious. Then I headed for the Last Pool and Boundary Pond. When I came down to my chair on the ridge above the lodge a little after 6pm, I saw that there had been more gnawing on the elm that could easily fall on my chair,
So I gave it some hard pushes to make sure it wasn’t timber time. I saw an adult beaver swimming up the channel. I lost track of it and then I saw an adult browsing quickly through the frog bit and then up on solid ground nipping stray blades of grass and leaves until it nosed up a sapling and with no further ado, cut it down. I found the sequence interesting. I have a tendency to lock beavers into purposeful activity such us cutting saplings or eating grasses. Now I saw that the beaver is easily distracted if it bumps into a nice sapling. The beaver didn’t have too much trouble tugging the sapling down and then a kit swam up to the newest treat in the pond, and hummed a bit which the adult seemed to ignore. The adult brought half of the sapling back into the lodge and the kit hurried back to the lodge to join in the general feast. In a few minutes a kit was back out and swam into the frog bit, and appearing out of nowhere, I saw an adult farther up the pond also browsing in the frog bit. I trained the camcorder on them trying to determine if they were eating the frog bit leaves or the duck weed so often floating between the vines of the frog bit. The beaver’s mouth danced so lightly over the greens that I could imagine sucking up the slight duck weed, but the frog bit leaves are not so large that they would have to chew them on the spot. Both could be swallowed whole. I also saw a muskrat swim by, but today, it ignored the frog bit. Tomorrow I’ll take a close look at where they were eating. One beaver at least knew I was around and gave me a long look
But as usual, now, there was no alarm taken or given. I walked along the ridge as I headed back to dinner and saw two beavers browsing in the frog bit. Then when I got to Last Pool channel, I saw a beaver, an adult, I think, dredging the channel. At least it kept diving and waving its tail in the air. I didn’t see it actually bring mud out until it got up around the crown. Then it dove and disappeared, leaving a kit gnawing on pieces of bark that it scooped out of the muddy water below the thick poplar trunk. I strained too much to get a photo
and it heard me and swam away from the poplar, but not from me. It turned and looked at me as I walked away.
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