Bob's Fall Journal

December 18 to 31, 2011

2012-02-12T17:51:00.000-08:00

December 18 back from Syracuse, I had a chance to take a quick tour of the beaver ponds. While we had been away the weather had been warm for the season, but on our return the temperature dropped well below freezing and we had a light snow. Since water is still flowing through the Big Pond dam there was open water right behind the dam.

There were no animals signs to be seen, but the snow had a frosty look about it. Plus a large patches of the ice had a frosty look that couldn’t quite conceal the stabbing crystals formed by water that must have frozen despite some perturbations from the wind.

I found that frosty ice easy to walk on. The clear ice was a bit unnerving as there were frequent fractures as I walked on it. I estimated that the thickness of the ice was at least three inches and thus should support me, but there were what looked like holes in the bottom of the ice sheet, which I have difficulty accounting for. Of course, I saw bubbles under the transparent ice but I couldn’t associate a trail of bubbles with what appeared to be holes under the ice.

Of course, I came out hoping to track otters or beavers but I wasn’t surprised at my enjoying what amounted to tracking ice. It is hard to describe the pleasure of letting the imagination loose over an extensive sheet of ice. It is likely that a muskrat did swim under the ice and I could get a sense of a line of bubbles, but they didn’t tell me a story.

I soon chickened out and headed for solid ground and found that areas where the frosty snow stood up as if on alert were safe to walk on.

If the pond was at its usual winter depth, a muskrat might be using burrows over along the north shore near the dam and in the dam itself, but I don’t think the water is deep enough for muskrats to comfortably use those burrows. Indeed, since I didn’t walk over much of the pond ice, I shouldn’t jump to a conclusion that a muskrat is here, let alone muskrats. As I looked down on the old bank lodge on the southwest shore of the Lost Swamp Pond, I saw a trail of bubbles under the ice

This is the second time I’ve seen bubbles under the ice here which makes a more convincing case for muskrats being here than at the Big Pond. I was able to walk on the pond ice. Once again the white ice seemed firmer. Then I saw a line of cut green grass. My first thought was that a muskrat had cut it, but clearly given the length of the line of cut grass and the lack of the more substantial vegetation muskrats also like to eat, I decided that the ice cut the grass as it formed and two sheets of ice joined.

That said, I have difficulty picturing it. Seen after the freeze, it is difficult to imagine the amount energy expended as water freezes. The ice was not any thicker than the ice on the Big Pond so I decided to limit my stay on it. I headed over to the deep channel between old dam in the center of the pond being careful to only walk where I knew the pond was shallow. The ice over the channel was clear and I didn’t see any bubble trails, just bubbles here and there.

Of course, as usual, before making any other observations around this pond, I checked the otter latrine in and above the mossy cove. There was nothing new there. The ice in the west end of the pond looked thicker so I walked on it and tried to focus on some abstract art made by the ice crystals.

Then I crossed what looked like slides on the ice left by a deer

But I didn’t see a clear deer print. When I got to the edge of the clear ice that I was shy of walking on, I could see that dead tree stumps were a main source of bubbles under the ice.

The stump of every tree in the pond cut by the beavers that I could see had bubbles frozen in the ice around it.

There were no signs of recent otter visits to the latrines on the north shore of the pond. Water still gushes through the hole in the dam so there is a generous patch of open water there. Bubbles remained frozen in or trapped under the ice that I could see behind the dam, but just as likely from rotting vegetation as animals.

Then I headed along the Upper Second Swamp Pond dam, where there were no signs of animal activity and headed down the north shore of Second Swamp Pond. The last time I looked at ice around the old bank lodge below the knoll I saw plenty of bubbles, obviously left by an animal swimming under the ice, but there were very little today.

When I got over to below the old East Trail Pond dam, I saw a porcupine’s trail in the snow roughly where I’ve seen one ever winter for as long as I can remember.

The downed trunk in the background of the photo above, that the porcupine went under, was well traveled by a mouse or two.

Then as I walked on the board through the middle of the East Trail Pond meadow, I saw that an animal preceded me. The imprint of 5 toes suggests that it was a fisher.

However the animal did not have a the typical fisher’s gait as it went down and back on the boardwalk. And it seemed to have a longer gait coming back. But Rezendes’ guide to tracking shows a gait like that with the hind paw coming down on the front paw print. But then why wasn’t the return gait, likely a fisher in a hurry, the more typical 3 x 3 prints?

I saw where the animal walked up on a log crossing the boardwalk and then turned around. That behavior is characteristic of a fisher, perhaps especially out in the open without protection of tree cover (fishers can climb trees), but nobody has ever explained to me what a fisher has to fear when it is out in the open, except another fisher.

When I crossed the log, I took a photo looking back showing the commotion the fisher and I made in the snow.

There was a good bit of water flowing out from the creek that once formed one of the two main channels of the pond when it was in all its glory. The old boardwalk doesn’t cross it but a dead tree conveniently fell across it.

On the boardwalk on the other side of the creek, there were coyote tracks.

Of course, what I was looking for were trails made by beavers or otters going across, not along, the boardwalk. I saw no none. But when I got up to the north end of the East Pond dam, I saw that a beaver had broken the ice behind the dam, leaving trails of bubbles under the ice.

Water flows into the pond from a creek coming from Shangri-la Pond and the valley to the north. I saw that a beaver had been under the ice up to a small dam the beavers made across the creek two years ago.

No beaver went over the dam and into the pool of water behind the little dam.

I headed up the ridge on the trail and then went down to check the otter latrine. I saw that the tall tree in the pond that the beavers had been cutting for a month or so finally blew down, but not into the pond like the tall red maple, but onto the ridge. Bad luck for the beavers.

Turning back toward the latrine below the ridge, I saw a trail in the snow likely made by a beaver coming up to inspect the new wind fall.

I saw no signs of recent activity on the otter latrine, and no trail of bubbles or broken ice down below on the pond. There were some ghostly crescent shapes that I have no idea what might have caused.

Looking out at the pond there were some beige patches under the ice but they were shaped like the bottom foraging of beavers or muskrats.

I went back up the ridge, following the beavers’ trail and found that a large branch had been cut off the tree that fell onto the ridge.

Beavers sometimes seem oblivious to wind falls, but over the years members of this family seem to keep track of when and where big trees they cut fall. And once up on the ridge again, a beaver resumed gnawing the trunk of a tree that no beaver had gnawed since the spring.

There was a nice trail of bubbles under the ice below the ridge. At least one beaver in the family likes to roam around under the ice.

I didn’t have the time today to check up on every tree the beavers are currently gnawing. Plus on cold days, taking gloves off to take photos is no pleasure. I did take a photo of another tree that recently fell, landing on the oak that the beavers gnawed so it split. They had stripped a good bit of bark off that and then, bang, another tree fell on top of stripped trunk.

As I walked around the pond I didn’t see many bubbles under the ice until I got to the burrow on the south shore of the pond where I have been seeing bubble trails whenever ice has formed. Today there was a grand procession of bubbles complete with a huge patch of white ice that started several yards out in the pond

and led to the burrow in the bank. I don’t know how to account for that mass of bubbles.

Bubbles don’t only come from the animal exhaling. Beavers are inveterate farters, and bubbles come from air trapped, so to speak, in their fur. Perhaps the number of bubbles correlates with the length of time in the burrow. More air nestled into the beaver’s fur as it dried out. Pure speculation. Continuing along the shore down to the dam, I saw where a beaver bucked up a good size block of ice which looked to be at least 2 inches thick.

A few feet away there were cracks in the ice. I got the impression that a beaver tried to crack up the ice there and could not get the leverage it needed.

My guess is that the beaver tried using its head to butt up through the ice, found it too difficult and repositioned itself in deeper water where it could buck up its back and break a good chunk of ice. Then it could push up through the nice sized hole. I headed home via the South Bay trail. Most of the year I can use exposed to rocks to get across the little creek flowing down to the north cove, but when water is rushing down the creek, I have to use a rather sketchy log bridge. Three years ago Ottoleo and I dragged over an freshly cut elm trunk to bolster ancient and slowly rotting trunks. As I crossed it today, I saw the prints of a fisher crossing the other way.

Often by this time of year there is a good start of snow cover that will last well into March.

December 23 I got a chance to take a hike in the afternoon and headed to the East Trail Pond via Antler Trailscattering a healthy herd of six or so deer along the way. We’ve had cold nights but just dustings of snow. So the East Trail Pond presented a gray sheet of ice and a little snow where the sun has not been shining.

It crossed my mind that I should compare the photos of the pond this December with those from last, but not only was the pond snow covered most of last December but the dam is higher now, so there is more water in the pond. I think a close analysis would show that the beavers have eaten much of the pond vegetation but before and after photos might unfairly make that point. Anyway, today I was looking for signs of immediate life that always take more of an edge off the cold than long term studies. A week ago I saw a huge trail of bubbles under the ice outside the burrow in the south bank of the pond. Today I could see that there had been open water there longer than anywhere else along the shore, but there were no bubbles under that newer ice.

However there were frozen bubbles under the ice all around that newer ice, including a trail that seemed to come from the lodge.

The best I can say is that it is easy to see what might have happened but difficult to explain. Enough vegetation has died back so that I can get a better look at the lodge in the middle of the pond. The snow cover now helps to accentuate the cache pile near the lodge.

I didn’t see any broken ice, the best hint of warm bodies, not even behind the dam. I decided to walk out along the dam until I could sense a dry trail down to the boardwalk and then head off to the Lost Swamp Pond.

I didn’t see any broken ice as I walked along the dam but looking up toward the lodge I saw a short trail of open water heading toward the dam.

Then behind the dam I saw where the trail led to a good array of bubbles frozen under the ice.

The level of the water behind the dam is about as high as it can be. As dams go, since it is relatively young, there is not much bracing below the dam, neither logs nor mud pushed over the dam. It looks like it would be easy for otters to breach the dam. Last year otters did not pay attention to this dam but they’ve scatted on the dam this fall. In the 10 years, more or less, that I’ve watched this family, I don’t think they have ever had their dam breached by otters. The beavers themselves did break their dam at Meander Pond to make it easier to go below the pond and cut a clump of alders.

I managed to find a relatively dry path from the middle of the dam to the boardwalk where I found no tracks at all. I had an itching to see something I suppose because over the years I have grown so accustomed to seeing beavers as the sun goes down. So I decided to hike over to check the Lost Swamp Pond dam and then return to the East Trail Pond and sit up on the ridge north of the pond and hope a beaver comes out into the patch of open water around the lodge. Of course, I checked the Second Swamp Pond along the way and looking down at it from above the lodge below the knoll I saw some patches of open water and an array bubbles that might indicated animal activity, muskrats I presume.

There were patches of open water in the pond but it didn’t look like an otter or beaver made or used them. Those bigger animals can rule ice this thin, not so the muskrat. Or, to be fair to the muskrat, it is able to get what it needs in the pond without wasting energy contending with the ice.

I crossed the valley along the Upper Second Swamp Pond dam, and as I approached the dam, six black ducks flew off from the open water behind the hole in the dam. I braced for more ducks or geese when I got up to the Lost Swamp Pond, but there were none there. Here too there was a patch of open water behind the dam.

But the rest of the pond was frozen over and I didn’t see any bubble trails or broken ice. There were no new otter scats in the latrines along the north shore of the pond.

Disappointed I headed back to the East Trail Pond. As I headed up the ridge I saw a trail of bubbles under the ice going to the northeast corner of the pond. The beavers have been gnawing on a few trees over there.

Then I found a rock to sit on, not warm but not too wet, and studied the open water around the lodge.

The potential for a beaver to emerge from the water seemed great. Dare I say the water around the lodge seemed pregnant with beavers, but none appeared. A shifting wind played on the water, nothing else. Then looking down at the otter latrine on the rocks below, I saw what looked like scratching in the snow and fresh black scats.

But when I got down to the latrine I saw that there were no fresh scats, no new scats. And the scratching looked like unexceptional melting.

The beavers have been going up the other side of the rock. Their trail there looked hot,

and led to more gnawing on their latest windfall and a tree next to it.

So I didn’t see a beaver, but felt close to them all the same.

December 27 with cold nights and cold enough days, South Bay froze over and over the years I’ve found that as the bay freezes, otters tend to make a mark in the latrines along the north shore. I couldn’t check the latrines when there was a light snow on the ice but I knew that any scats deposited wouldn’t disappear for at least a week. Yesterday the wind picked up and with it the temperature and the ice was broken well back in the bay and cleared out. Most of the snow melted. So today I knew I wouldn’t see otter slides but I would see scats. Of course I always hope that I’ll see where otters broke the ice as it merges with the water, but no such luck today. The ice only stretched half way up the coves where the water is rather shallow.

I haven’t seen signs of otters visiting what I call the docking rock latrine for months so I was pleased to see some fresh scratching through the leaves down to dirt.

The scat next to the scratching was not fresh. There was one rounded bolus and some stringy scats on the log and leaves that could have been left by just one otter.

There were three groups of scats down on the rock sloping down to the water, which, of course, could have been left by two or three otters.

They too were not fresh but one had the whitish remains of a fish in it as well as scale-laced black.

A group of scats gave the impression of containing deposits left on different days, but the contrast in color could also arise because the scats came from two otters who visited at about the same time.

I anticipated seeing otter activity at the latrine overlooking the entrance to South Bay. By this time of year, especially since we’ve had some snows -- wet and heavy for all of one or two inches, the grass is matted down and the wind has bunched leaves together. So the latrine looked ruffled by the wind and scratched by otters.

But I soon saw that an otter had been there. There was a generous scat or two half concealed by leaves.

Then I headed up to Audubon Pond to see what the beavers there have been up to and to check for otter scats. The beavers continue to make slow progress girdling and cutting the two big ash trees off the southwest corner of the pond.

Cutting into that big ash strikes me as difficult and dangerous work for a beaver and I can understand why there is slow progress. I wonder if the beaver comes and gets some nutrition from the girdling and then expends those calories in that laborious gnawing into the other tree. The beavers cut a smaller ash nearby a bit deeper in the wood, but it fell into another tree.

When I was last here a month ago I saw two thin ironwoods the beavers had just cut down and saw today that they had trimmed all the branches and cut a log or two off the end of the trunks, but no stripping off of any bark on the trunks remaining, which is their typical treatment of ironwoods.

Then I checked their work around the vernal pool back in the woods. The two trees they were cutting a month ago were in the same state of not quite being half cut but another small tree looked like it was cut to the point that the wind might blow it down.

But thanks to having cut down three larger ash trees along the little rivulet flowing down to the pond, the beavers can keep the trees by the pool in reserve (though I am not confident that they think like that.)

They have neatly trimmed and segmented the trunk of a smaller ash tree.

And then they cut down another big ash by demonstrating to me once again how to cut down a large tree by cutting from opposite sides about a foot apart.

However, they cut more deeply into the lower cut and I don’t think I would hazard my head so deep into a tree that will split down and fall right where my teeth might be gnawing. So far the big tree has not fallen down quite low enough for the beavers to get much off it. But gravity may tell. The beavers could cut down a hickory tree holding up the large ash. Instead they cut down a tree near the ash that fell on top of the ash.

When I got over to the old bank lodge in the middle of the west shore of the pond, I saw some otter scats that looked about as old as the scats I saw in the latrine overlooking the entrance to South Bay.

However in general the area where the otter latrined did not look well used. There was no evidence of scratching or scent mound building. Of course, there is a steady fall of oak leaves here covering up what an otter might have done.

It would seem to me that otters could live all winter off the fish in this pond, but none ever have. While the beavers don’t appear to be using the bank lodge, they are coming up on the nearby shore. They cut a tree 10 yards off the shore and trimmed the crown and are working on the segmenting the upper trunk.

And they are cutting a hickory tree closer to the pond. Last year a beaver stripped a small patch of bark off the bottom of the trunk and the top of a root. This year the beavers are cutting the tree down. Evidently it takes time for beavers to reconcile themselves to eating shag-bark hickory bark.

Meanwhile they are making very slow progress on the two remaining hickories on the small peninsula on the west shore of the pond, a few gnaws in the last month, and they haven’t cut off the branches of the last hickory to fall.

Needless to add, their cache in front of their bank lodge in the embankment forming the south shore of the pond is getting larger.

I’m still unable to identify the stripped logs in a cache so I don’t know if the rather large log frozen in the ice is an ash or hickory. Since ash is the lighter wood I assume it is that.

I should be able to identify logs that haven’t been stripped but after all these years looking at beaver lodges, I’ve never had the patience to do it. More important to note is that the beavers keep pushing up logs above where their burrow must be. I doubt if they fuss about the species of the tree from which the logs came. They simply want the protection logs can give.

Walking down the embankment I saw many bubbles under the ice below, some of the them as large as a beaver. I also saw where a beaver came up on a flat piece of ground and nibbled sticks.

In the late afternoon I went to our land and had a chance to look at the Deep Pond dam. The beaver has added two big logs on top of the dam -- too dark for me to speculate where it got them from.

There were plenty of bubbles under the ice behind the dam and some patches of open water down behind the east end of the dam. And it looked like there was open water in front of the bank lodge.

It may be a few more weeks before we can take long hikes at our land. Sooner the better.

December 31 we had an inch of snow two days ago and a thanks to continued cold there is a good bit still around. A thaw is supposed to start this afternoon, so I headed off first thing in the morning hoping to see some otter slides and other tracks. As I walked along Antler Trail I was often following deer tracks, but I didn’t cross any fisher or porcupine trails. The edges of the Big Pond were still snow covered and at the southwest corner of the pond just behind the dam I saw a circle of coyote tracks around a clump of grass.

There was nothing new at the dam, which continues to leak liberally, but the pond ice was safe to walk on. The wind has shaped the snow into patches on the ice. Those white patches are easy to walk on, plus I could follow the coyote tracks in the snow. Judging from where the coyotes went there is not much happening in this pond. They didn’t stray near the dam, nor lead me to any grassy muskrat lodges or get that close to the beaver lodge on the north shore of the pond. But the water in the pond froze when it was at a relatively high level which leaves the impression that the pond is large and deep and should be a going concern. During the summer when I looked up pond from the dam, it looked like tall grasses had swallowed the whole upper end of the pond just leaving a narrow creek, but today as I walked up the pond, I could see a wide upper pond beyond a narrowing in the middle of the pond.

During the summer I had speculated that the lodge on the north shore of the upper part of the pond was covered with tall grasses. Not so. It is a little high above the ice but looks like a beaver could use it.

However, I know how shallow the water is there. No coyote seemed interested in sniffing the lodge. And there were no mink tracks around which is a better indicator that there is nothing warm inside the lodge. However, between the lodge and the upper end of the pond, which for years had always been a part of the pond, was now almost all wet meadow. That used to be a favorite place for otters to fish because, I think, fish were attracted to some springs up there. I picked my way through the grass clumps holding out a slight hope that the beavers might be in the pond above. However, in the years beavers did live up there, they always kept the Big Pond dam in repair. I found the dam of the upper pond in complete disrepair and there is not even a semblance of a pond where one used to be.

The meadow seems to be spreading down the valley, rather than closing in from the sides. We’ve had a wet year. A dry year might spell the doom of the Big Pond, unless some beavers come along and repair the dam. I seem to be incapable of making a study of all there is here for beavers to eat. This upper meadow is surrounded by thick clumps of osier. And as I walked up the ridge to the north, heading for the Lost Swamp Pond, I saw that there were fresh shoots coming out of the stumps of the shrubs the beavers ate the last time they were here, and much of the same types of small willows and other brush difficult to identify that they ate before. I fear the beavers need more substantial trees, or what grows back does not taste as good. I followed deer trails through the brush on the ridge until I got to the east-west trail that the land owner maintains. Deer and coyotes also used that trail. I kept looking for a likely place to turn down to the Lost Swamp Pond and as luck would have it, I found a narrow trail that took me to a wondrous sight: an oak tree with the trunk almost completely stripped by porcupines.

The tree is in a clearing with no other trees near by which added to it magical appearance. There were many dead leaves on the branches so this is all recent gnawing. Indeed I could see a fresh porcupine trail coming to the tree, and wood chips on the snow.

Usually the trees I see getting this treatment from a porcupine are maples and a bit thinner than this white oak. Since there didn’t appear any area near by convenient for a porcupine to den in, I assume that attraction of this tree is that its bark really tastes good. It was easy getting down to the Lost Swamp Pond from there where I got a good view of the southeast expanse of the pond.

I tried to keep on the snow patches as I walked out toward the dam. In most years, this pond freezes solidly but it is easy to see by bubbles under the ice where beavers and muskrats are swimming. I didn’t see any bubbles under the ice. The only sign of life I saw out on the pond was a tiny lichen growing out of a crack in one of the dead trunks still standing in the pond.

One coyote trail did come from the lodge but I had never seen the lodge area looking so lifeless. The ice around it was thick and featureless revealing no bubbles from any animals under it fashioning a winter world around the lodge.

Then as I walked from the lodge toward the north shore of the pond, I heard some barking coming from the west end of the pond. I did not like the sound of the barking which sounded aggressive and from a big dog. Then I saw a large coyote cross the middle of the pond occasionally barking, but moving away from me as it did. I haven’t used the camcorder in several weeks and was a bit ham-handed in getting a video of the coyote as it ran into the woods south of the pond, but I did capture some of its barking. When I got to the north shore I saw that there were trails made by three coyotes, and I looked down pond and saw another large coyote. This one did not bark, but it kept looking at me as it angled over to the south shore, angling so that it kept the same distance from me, say a little under 50 yards. I have seen coyotes before, but only one at a time, and when they saw me they always increased the distance between me and them.

This coyote seemed to be moving behind me and gaining some high ground. I continued over to the north shore and saw the trail of a coyote going over to sniff at a burrow in the bank.

My next impulse was to track the coyotes along the north shore of the pond. I saw the tracks of three, but I had been getting the impression that the coyotes were having a frustrating time on the ponds without even a whiff of beavers and muskrats. So I decided to gain some high ground. I went up the ridge north of the that section of the pond. When I gained the top, I saw the third coyote following the same route the other two took to the south shore of the pond. That somewhat reassured me that the coyotes had no interest in me and I went over to and down the northeast section of the pond toward the dam where I thought maybe the coyotes had been feasting on a deer kill, which might explain their barking and looking at me, the marplot of their feast. However, I didn’t see any kill, and then I heard loud barking followed by sharp and ungainly yipping bordering on yowling. It was an unsettling sound and my first impulse was to get away. At least it was only one coyote, but though I couldn’t see it, the noise seemed directed at me. I started moving faster and thought it prudent to pick up a small stick. Years ago I had been briefly surrounded by coyotes as I sat above the old Middle Pond at night trying to see beavers. But that was before I had ever seen a coyote and in my mind still pictured the smaller western coyote when I heard an eastern coyote. Eastern coyotes are a very big dog and I’ve always appreciated their deferential flight when I’m around. The noises these coyotes were directing at me did not seem deferential. Fortunately all was quiet at the Lost Swamp Pond dam. I took no photos and soon felt more at ease when I got on the other side of the Second Swamp Pond. However, the coyote kept up a pattern of loud barks and sharp yipping. I didn’t think the sound was getting closer but then again I didn’t think it was getting farther away. I photographed a porcupine trail in the knoll over looking the Second Swamp Pond, and took a photo of the ice patterns which were much like the earlier patterns that I thought could have been made by sliding otters.

Clearly the wind and water flow were making the patterns not otters. I didn’t toss my stick away until I got to the East Trail Pond. The coyote kept up the pattern of barks and yips but now it sounded distant and more plaintive than menacing. The video below gives some idea of the barks and combination barking and yipping, as well as a good look at the second coyote I saw.

I finally decided the noise was not directed at me but was the effort of the youngest of the coyotes to get a response from the older coyotes so it could join them. Indeed the coyotes might have been unnerved at my getting so close to them before they realized I was there which might have prompted the older coyotes to disperse and lay low for fear I was hunting them. Easy things to think of once I was a half mile from the barking coyote. I didn’t see any fisher tracks in the Fisher Woods, nor on the boardwalk across the East Trail Pond meadow, where I saw tracks a few days ago. From up on the ridge I took a photo of the snow covered lodge in the middle of the pond, and saw no holes in the ice and snow.

I did see a deer trail down on the pond. I sat and listened to the now far away coyote's call which slowly resolved itself into a series of short yelps not untuneful, like the start of a light aria. Then they stopped and I headed down to South Bay to look for otter signs. I didn’t see any but I saw some other interesting tracks. As I followed their trail I wondered why two minks ran on the park trail.

The best I could figure was that they wanted to make time and found the inch of snow on the trail easier to negotiate than the slick ice of the bay. I veered up to look at Audubon Pond. No signs of otters there either and ice and snow enclosed the beavers’ bank lodge and winter cache.

On my way to the otter latrine overlooking the entrance to South Bay, I saw that I was following a fox trail. It didn’t continue to the latrine. Its nose probably told it what my eyes soon did: nothing happening there. I did see some holes in the ice just off the rocky shore and I tried to conjure them into an otter fishing and bumping up holes, but there were no slides in the ice or on the snow. On a warming sunny day the ice along this north shore of the pond is quick to begin melting.

There was a large flock of a couple hundred ducks out beyond the end of the ice, in the channel going from the main channel of the river to the Narrows. At first I thought it was a flock of Bonaparte gulls that sometimes make brief visits here, but judging from the video I took,

they were ducks, mostly common mergansers. It’s not common to see so many of them here before the ice closes all the river but the channel in front of our house. I also got a glimpse of a muskrat swimming from the ice to the shore, and just missed getting a photo. I also saw an eagle fly off a branch offering it a good view of the river. Going back on the park trail, I picked up the fox tracks again and saw a fisher trail crossing it, going down from the ridge to the bay. There were some ice fishermen on the bay. If they hadn’t been there I would not hazard going on the ice. But I was a bit tired and needed a short cut. The north shore is always hard to get on because it melts out but I found a branch just above the melt water and got on solid ice, only 3 inches thick, but if the ice fishermen risked it, so could I. I saw a fox track in a patch of snow out in the middle of the bay,

which made a strange last photo for the year.

December 7 to 12, 2011

2012-02-02T10:20:00.000-08:00

December 7 after more rain the Deep Pond was leaking over, through and around the dam,

But I saw that the beaver had been the dam, not only was a bit more vegetation pushed up, but there were two nibbled sticks near by.

This is the first time the beaver left some woody leftovers at the dam, and it has left only a stick or two elsewhere around and in the whole pond. Our path from the road to the dam is now flooded and water is flowing over the path down to the outlet creek.

One pair of beavers built up a dam here when this happened years ago. Leslie set out to cut a small Xmas tree or two in our inner valley. I tagged along. She decided she didn’t need my help and then she called me back to see a dead mouse nestled up in a small pine tree.

It was difficult to tell if it landed there after being dropped by a flying bird or was carefully placed in a nexus of branches.

I headed back down to the Deep Pond and walked around the high east bank, nothing new there, and then worked my way up the inlet. By building up the dam, the beaver has widened the inlet creek which back in the summer I could cross over easily just about everywhere.

As I headed up the creek, I soon saw that the beaver had been up it to and cut what I think are birch saplings here and there amidst the dead grasses and small shrubs.

Most of the saplings here are sprouting out of roots snaking through the wet soil.

As the beaver noses about it seems to nip saplings that are not too small, say, at least over a half inch in diameter and preferably just over an inch.

There are saplings cut high off the ground, a foot or two up instead of an inch or two. Perhaps it’s a question of the low brush being too thick to get the teeth down or the beaver cuts a bit higher just to get the thickness it wants.

I don’t think the beaver has come back here much since there are no well worn trails from the inlet to where it cut saplings.

The beaver did move far enough away from the inlet creek to see where the bigger trees grow. But it only cut one thin sapling in that area.

I didn’t count how many saplings the beaver cut. I did take more photos, well deserving close study but it’s hard to keep track of the tastes of beavers. I took a photo of the inlet at a point just above where the beaver had gone up into the brush. As far as I could tell it only foraged just to the east of the creek.

Scanning the pond as I left, I couldn’t tell where the beavers took the saplings it cut nor where or if it gnawed the bark off them.

December 10 another cold night gave us a chance to check for bubbles under the ice of ponds. There were two trails of bubbles under the Last Pool Ice. One came from the lodge and the other down the main channel of the pond.

I have seen beavers swim considerable distances under the ice and under the water in this pond, but these trails of bubbles didn’t go into the canal down pond, as far as I could see, but some of the ice had melted there.

So I can’t be sure either way, but looking down at the black ice of the remaining stretch of the Last Pool, where water had spread on either side of the deep beaver canal, I didn’t see any bubbles nor any holes in the ice, which I think suggests that a beaver didn’t swim under the ice. Beavers usually bump the ice of shallow ponds. A muskrat is another matter.

I kept checking the snow covered grassy areas along the Last Pool and saw no animal tracks there

I walked around the upper end of the Last Pool to look for tracks and bubbles there and saw the stray bubble under the ice, but no trails north of the lodge.

Looking over the shoulder of the lodge so to speak I could see the trail of bubbles under the ice on the other side.

So, something took a short swim under the ice going out from and back to the old lodge. That theory held since I saw no disturbances on or under the ice as I walked down the east shore of the Last Pool and Boundary Pond until I got to the summer hut the beavers made half way up the shore of Boundary Pond. I saw a little trail of bubbles going from the hut toward the main channel of the pond.

But that trail of bubbles, like the trails in the Last Pool, didn’t seem to lead to anything. And behind the dam, where a beaver might be expected to break the ice, all was smooth and undisturbed.

We always have a tendency to underestimate muskrats but one could have complete command of the new under ice world of this pond and I saw a few tokens of its explorations. That said, there were white blotches on the ice all around the Boundary Pond lodge, I expect from icy blobs falling off tree branches above

But the spread of branches above might not account for all the blobs. Many of them were above bunches of green grasses under the ice and that vegetation under stress may have emitted bubbles. I headed up over the ridge heading down to the Deep Pond. There was not enough snow to make the Hemlock Cathedral a romantic place to stop, and there was not enough snow to bother looking for tracks. As I walked down the final slope toward the creek feeding the Deep Pond, well above the area where the beaver had been foraging, I saw gnawing on some beech trees; one was half girdled.

No way a beaver is doing that. I saw that the gnaw marks were small and pointed, a porcupine had been busy.

I walked along the high slope of the Deep Pond and saw what I interpreted as a trail of bubbles around the pond, but no way I could interpret what the beaver or muskrat making the bubbles might have been doing.

There was one bunch of bubbles off from some old muskrat burrows, but the trail of bubbles didn’t lead to the burrows.

I suppose bubbles could be coming up from the well vegetated pond bottom here too.

December 11 Leslie joined me on a hike to the interior beavers ponds. While the snow had melted around our house on the river, there was still enough on the edge on the ponds to reveal tracks. And it had stayed cold enough to keep the ice on the ponds. Over the years we’ve had some exciting hikes after snowfall in early December, but those inspiring snows were much deeper than the one we just had which probably didn’t impress any animal above the scale of a deer tick that there had been a fundamental change in their environment. The only tracks along the Big Pond dam were from a lone and small coyote. The snow covered the area where the otters had been scatting. There were bubbles under the ice just behind the commodious holes in the dam. Perhaps a muskrat made them.

In the woods and meadows the snow was very spotty, no tracking there. But I could show off the mystery of the fresh gnawing low on the large maples just up from the south shore of the Lost Swamp Pond. Leslie spotted it immediately as porcupine gnawing. As always I tried to keep my mind open to new evidence.

But as I took a closer look at the gnawing, the narrow strokes of the incisors suggested that a porcupine had the meal.

Then on the ground below the gnawing, amidst the bark and wood shavings, I saw a porcupine poop.

There were no signs of a beaver having been in the area, nor under the ice of the pond. There was a trail of bubbles from the porous bank lodge to where there are burrows in the nearby bank, most likely made by a muskrat or two.

As we walked around the west end of the pond, I saw porcupine gnawing in a tree on a slope 30 yards off the pond.

There was also gnawing at the base of the tree which looked like the work of the narrower gauge porcupine incisor.

Then on the other side of the valley, we saw that a porcupine did some extensive low gnawing on the twinned trunks of what looked like a big beach tree.

Such extensive gnawing at the bottom of trunks is not common but often a porcupine is so persistent in doing it that I assume it must have lost the ability or courage to climb up in a tree. Then, eventually, I see it up high in a tree. I didn’t see any new otter scats as I walked up the north shore of the pond. The dam still leaks, and there were some small bubbles under the ice behind the dam but not enough to credit any particular animal.

As I walked along the Upper Second Swamp Pond dam, which has had a big gap in it for about a year, I didn’t see any signs of otters, or anything else, going over it. However it wasn’t snow covered and the ice cover on the pond wasn’t solid. All to say that there was a large enough seed of doubt that I did a double take when I looked down at the Second Swamp Pond. I could see parallel patterns in the ice that I could interpret as otter trails, though they certainly looked more like the pattern gently flowing water might make when it freezes.

There were plenty of bubbles under the ice of the bank lodge below the knoll.

There were large bubbles under the ice around a dead tree trunk and rock which reminded me of an array of bubbles in the same area one winter when I saw otters here.

Looking up pond I got a different angle on the patterns of the ice about the main channel of the pond.

My trouble is that I have grown old with these ponds. I delighted in them when the beavers filled them with water and life and now that the beavers are gone, several years gone in this pond, my imagination can’t help but amplify any sign of the return of those lively times. I checked the lodge for otter scats and found none but I did see a muddy print on the snow outside a hole going into the rather porous lodge, likely mink tracks.

And as I walked along the dam I saw more prints that if they were twice their size, I could attribute to otters. They too were probably mink tracks. Every winter minks get use out of this dam as they range for muskrats, birds, and other stingy winter fare.

The little bit of snow around the gap in the dam did not betray any tracks. Otters latrined around this dam a couple years ago but I saw no scats or trails today on or below the dam.

However, my imagination could still feed on the vague patterns of the ice behind the dam. Perhaps you had to be there to think that an otter had scooted over that ice.

The area of ice narrows below the dam, and none of it looked disturbed by any animals. I can’t imagine any other animal like me hopping from clump to clump of dead grass to avoid thin ice and keep its boots dry.

I looked for fisher tracks in the woods between the Second Swamp Pond and East Trail Pond, an area I call the Fisher Woods, but there was not enough snow to see any tracks. Over the years beavers who lived in the East Trail Pond dredged mud behind the dam so even though the old dam leaks liberally there is still a small pond behind the dam. The ice behind the dam looked like it had been roughed up. However I didn’t see any animal tracks or signs on what remains of the dam.

There was a wide trail in the ice going to the west shore but nothing of note on the shore. In my experience, otters don’t impress the ice like that.

An old boardwalk, now in disrepair, bisects the old pond, and save for a few spots where small rivulets flow down to the old dam, it crosses meadow. Today the boardwalk was completely covered with an inch of fresh snow. A week or so ago I could see on a brief snow cover where beavers crossed it. Today I only saw mink tracks. One set of tracks came up from the narrowest creek and left some slightly muddy prints.

As I headed up the East Trail I didn’t see any broken ice behind the dam. Up on the ridge, in an area I haven’t be at in a while, I saw where a beaver trimmed a branch off a small trunk that had been hung up in another tree and that I had pushed over.

A beaver also resumed gnawing the other trunk of the oak.

This area is the highest point where the beavers are foraging. I am not a good judge of how high ridges are but I suppose this one is at least 50 feet high. Beavers have to take a somewhat circuitous route to get to it. Another larger tree, oak I think, that is a bit higher up the ridge is almost half girdled.

A beaver gnawing up here is rather far from safety. Coyotes coming either way along the East Trail could probably easily catch a beaver up here. However, come to think of it, I can’t recall seeing coyote tracks up here nor poop. A beaver that makes this climb and drags branches back down to the pond is probably in pretty good shape. Coyotes are probably wise to limit their patrols to the low ground. I found a spot a bit lower on the ridge to take a photo of the lodge in the middle of the pond. There looked to be open water or ice that just formed near the lodge and a trail of broken ice that beavers made after swimming to and from the north end of the pond. (I didn’t see any beavers in the pond today nor heard any ice crack.)

The way the ice was marked reminded me of the Second Swamp Pond ice, but here I knew beavers had been swimming in the pond as the ice formed.

A trail seemingly marked in the ice went toward the otter latrine on the low rock, but then veered and went parallel to the north shore of the pond. And there appeared to be a portion of the trail where the water had not frozen.

Of course, I hoped that an otter or two had a role in breaking the ice but if one did it did not go up on the rock and scat. There was a knot of bubbles under the ice about 10 yards off from the shore.

The next knot of bubbles was around the trunk of a tall tree the beavers have been slowly cutting. However the cut was above the ice and the bubbles below the ice. There were no chips of gnawed wood on the ice.

Then there were two trails on the ice that veered apart that from the distance I was looking down from looked like animals with a short gait walking on the ice, as indeed beavers would. They don’t slide on the ice like otters.

There was also some gnawing up in a tree, done by a porcupine, of course, not a beaver.

As I angled down the ridge toward the west end of the pond, I saw that the red oak along the beaver trail angling up the ridge to the west that the beavers had been gnawing at two points on the trunk a little over a foot apart had fallen down. The beavers had trimmed it and almost stripped the bark off the trunk.

The other day I opined that beavers were lured into cutting trees at two nearby points along the trunk because they appreciated gnawing into bark that didn’t move as their incisors cut into the wood. Today I saw that cutting the trunk at two points can be an efficient way to cut a tree down. The wood split between the cuts.

I don’t think I’ve seen this before, probably because beavers know it is a bit dangerous. Splitting wood is a bit unpredictable. Right below that latest windfall, with an assist from the split along the grain of the wood, the beavers were beginning to cut another good size tree that looked like a red maple.

Down beside the pond, I saw where and how the trails on, or should I say, in the ice ended. Up close they looked wider than a trail an otter would make.

And up on the snow, I could see the beaver’s prints.

I got another angle looking at the ice tracks from the east. It looked like there had been a large patch of open water and the now frozen “trails” went off from that.

It looked like there were some smaller trails in the ice which renews the hope that there is a kit or two in the family. I didn’t take my usual tour of the beavers’ gnawing along the south slope of the pond. As I walked up the slope on the way to South Bay, I saw that they cut another relatively small tree that got hung up in the neighboring bigger trees.

I saw that they had started cutting another tree higher up the slope and deeper in the woods.

I have yet to figure out if this ranging relatively far distances to cut trees means the beavers are doing well and have a surplus of energy or if it means they are desperate and fear starvation. Perhaps it is just a function of the rather mild late fall and early winter with little snow or ice formation. Given the opportunity to gather more food, the beavers will take it. As I headed up the Antler Trail on the way home I bumped into two deer and had a chat with them before they ambled off.

When I got home, Leslie, who had headed home after we got to the Lost Swamp Pond, reported that she had had a long chat with the same two deer. After months of being hunted by bow-bearing humans, they stumbled onto two chatterboxes full of good cheer.

We went to our land in the afternoon. I checked the Deep Pond dam and it was easy to see that the beaver kept the water open behind the dam as the rest of the pond iced over

That said, I wasn't sure if the ice I saw on the mud pushed up on the dam meant that it was the last thing the beaver did or the first.

More to the point were some stripped sticks just behind and beside the dam. Of course, I've seen the beaver gorge on lily pads, roots and pond weed here, but have seen little evidence of it gnawing bark. I saw a nibbled stick on the 7th too but didn't look around to see if the beaver was cutting anything near the dam.

Doubting that the beaver had brought what it cut up along the inlet creek all the way down to the dam, I checked the west side of the pond, and found that the beaver had trimmed some saplings there.

In my brief observations of this beaver's tree cutting skills, all at the willow clumps in the Third Pond, I got the impression that it was a picky forager not prone to clear cut. However, it was relatively voracious here. And why not, it is getting cold.

But it left plenty behind.

Once again I was stumped in identifying what tree it was cutting. I'm not good at it and saplings are always difficult. I did get a few leaves planning to park them on a tree identification book and compare. But as I walked up the road I saw the same type of leaves on a larger tree that I could identify, hornbeam. This is the tree the beavers at the Boundary Pond and Last Pool almost cleared out of that valley, even though, as far as I could see, they didn't really relish the bark. Of course, this is just one beaver and the amount of cutting it did rather tame, compared to what beavers feeding a family usually cut. There was a short trail back to the pond.

The water had turned to ice there too. There were large bubbles under the ice as well as small stripped sticks.

As I headed over to the lodge, curious to see if the beaver had taken any cut saplings over there, I saw some strange circles in the ice, perhaps trails made by a muskrat before the ice froze.

I went up and over the knoll to get a good look at the lodge, and really couldn't see anything worth noting, no sign of the beaver sinking sticks in front of it to start its winter cache, no new sticks up on the lodge.

This beaver had a fat summer and fall. Unless it lives off the remaining lily roots, it might have a lean winter, but I suppose beavers might expect to have to endure that.

December 12 this afternoon we go to Syracuse for a week away to take care of medical matters, so we tried to take a relaxing walk around South Bay and check Audubon Pond and the otter latrines. Water was raging down the creek that feeds the north cove of South Bay. Because it was rather cold last night there was ice on, above and around the creek to enjoy.

We especially like the ice flowers that can form around grass stalks.

Where the water wasn’t rushing down to the bay, there were some nicely patterned sheets of flat ice.

Ice had formed in the lower end of the cove, been there a couple days, and there were bubbles under the ice around the old dock.

A couple weeks ago I saw a muskrat in the area. I didn’t see any scats at the otter latrines along South Bay which put an end to my over interpreting the marks on the ice going down the Second Swamp Pond, that I saw yesterday. No otters went down the ponds to South Bay. Yesterday I saw that no otters had been at the East Trail Pond. There was plenty of bubbles to ponder under the ice of Audubon Pond, too many to really allow tracking of the beavers' comings and goings.

There was also broken ice here and there, and it was easy to conclude that all trails came from or led to the cache pile and bank lodge along the embankment.

It looked like a beaver had been up on the snow atop the bank lodge. Plus there seemed to be more sticks upon it as well as mud.

As we stood there, something swam out from the lodge and added more bubbles to rise up to the ice. The highest concentration of bubbles was under the ice around the cache of winter food, suggesting that the beavers were content to dine off what they had collected already, rather than go off and collect more.

We didn’t walk around the pond seeing what the beavers might have gnawed recently, but taking a cursory glance, I didn’t see any new activity.

December 1 to 6, 2011

2011-12-21T18:25:00.000-08:00

December 1 we had more rain and then a night cold enough to freeze ponds, so when we got to our land we checked the Deep Pond to see what we could learn about how the beaver is handling the on-set of winter. As we walked on the road over the culvert carrying the creek down to White Swamp, we could see that there was a good flow of water coming down from the Deep Pond. (Water has been lapping over the smaller Third Pond dam every time it had rained in the past few weeks). Up at the dam, we saw that it was leaking, and that the beaver had just pushed mud and vegetation up on it.

This was a concentrated effort by the beaver. Usually it seems to push up a heave or two and move on. The far end of the patch had more vegetation pushed up than mud.

Those times I’ve seen a beaver pushing things up on a dam, I never got the impression that they were selective about what they pushed up. At this time of year, the low angle of the sun makes it very difficult to make sense of the thin clear ice that forms on a pond after a cold night. It was easy to see that the water behind the dam was open. Looking up pond, it seemed easy to see what looked like trails of open water through the ice both in the middle of the pond and over by the slope at the far end of the pond. Our project for the day was clearing trails, and after I cut a few bushes along my new trail down the wooded slope below the Third Pond, I went over to the high slope of the Deep Pond, and with the sun at my back, I could see that the trails through the ice in the middle of the pond were scarcely noticeable.

The ice over the entrance to the burrow that we saw the beavers dive into a few weeks ago was unbroken and there were no bubbles under it. Because the water level of the pond has gone up several inches, I wasn’t sure if the stick frozen into the ice was new.

There wasn’t the fussing about with logs and mud that beavers usually exhibit late in the fall. But there is only one beaver here. There was open water where the inlet creek flows into the pond, which probably has nothing to do with a beaver swimming there. While there was no broken ice nor open water from the inlet to the bank. I could make out a possible trail that just iced over.

I saw two or three small bubbles under the ice, that don’t show up in the photos I took.

There was what looked like a stick gnawed and stripped by a beaver frozen in the ice at the end of what might have been a trail.

But when beavers gnaw a stick on the ice that often leaves woods chips of some sort behind. All to say, from just looking at the ice, I more or less had little understanding of what the beaver might have done in that corner of the pond the night before or this morning. So I softened my focus and simply enjoyed the complex beauty of the ice,

Crystals shaped like so many keys to heaven.

December 3 we went out to check the East Trail Pond, and, trusting that two cold nights and a day just above freezing had subdued the deer ticks, we used Antler Trail to get over to the South Bay trail. No ticks latched onto our clothes. We went to the crest of the ridge on the East Trail and then veered down the canyon to the pond.As far as I could tell from their gnawing, the beavers have not got as high up in the canyon as they did a few weeks ago. However, they continue to segment the red oak that fell across the trail that crosses the midpoint of the valley.

Then as we continued down the slope, we saw a mink running on the ice leaving the area around the lodge and coming toward the south shore of the pond. There are few things as exhilarating on a cold day as seeing a mink dancing on the ice of a frozen pond. I don’t think the mink saw us so I don’t think its running over to the burrow along the south shore, where I sometimes see bubbles under the ice, had anything to do with hiding for us. I lost sight of it there and then a few seconds later it was running back toward the lodge. It paused to look over toward the north shore

Then it briefly nosed the clump just beyond it in the photo above and then ran toward the dam where we lost sight of it.

Then I heard the ice crack somewhere along the north shore of the pond. I waited for more cracking, but there was none and I assumed that a bit of ice over on that sunny side of the pond collapsed as it was melting. I turned back to the beaver work on the south slope. They were well on the way to cutting a relatively thin red oak some 10 yards above the trail.

The beavers continue to strip the red oak, also relatively small, that fell just above, and roughly parallel, to the trail.

With Leslie with me I tried to not get too wrapped up in examining what the beavers have been doing. This fall I could have made a study of the beavers' daily gnawing but I couldn’t figure out the point of it since everything they gnaw in this pond is accessible to me and easy to spot. They cut down one of the maples next to the clump of ash trees they’ve been cutting. That maple is hung up in other trees and the beavers are cutting a log off the bottom as they did to an ash that got hung up. It looks like they are about to cut off another log off that ash.

They cut a smaller tree that fell on the maple on the ledge that they have almost completely stripped.

Perhaps with the twiggy crown hanging over that maple, the beavers will finally get around to balancing on the ledge and cutting all the branches off the maple as they harvest the branches on the new tree. The twinned red oaks that the beavers have been girdling gave the impression of being freshly gnawed. Comparing a close-up from today with one from November 27, one can see that a beaver did do some more gnawing on both trunks, but not much.

Farther up the slope the beavers have almost cut what I am pretty sure is a red maple, and there are more there to cut.

The stump oozing with sap on the warm day after the snowfall was a red maple. I noticed a beaver did a bit more gnawing on the trunk still standing. And there was no sap oozing out of the stump. It once again looked its age.

Similar sized sugar maples would be cut and stripped much faster. Back up on the south slope, the beavers are also cutting a choke cherry -- next to another red maple they cut and didn’t do much with.

I followed the beavers’ trail up to the cherry and noticed that on the way, a beavers stopped to gnaw the exposed root of a red oak that had been more or less completely girdled last fall.

We look at the crowns of trees. Beavers keep their nose down. Meanwhile Leslie was patiently sitting on a seat conveniently provided by the beavers.

She makes it look colder than it was, though the ice on the pond was still frozen. Indeed the cold night and early morning seemed to slow the beavers down. We did not see any open water indicating where beavers might have just broken out of the pond. And there weren’t as many bubbles under the ice as there were the other cold mornings when I checked.

However, there was a trail of bubbles, and some triangles of broken ice, leading to the burrow along the bank.

That the mink appeared to go over there to take a sniff seems to favor the idea that a muskrat is using it as minks are in the habit of checking out where muskrats might be. I also checked the ice behind the dam and saw no open water there, and no bubbles under the ice.

Heading around the west end of the pond, I saw that the beavers cut a maple, now hung up, and the wood chips from the cut appeared to be on the surface of the ice. That suggests that a beaver might have been walking around on the ice looking for trees to gnaw.

I am trying to remember if I’ve ever seen beavers standing on ice to cut a tree. Hopefully I’ll soon be seeing them gnawing away as they stand in the snow, both in snow on the ice and on the land. Standing on ice strikes me as a little risky. The beaver might slip if it has to run back to a hole in the ice. Speaking of holes, I saw where something dug into the ground just up from the pond. I didn’t see anything in the hole to explain the digging.

However, a couple yards away, I saw roots uncovered and gnawed by a beaver.

The last time I was here I speculated that a large ash the beavers were cutting might fall conveniently toward the pond. It fell into another tree. And the beavers started cutting the ash next to it, also big but not quite as big as the tree hung up.

With Leslie in tow I asked her to identify the large tree that fell into the pond, that I recollect changing early with very red leaves. She agreed that it is a red maple. The beavers are finally stripping bark off the trunk, both near the stump

and out in the water.

To get up the north ridge we used the beavers’ trail and passed their impressive carving into a small oak that they could easily have cut down if they had concentrated all their gnawing on one plane.

It’s finally dawning on me that beavers like gnawing the bark of a standing tree because the rooted tree provides resistance to its incisors. Of course, after gnawing all it can reach, it can cut the tree down and get to the rest.

Leslie headed up the ridge to look for the red tail hawk we heard as we walked around the pond. Of course, I headed down to the otter latrine and was greeted by two splashes in the water behind a clump of flooded bushes 10 yards off shore below the otter latrine. The splashes sounded like the way a muskrat dives when it is alarmed and the two splashes were about 15 seconds apart so I could assume that one muskrat dove, surfaced and dove again. Of course, I hoped it was an otter and waited for the ice to crack again or a nose to surface and snort in my direction, but all was quiet. Then to my surprise it looked like something had worked over the otter latrine up on the rock. Unfortunately the photo I took today and the one I took on the 27th were in different light.

I looked for a fresh scats and found one, not quite as big as ones I often see here, and it had a much different texture, plenty of fish scales. The otter scatted right on top of the array of old scats.

A close-up shows its scales and tubular shape -- I often see scats shaped like that but not here.

That suggests to me that the otter’s meal that molded this scat came from another pond or South Bay. The scat looked fresh, but at this time of year scats age slowly. The old scats around it, left November 15th, were still black. There was no cracked ice below, and no coherent trail of bubbles under the ice

Then I heard another splash well off to the left of the other one but I thought I should be able to see where it came from if I climbed higher up on the ridge. I did and saw and heard nothing. Then Leslie came over and as we talked, what I thought was a log out in a patch of open water moved, and that log materialized into a beaver.

We had a few more minutes to study and then it dove

and we didn’t hear it coming back up so it may have gone back to its lodge. Leslie thought she could see an old trail of disturbed ice heading back to the lodge. But I wasn’t so sure.

I kept my camera sheathed on the way home. I already had enough to think about .

December 4 The beaver at the Deep Pond reacted to a steady rain last night that amounted to about an inch by pushing more mud up on the dam and I am getting the impression the beaver has to push up vegetation with the mud because it doesn’t have logs behind the dam to brace the mud.

So all the vegetation amassed behind the lodge is not food but building materials.

By backing more water up the beaver flooded the path we use to get from the dam to the road.

This happened before when a pair of beavers was here and then built an extension to the dam to keep the water from flowing out there. Then I headed off to work on firewood. Seeing that the trail down Grouse Alley was wet, I took my axe and maul into the woods to split the maple logs I had cut. I was delighted to see that the Last Pool had enough water in it to make it look like a pond again.

The temperature had dropped after the rain and there was ice on the shady part of the pond, and I saw some bubbles under the ice, which is the first sign I’ve had in months that a mammal might be using the pond.

The bubbles didn’t tell me a coherent story and I saw nothing on any shore to suggest that a beaver or muskrat had been there. I could only hope that the spreading sheet of water might prove inviting enough that a muskrat or beaver might move into the beaver lodge.

I followed what is now a very wide channel down toward Boundary Pond.

And after I split some logs, I walked down the ridge to Boundary Pond dam where it was easy to see that the dam could back up another foot or two of water, but that water is leaking through the dam principally down the small stream down to what I called Wildcat Pond.

I didn’t go down to investigate the leak, but looking down the valley I could draw some conclusions. The hole in Wildcat Pond dam was rather low and wide, perhaps even made by the beavers in the winter before they moved up pond. Even after a long rainy spell, like this fall has had, water never backed up much behind that dam.

I think the leak in the Boundary Pond dam, which has always been small, has now clogged up enough with the debris that the dam almost repaired itself, and so there is now a creditable pond backed up behind the dam.

Now, if only a beaver would move into the lodge.

After 17 years of watching beavers come and go, I still do not have a theory on what invites beavers to move in and what keeps them away. If I was teaching a class or fancied myself a scientist, I could list various factors and not bother with the exceptions, which is to say, I have seen beavers move into areas where I did not think they could survive and leave areas, like the Last Pool and Boundary Pond, where I thought they could survive for a few more years.

December 6 hunting season ended on the island and the weather finally dried out enough for me to take a soggy tour of the island beaver ponds on a cool cloudy day. I went via Antler Trail and flushed 3 deer along the way. Thanks to the recent rains the Big Pond had not drained away.

I could tell by the rush of water I heard as I approached that beavers had not repaired the dam. Indeed the dam has deteriorated quite a bit with the old holes open more and at least one new major hole a bit farther along the dam in the photo below.

The good news is that all the holes are through the top of the dam and relieving pressure on holes deeper through the dam that otters made over the years and beavers patched. I was last here back on October 12, but I didn’t expect to find that beavers had returned to the pond. My hunch is that returning beavers would first get one of the small ponds upstream in shape, since this dam needs a lot of work. I was hoping to see otter scats at the dam. I saw them at the Lost Swamp Pond a couple weeks ago, and there is enough water in the Big Pond to interest an otter. There were no scats in their usual latrine just south of the dam, but I saw three scats on the north side of the holes in the dam.

The scats were on the back of the dam where the grass had been worn down and worked over by coyotes, I think, given that I often saw coyote poops there. There was one not far from the old otter scat below, but I angled the photo so I could include part of a collection of berries. Not sure what animal collected them there, but I bet a raccoon did it.

I looked up pond from the dam and took a photo to show the extent of water the otters had to forage in. The photo exaggerates the extent of the pond. For the last 16 years at least, the pond would extend over those grasses in the foreground and all the grasses in the background.

It once was, indeed, a big pond. I also took a photo looking toward where the lodge along the north shore used to be. It may still be there but this summer the grasses grew around and over it, and it is no longer perceptible from the dam.

I headed up to the Lost Swamp Pond expecting to see more otter scats and hoping some would be fresh, from this morning. Since the leaking dam there would be simple for a beaver to patch, I hoped to see some beaver work there too. And as I came down the southwest slope of the pond, I saw gnawing renewed on two of the big red oak trunks that have been gnawed over the years. I always assume beavers do this, but I know, that porcupines can do it too, so I looked for more evidence.

Today, the only other gnawing I saw was on another huge red oak trunk.

I didn’t make a close study of the teeth marks but I think they are large enough to be a beavers. I didn’t any signs of porcupine gnawing up in a tree. Last year I saw the same type of gnawing in the fall and soon saw more beaver foraging and soon saw the beaver. So maybe I am seeing evidence that a beaver just came back to the pond. If so, I should be able to tell next time I hike out here. Looking down from the rock above the mossy cove latrine, I saw at a glance that an otter had been there recently. The leaves were scraped up into scent mounds and some grass and moss had been scratched down to dirt.

Last year, otters here frequently came up on the rock to scat and scratch. This otter, or otters, only made it a few feet up the rock.

I didn’t see any scats up on the rock but there were some down on the grass slope down to the pond where an otter had scratched the ground. None of the scats looked fresh enough to have been left this morning.

The scent mounds that an otter scraped up at the bottom of the slope did look new made. At the East Trail Pond latrine, I’ve seen how scent mounds can collapse in a few days.

The scat on the scent mound did not look that fresh, but it did look grayer than the others.

With snow and pond ice that otters can break holes in, I should be able to tell how many otters are here and how they get from this pond to the East Trail Pond and where else they might go. Yes, I know that a wily tracker should come up with instant answers but experience has taught me to be patient. I usually enjoy speculating but this year I am stumped. I have heard one otter and I’ve seen piles of scat that I usually associate with a group of otters. I’ve seen several scent mounds, one large rolling area, and one possible slide in the dirt that looked relatively large. I hope I’m seeing signs of a mother, her two pups and her sister. We’ll see. I kept looking up and out at the pond hoping to see answers to my questions. All I saw was a pond large enough to accommodate otters and beavers. For the moment all I saw were geese way off in the southeast corner of the pond, and a few mallards.

I didn’t bring binoculars so I can’t say that the spur next to the lodge was a cache pile. A beaver moving into the pond could find osier to nip and collect up at that end of the pond, but that spur may well be the remnants of what beavers here last year collected. There were no signs of beavers doing anything at the closer lodges.

Ten years ago otters used to always scat along the north shore of the pond. For the last five years otters have concentrated their scatting along that shore up at the dam. This year they scatted at one of the old latrines and I saw that they had done so again.

There was nothing new in the latrine up higher in the moss and closer to the dam that these otters have used quite a bit. Then I saw that the latrine next to the dam and slightly down the rocky slope from the dam was rather worked over. But before photographing all that I took a photo of the dam and it was plain to see that no beaver had patched the leak.

The gap in the dam appears to be getting wider but after the recent rain there appears to be plenty of water in the pond. Of course, the otters made the breach in the dam last winter, and there coming back to the pond now as the dam still leaks demonstrates, I guess, that they don’t worry about leaking dams like I do. As usual a photo of the whole latrine area doesn’t reveal that otters have been there several times.

On the rock next to the pond, there is a pile of grass which I think we can call a scent mound though there is no scat on it or any stain of urine. It’s probably been there for awhile and has dried out.

The scats on the grass nearby are still black but not fresh.

Scats on some nearby moss didn’t look fresh either.

Most of the scats were spread on the lower part of the latrine. The otters used that area quite a bit last fall.

The scats here looked more recent but nothing from this morning, I think.

I assume that the otters here are the same that visit the East Trail Pond. Over the years, I’ve seem them take three routes: down to the Second Swamp Pond dam and take a right up the valley to the East Trail Pond; down to the middle of the Second Swamp and take a right before the knoll on the north shore of the pond, and then head up the beautiful granite ridge and then a left down to the East Trail Pond; finally I’ve tracked otters using the two mile long ridge northeast of the East Trail Pond which they can get too by going straight north from the Lost Swamp Pond dam. Since I knew the Second Swamp Pond dam was probably impassable because of the flood of water, I crossed the Upper Second Swamp Pond dam where I didn’t see the least sign of otters coming through. I should add that otters can get to the Second Swamp Pond by going over the ridge north of the Lost Swamp Pond. I angled toward the rock ridge north of the pond but when I got a glimpse of the Second Swamp Pond, I was lured over to take a look at that because there seemed to be more water in it than I expected to see. But when I got to the knoll, I saw that while there was more water thanks to the rain, there was no evidence that a beaver repaired the dam.

Then I went over to look down at the pool of water where a beaver lived for about a month in the early summer, a retreat to where I would not generally look for beavers. The beaver did leave signs on the Second Swamp Pond side of the knoll but I am pretty sure it stayed in this small but deep pool. There was no fresh beaver gnawing today and at a quick glance I couldn’t see any of the old work from a few months ago.

Down in the flat west of the pool, I saw that a porcupine had been busy gnawing in one of the trees permanently bent down by the ice storm in 1998.

On my way to the new East Trail Pond, I checked for any possible otter activity near the old East Trail Pond dam but saw none. The new East Trail Pond, as it were, is quite full and I saw a few heaves mud on the dam.

At this time of year with an almost full pond behind it, I hate to walk along a dam. One false step can cause the beavers added work to repair what damage I might do to the dam. I am certainly not bored touring the shores of this pond and seeing what the beavers are doing, but there is no point in sharing photos of every tree they are working on. Beavers usually don’t complete any job they start in one day or even one week. To me it looked like that sometime in the last three days a beaver gnawed some more on its cut into the choke-cherry tree up the slope near the dam with the intention of cutting it down. A beaver, perhaps the same one gnawing the cherry perhaps not, also gnawed another foot of bark off the nearby maple that fell a month or so ago.

I also saw that work on the thin oak up on the slope that I assumed a beaver did may have been done by a porcupine. Certainly a porcupine did the gnawing up in the tree.

I can’t resist taking a photo of the big dual girdling job on two big red oaks and every day it looks different. Now the beavers are getting deeper into the heart wood of the bigger trunk.

The small tree that fell onto the maple that the beavers almost completely stripped has been cut in half. It doesn’t look like the beavers have gotten much of a meal off it yet.

The smaller maple by the larger ash tree that was hung up is now down thanks, I assume, to the beavers cutting a log off the bottom of the trunk. They continue the same process on the smaller ash tree that they cut a few weeks ago but which hasn’t fallen.

It strikes me that beavers tolerate problems in ways humans can’t but how can you tell if that is because they are insensitive or simply patient. After all, gravity is their great ally and gravity can be gravely slow. The beavers have virtually strip the oak that fell high up on the ridge a week or so ago.

The beavers worked quickly on this tree that fell a week or so ago. When I got closer to the smaller ash tree cut and hung up I couldn’t resist a photo of the next log they are cutting with two previous logs down on the ground down the slope.

I took the high road to the otter latrine on the north shore around and over the beaver work. It would have been nice for my theory of the otters’ behavior this year if there had been fresh signs of an otter’s visit at the latrine, but there were none. Plus judging by the black color of the scats the otters were last here more recently than at the Lost Swamp Pond latrine. However, the latrine at the Lost Swamp Pond gets twice as much sunshine and is exposed to the winds from all directions. The East Trail Pond latrine only gets the south and east winds.

Heading back along the ridge I took a photo showing the beavers’ slow progress girdling the big red maple that fell into the pond almost a month ago.

I’ve been puzzling over poops along the little causeway at the end of the south cove of South Bay. Fishers have often scatted there over the years but foxes have not neglected the area either. I think the fresh scat below is twisted enough to be a fisher’s but their scats are usually dryer.

November 25 to 27, 2011

2011-12-04T06:40:00.000-08:00

November 25 it warmed up again today. All the snow and ice melted which seemed to make the Deep Pond dam leak. We had 2 inches of wet snow preceded by a quarter inch of ice.

Maybe the ice on the pond makes it harder to pack mud on the dam, or dulls the beavers' ability to sense leaks. Perhaps I better phrase that last idea better. I’ve been in the midst of the river freezing a few times -- in a boat of course, and found it a chaotic and energetic experience. After it forms ice might seem solid, monolithic, quiet, but the process of becoming ice is anything but that. Beavers swim in the water as it freezes; swim out of their lodges and find ice over their head. How can human senses really fathom that? Winter simplifies my life in the woods. It probably complicates a beavers’ life. Not that I had much time for such deep thinking today. I went out to the valley the beavers left to continue sawing up the maples they killed into logs suitable for hauling and splitting. But first I had to admire the depth of water now in Boundary Pond.

The green grasses that grew up at the end of the summer on the last of the pond bottom exposed as the pond water drained through the hole in the dam was getting flooded once again.

I didn’t check the dam where obviously the hole in it is getting clogged with debris draining from the pond. I still fear that poking around the hole will only make it worse. Meanwhile, celebrating that deer ticks were no longer latching on to us, Leslie trimmed some trails, and in the process forced a young porcupine higher up a small pine tree.

November 26 we had a warm night, in the 40s, followed by a day with temperatures climbing back into the 50s. I headed down to my work in the valley, and soon found deer ticks climbing up my pants again. I knew Leslie didn’t want to be bothered with ticks so I tracked her down before she waded too far into fields. Sticking together helps find ticks sticking to us. We went down to check the slope of the Deep Pond where we saw a beaver go into a burrow. There were muddy trails up the slope and into the brush.

And I saw where the beaver ignored the larger branches of a honeysuckle for smaller nips.

I can only think that the nose directs this beaver to what it cuts. Eyes would be too big to result in such a low, almost unnoticeable snip or two.

Then I got to where I could overlook the burrow. The water was a few inches higher than it was a week ago. There was a green stalk where there wasn’t one before. No new mud. It more or less looked the same as it did a week ago.

Leslie moved on ahead and up on the crest of the slope in the middle of another path the beaver and, we presume, other animals have used, something had dug down into the dirt to a root. Deer eat roots too, as well as beavers. There were no prints from any animal.

Down in the water there were root fibers and stalks, remnants of this beaver’s usual meal.

We still haven’t seen evidence of the beaver gnawing bark off a tree. However, as we looked across the pond back at the dam, we saw what looked like a log floating behind the east end of the dam. I walked over to take a closer look and on the way I noticed that the higher water in the pond had brought the beaver to a clump of willows up from the pond almost at the dam. There were trails up to the clump and I saw that some willow shoots were nipped.

When I got next to the dam, I saw that what I thought might be a cut log was only yellowing cut grass stalks floating in bunches behind the dam.

Years ago we could walk along the dam but the honeysuckles there have thrived, even more than they usually do, thanks to the increased fertility of the soil forming the dam, thanks to beavers heaving mud laced with plants up on it. Unfortunately for the beavers, they don’t eat honeysuckle bark, except under extreme conditions. Unfortunately for me, honeysuckles seem to grab all the surrounding air when they grow making it difficult for me to squeeze through. So I walked below the line of honeysuckles. The ground below the dam was not as wet as usual at this time of year thanks to the beaver’s repairs. I got a good photo of a portion of the dam that I tried to repair one. Thanks to several muskrat tunnels that had gotten out of hand the dam gave way there and the pond lost two feet of water. Working from below the dam with logs and a spare plywood rectangle, I fashioned a patch and imitated a beaver to the extent of wading into the mud behind the dam and shoveling some up on the dam. Didn’t work, at all. A few months later a beaver moved into the pond and repaired the dam. Looking up from below the dam what the beaver did doesn’t look like it should do the job -- certainly not as well as a plywood rectangle. Looks deceive.

However, water is leaking there. Farther along the dam, there seems to be other weak areas with leaks. I didn’t probe to see exactly where for fear of making the leaks worse.

Perhaps I should have more faith in the dam repairing skills of beavers. It is not true that they react in Pavlovian fashion to running water and must stop it. The Swedish scientist who published that manipulated beavers he captured from a river that Swedish engineers would frequently flush like it was toilet. Rather than labeling beavers as engineers, one might get closer to the truth by saying that they practice a religion in which they worship by bringing trees to the earth and raising mud to the heavens. So up I went to admire their devotions.

As has been the case for a week or so, the beaver seems to be pushing up one or two heaves of mud each evening.

And I must say, looking down on the mudded dam, it looks impregnable, but, it is still leaking.

I also admired a bit of vegetation the beaver rooted up but didn’t eat. How it can find such bright greens at this time of year is a marvel to me.

There is a small pool of water a few yards up from the west shore of the pond, that I periodically go over to check because over the years beavers have found things to eat there. I saw that the beaver cut what, for it, was a sizeable willow, maybe just over an inch thick at its base.

However, there aren’t many more shrubs to eat in or around the pool.

What beavers cut down over the years hasn’t grown back yet.

November 27 we went for a hike to check on the East Trail and Audubon Ponds, and since the ticks are active again, we stayed on the trails as best we could. We got up to our usual perch up on the granite ridge north of the East Trail Pond, and after sitting there a minute or two in the pine straw, I saw a deer tick climbing up my leg. So I went about my observations and Leslie looked for snakes sunning themselves on the rocks. At last, I can see logs stripped of bark in the beavers’ cache next to their lodge.

Looking down at the otter latrine from the top of the ridge, I could see that otters had not been at there since my last inspection. I went down to take a close look. There was no hint of the smell of otter scats. Plus I noticed that the scent mound looked deflated. Beavers make their lodge with logs that don’t shrink (well, maybe in a year of two) but otters make their scent mounds of grass and they don’t last long.

I took a close-up of one of the most recent scats -- a week old? There were fish scales in it.

But the proportions of fish scales to je ne sais quois pas was much less than usual. Frogs must have been the principal fare. Now they are secreting themselves for the winter which may explain why the otters have stopped coming here. I walked along the north ridge to the west. When the pond had ice on it, I could see how the beavers used the northwest corner of the pond. With the ice gone, I can see the bottom of the pond and the clear bottom of the southwest corner gives the impression that the beavers are spending all their time there.

Back in late spring when turtles were active I saw a good bit of oil sheen on the water just off the north shore. I saw that again, not sure what causes it, especially since both plants and turtles are subdued now.

Then I got a good view of the trail the beavers have made up the slope northwest of the pond.

Once on the trail, I took a photo looking down. Of course, all land mammals make trails when they forage, but beaver trail are always more striking because beavers use the same trail over and over again and it is easy to see what they are eating or leftovers from what they ate or carried off to eat. Tracking any other animal is more challenging, however.

I also took a close look at the big tree that fell into the pond around November 15th that the beavers have been dancing around, so to speak. They have trimmed and hauled all the branches, and now are slowly gnawing the bark off the parts of the branches they didn’t cut and now have started gnawing the bark of the trunk.

I’ll have to check my notes because I did see this tree when it had leaves. The trouble with my unscientific cataloguing of these doings is that I lose track of my initial identification of a tree. Leaves help. I assume this is a red maple and since the beavers are slow to gnaw into bark that is so convenient for them. Many beavers don’t cut red maple at all, but the beavers in this family have cut, trimmed and sometimes stripped red maples for years. An expert may be able to identify the trees I’ve observed just by looking photos of the bark and wood, so all my work may not be in vain. The next large tree that will probably fall near the pond is an ash at the foot of the diminishing ridge west of the pond.

As I continued around the pond, back on the trail, I took a photo of the last big tree to fall, a red oak, which got hung up in other trees. Gravity may slowly bring it down so I want a photo showing its current angle.

While making the point that the beavers here are gnawing trees of all sizes, I’ve not kept up with their gnawing on the tree roots. They keep expanding their gnawing of the roots from an ash tree with twin trunks, but it's not that their incisors follow their noses down the root to ground. They've started gnawing a root that surfaced on the ground. Perhaps it comes from the ash, or it might come from the smaller maples just east of the ash trees.

I found myself paying close attention to the recent heroic labors of the beavers. They almost completely trimmed and stripped the sugar maple that fell along the ridge about a month ago. I tried to see why they didn’t cut two large branches at the end of what remains of the tree. Given what they had done to the rest of the tree, I didn’t think it was from fear of falling over the ledge. I wondered if a section of dead wood at the base of the branches, probably dead from old porcupine gnawing, deterred the beaver from cutting it off.

However farther down the trunk there is another branch they didn’t cut that leans a bit over the ledge. They did strip the bark off it as much as they could. So I think the beaver doesn’t cut the branches for the very good reason that it realizes it has to put weight on the branch while cutting and when the branch goes the beaver may tumble.

Next to the maple are two or twinned red oak trunks that the beavers seem to be gnawing somewhat haphazardly, probably because the trunks are too close together to conveniently get around.

Well, I was finally approaching all these trees like a beaver. Instead of gawking at their height or length, I was nosing down at the bark. The stump of the stocky maple they cut which I thought was an old job came back to life. The freeze and thaw got its sap running. The pale stump is now almost reddish brown from the sap. Plus, perhaps thirsting for the sap, a beaver gnawing into some more bark below the cut finding a red seam of inner bark there.

There were flying insects lighting on the sappy wood and I tried to get a photo of them, in a vain hope of being able to identify what they are, but if they are in the photo below, they are a blur. I share the photo because it looks delicious.

Farther down the pond I saw a smaller maple, just cut. No sap running there, yet. The beavers hauled the cut trunk down the slope.

Meanwhile I was late for my rendezvous with Leslie who didn’t see any snakes. I quickly took a photo of the trimming the beavers did on the smaller tree they cut during the snow fall a few days ago.

Then we headed to Audubon Pond, or at least I did after Leslie decided she did not want to face a stiff, somewhat cold west wind blowing down South Bay. I still look for otter scats in the lower latrines on the north shore of South Bay, saw none today and haven’t seen any for weeks. When I went up to Audubon Pond coming to it from the southeast, I saw a line of trees that the beavers just cut.

Two red oaks and a small maple, I think, and beavers had cut most of the branches and cut a large log off one of the red oaks.

Then farther down the trail to the causeway I saw that the beavers were in the process of cutting down a pine tree.

They are gnawing into the trunk so I expect they want to cut it down and get to the branches. We’ll see.

I walked down the embankment to the check on the growth of the cache outside the beavers’ burrows into the bank. I am challenging myself to try to identify what trees the logs in the cache came from. Very difficult.

Several of the logs look rather old. The beavers probably dredged them up from the pond bottom. The beavers are bringing mud up as well as logs to cover the grassy bank above the burrow. I can’t say that any shag-bark hickory, red oak, or ash branches the beavers just collected were up on the bank. So they must be sunk in front of the lodge.

Then I went back down to check the otter latrine above the entrance to South Bay, which the otters have been visiting. There was no fresh scats, just the same scats I saw there 12 days ago, easier to see since the wind blew some of the leaves away.

The photo below shows a grassy slope with leaves arrayed in patterns easily explained by the shifting winds. Yet I can walk around the leaves, and, in my mind, recite a short history of otters in South Bay since the leaves began to fall. Until I see otter scats, such recitations are pure fantasy.

I went back to Audubon Pond where the beavers’ activities are writ large. When I was here on the 22nd I saw from afar that the beavers were girdling a large ash tree in the woods off the southwest corner of the pond. I got a closer look and saw that the tree I saw then was now completely girdled and another a few yards was getting the same treatment. There was more gnawing on the north side of the tree, not in the photo, so I would say the tree is almost half girdled.

Beavers generally do a complete job of girdling a tree, gnawing off all the bark within reach and gnawing the bark off exposed roots. Then there comes a period when it is hard to tell if deeper gnaws are the beginning of their effort to cut the tree down or just a reflection of how tasty the last bit of inner bark can be to them.

I took a close up of the girdling that gives a hint of how many times the beaver gnaws over the same patch of wood before it gets all outer and inner bark off.

The beavers are cutting down smaller trees in this section of the woods, including two ironwoods. They often don’t gnaw much of ironwoods, but they did cut branches off these two trees.

The sap is running up in these ironwoods, and some bugs enjoying the sap didn’t pause long enough to get into the photo.

Deeper in the woods, the beavers are cutting tree in and around a vernal pool, which thanks to the wet fall has plenty of water in it.

They had cut a tree here a few weeks ago. I didn’t see any evidence then of a beaver relaxing in the pond and nibbling sticks. I didn’t see any evidence of that today. Then I went down to the big ash the beavers have been girdling for a few weeks. I would say that they are definitely aiming to cut it down, except that one cut is high on the trunk, because they evidently stand on a downed log as they gnaw from that direction.

Then standing on the ground, on the other side of the tree, they are cutting into the tree a foot lower.

There must have been a little sap running in this ash tree because I saw several flies on the gnawed wood, and managed to get a photo of one.

When I checked the smaller ash nearby, that the beavers have cut down, I noticed that what I thought was a stripped log next to the almost completely stripped trunk of the tree, was actually an exposed root that beavers also stripped of bark.

I assume that the root ran back to the ash, but on closer look, I think it comes from a clump of shag-bark hickories. The beavers have cut down the smallest of that cluster of trees, and cut and hauled away the trunk and branches.

The trail the beavers use to get to this work is now running with water, draining the vernal pool a bit deeper in the woods.

Looking back from the pond, as grand as the beavers’ gnawing looks up close, from a distance, what the beavers are doing may hardly be noticed once the newly expose ash wood loses its glow.

Closer to the pond, the beavers are in the process of cutting down the 5th shag-bark hickory. One of the others they cut is not quite in the photo below. The one they are cutting now is bigger than the others and, if they cut it down, will rank as the biggest I’ve seen felled by beavers.

The freshly gnaw hickory had more flies on it than the freshly cut ash.

So far, after a hickory falls, the beavers cut off some of the branches in the crown and a log or two off the end of the trunk. The beavers did that to the last hickory that fell.

Instead of walking around the north end of the pond, as I usually do, I went back around the south end of the pond to get some photos of the beavers’ work on the northeast corner of the pond. Here too they are girdling the largest of the ash trees, which has twin trunks situated so it might be difficult for the beavers to cut them down.

When I was here on the 22nd I took a photo of the trunk of the large choke cherry tree they cut down. Today, I got a photo of the end of the trunk. The beavers have cut off branches but haven’t stripped the bark on the trunk.

The first ash tree the beavers cut down fell up on the mown field leading to the causeway forming the east shore of the pond. A month ago the trunk was 30 feet long and, since it didn’t completely fall to the ground, Leslie and I could sit on it and bounce on the end. The beavers have taken away about 20 feet of logs, and stripped most of the rest of the trunk.

By staying on the trails, we avoided getting as many ticks as we have been getting. I picked three off my pants.

November 18 to 24, 2011

2011-11-29T19:01:00.000-08:00

November 18 just over a week ago we saw the beaver in the Deep Pond dive into one of the burrows along the high slope of the pond, and because of our trip south, I didn’t have a chance to walk over and look over that burrow until today. The typical beaver pond often creates the illusion that things in it or along its far shore are bigger than they are. Looking across the pond from the dam, it looks like the beaver had done a good bit of work protecting the shore above the burrow. Standing above that section of the slope, I could see that the beaver hasn’t done much at all, save push up a bit of mud and two logs.

In other years beavers here have had cache piles in the pond outside the burrows and in places there is quite a collection of old beaver cut logs on the bottom of the pond, which drops off quickly. The logs pushed into the slope look relatively fresh, but I have seen no evidence that this beaver has cut any trees of that size since it has been in this pond.

As I walked around the pond I looked for trails into the woods, and now that the leaves are down I can see most of the trees. The beaver has some wide trails,

But they all peter out when they read the woods. The only woody vegetation I saw that the beaver cut was a little bit more honeysuckle.

I saw no signs of where the beaver took those honeysuckle branches. With the pond higher and the vegetation in it sinking as it dies back, I can’t tell if the beaver is still eating lily pads and rhizomes. However, there are more stalks of taller grasses floating in the pond.

But the muskrat I saw in the pond, and it might be eating that.

November 19 we have had a warm fall and because of that deer ticks seem to be everywhere in the woods and fields. Leslie has had a few bites. I’ve picked two off my skin before they dug in. Luckily, we can get to the East Trail by largely staying on relatively wide trails where we are less like to get ticks. So we took a break from the ticks today and went to the East Trail Pond even avoiding our usual shortcuts through woods and fields. Plus Leslie wanted to see the otter scent mound of which, in my journal entry for the 16th, I opined that the otters built solely to send a message to the beavers. Looking at my edited photos of the scent mound and lodge, Leslie immediately jumped to the same conclusion. Staying on the trail, we could easily see the beavers’ work along the south shore of the pond. I noticed that the bitternut hickory the beavers resumed cutting had fallen but was hung up on another tree.

It was easy to see that the beavers have resumed using the far west end of the pond. That area was all muddy and from the trail I took a photo of it as I overlooked the maple on the ledge that the beavers had almost completely stripped.

I took a photo of the large red oak next to the maple. They had girdled the oak now it looked like they were gnawing into it in hopes of eventually cutting it down.

In the 10 years I’ve watched this beaver family, they’ve always cut down large red oaks but never one quite that large. Of course, it is difficult to account for the intentions behind any given beaver gnaw. For example, a small twinned oak has been well gnawed around the trunk. It would be easy work for a beaver to cut both, but it has only cut one and seems more intent on gnawing rather than cutting the tree down.

Across the trail, an ash tree they cut a few weeks ago fell into other trees. The beavers cut off a log from the bottom of the trunk and the ash danced farther down the slope, and the beaver has started another cut higher up the trunk. Meanwhile in the cluster of trees where the ash once stood there are three trees in the process of being cut down.

Then the trail goes between a huge oak that the beavers have almost girdled and a smaller oak that they’ve almost cut.

Given all this wood work, I am not sure why the west end of the pond is so muddy. Over the years these beavers have been prone to dredge all their channels so perhaps they are deepening this area in preparation for winter.

Last fall the beavers cut several trees west of the pond, but haven’t been back this year, until this week. They have almost cut down a small tree and have girdled a larger one -- the typical pattern of these beavers.

Then we walked up the trail along the ridge north of the pond. An oak log the beavers have been working on is now in the middle of the trail.

The number of trees the beavers cut in the fall can’t help but strike humans as wasteful. For example, the beavers have started cutting other large trees even as an even larger tree they cut fell conveniently into the pond. But after trimming the branches off that tree, the beavers have not gnawed any bark on the trunk.

But that shows what the beavers want at this time of year, branches to cache near their lodge. To get the branches they have to cut trees down, and tall trees with their long branchless trunks do not sate their appetite for branches. Despite the number of photos I took, since I didn’t leave the trail, we got around the pond quickly and quietly enough so that we sat on the ridge overlooking the pond in case a beaver or otter was in it.

None was. Then we went down to look at the scent mound and compare it to the beaver lodge out in the pond. Of course, the mere comparison doesn’t prove my assertion that the scent mounds represent the otters sending a message to the beavers. But it does show that if the otters want to, if they look from their scent mound toward the middle of the pond they can see the top of the beaver lodge.

The otters first built a scent mound low on this slope. My crazy idea explains why they built another one up high on the rock. I took a photo at a different angle in that ever vain hope that another image might bolster my point. The other day I saw how difficult it is for beavers to get on top of their lodge since they otter proofed it with many logs crisscrossing the top. So I am not suggesting that the otters think that the beavers climb up their lodge and then are struck by an otters’ imitation of it. But one day I saw a beaver lurking in the pond below the scent mound keeping an eye on an otter on the shore above.

Anyway, fun to think in my weird fashion that I am overhearing a conversation of sorts between otters and beavers. As we headed back around the pond, I noticed that the beavers are back gnawing into the trunk of another lodge tree standing in the water just off the north shore.

We both got a tick or two on our pants that were easily removed.

November 21 I did some work at our land, cutting maple logs in the valley the beavers vacated, which was a bit melancholy. Of course we checked on the Deep Pond to see what the beaver has been up to. We are not having much rain, but it seems the beaver makes a point to push up a bit of mud now and then. I assume the different colors of the two mud heaves reflect a 24 hour lapse in time between each heave, and that the light color is more recent.

The middle section of the dam is well built up, at least a foot higher than the water behind the dam.

Nonetheless, here too, the beaver pushed up some mud, and as usual some still green vegetation was dredged up along with the mud.

Back on the island, after lunch, we took some friends for a hike to the East Trail Pond. After lecturing about beavers, I broke away to check the latrine below the ridge for fresh otter scats. Strangely, few people seem eager to join me in that quest. There was nothing new there, and the smell of their last round was unsniffable. I took another photo of the big scent mound. Now that I think that the otters made this scent mound to mock the beaver who otter proofed their lodge with logs on top, I over interpret what I see. Why are there so many pieces of wood near the scent mound….?

It got cold enough last night to freeze some of the pond, and there was still some patchy ice on the shady south side of the pond.

I went down the ridge to the north shore of the pond and got a photo looking up the broad trail the beavers are making up the ridge.

They have several projects on the way up beginning with stripping the bark off what remains of a thick red oak trunk. That so much of the gnawing is on the underside of the trunk encourages me to believe that there is a kit or two in the family. An adult beaver could easily gnaw the top of the trunk.

Instead of walking up the trail I continued along the shore of the pond and took a photo of the big tree that fell into the pond. It’s not an accurate photo since the sunlight on the trunk gives the impression that the bark has been gnawed off at spots, which is not the case. The beavers have just trimmed the branches off the tree.

I am familiar with many of the tree-cutting projects on the south slope of the pond, but generally I look down on them. Today I looked up and saw a nice juxtaposition of the beavers’ levels of work: a thin tree cut down but the trunk not segmented and hauled away, a middle size tree cut sufficiently to fall but hung up in other trees, and a huge trunk being girdled.

How much work has gained how much nutrition? Sounds like a simple calculation, and may be for humans because biologists have saddled us with a notion that every animal has to eat so much every day to survive. But whatever calculus beavers used which stretches over such a different sense of time than our own is difficult for me to fathom. The clutter of branches in the crown of the downed maple on the ledge have been simplified. Three remain, but I suppose the beavers have taken all they will off this tree on which they did about all they could without falling over the ledge.

Staying along the shore I checked the ice in front of the burrow, but there were no bubbles under it today.

I almost walked by a maple that fell since the last time I was here. This twinned tree had been gnawed by fits and starts over the last year, so the stump of the half that just fell looked like old work.

I didn’t notice before, but this tree had been topped years ago. The beavers quickly took the remaining branches on the lower trunk.

Beavers are always showing me things about trees that I didn’t notice before. The hardest lesson remains trying to figure out why they keep trying to girdle the big oaks. I walked around one twinned red oak and saw gnawing at all levels.

I wish I could say that this proved that a family big and small had been working on it, but I’d have to see it to be sure. But I am giving the impression that a spent time contemplating all that I was seeing. Actually I hurried off to catch up with Leslie and our friends on the trail. I took a photo of the ash trunks hung up but dancing down the ridge as the beavers cut more logs off the bottom.

I saw one of the logs cut off the bottom of the trunk, rolled a bit down the hill almost covered with dead leaves.

Then I took a photo of the oak that had been hanging up in other trees. The wind and gravity finally brought it down.

Beavers cut two branches and dragged them away and have several more to cut.

November 22 the temperature went below 20F last night so I was eager to get out to the East Trail pond to see how the beavers managed the ice, with a hope that there might be signs of otters too. I went with Justin, now 24, and as we headed up the East Trail, I gestured toward Otter Hole Pond, now mostly a meadow, where I took Ottoleo and Justin when they were 12, and we saw a family of otters. Here's a long video clip from that halcyon October day in 1999. Ottoleo and I do most of the talking.

We approached the East Trail Pond from the south and could easily see bubble trails under the ice. Those bubbles and the cracked up ice looked characteristic of how beavers relate from below to a frozen pond. But on the ice there were sweeps, I guess they should be called, that I had to take a hard look at.

I decided they looked more like sweeps from a beaver’s tail, rather than the slides of an otter’s belly. That said, after years of watching beavers during the winter, I have never seen “sweeps” like that.

We walked down toward the dam to see if the beavers broke the ice there. On the way I saw that there were bubbles under the ice leading to the bank burrow.

Unlike the last time I saw bubbles here, these didn’t necessarily show an animal swimming directly in and out of the burrow, more like it was poking around under the ice there. I always look for bubbles under the ice expecting to learn a great deal. Then when I see them, I have little idea as to what they mean save that probably a beaver, muskrat or otter was swimming there. Cracks in the ice tell more of a story. However, I got the impression the beavers were quick to get back under the ice after they broke out from under. There were no breaks leading to the shore, no sticks left on the ice.

It was that cold a night. I saw some large bubbles under the ice behind the dam, but no extensive cracking, though I didn’t walk out on the dam to take a close look.

I continued to take photos of the cracked ice since refrozen, but not because I could tell what happened there. I simply think cracked ice makes for a good photo.

There were bubbles under the ice along the north shore of the pond. I got the impression that beavers had kept the water around the big tree that fell into pond open for a relatively long time.

I was a bit disappointed that there were no bubbles or cracks to be seen off the rock where the otters usually latrine. That suggested that neither otters nor beavers swam by the area where I think I saw an otter and a beaver in a standoff a few weeks ago.

I didn’t see evidence that beavers came out of the pond to gnaw wood, but having someone with me, I was not careful to check all their current projects. We headed off to Audubon Pond via the high granite ridge north of the valley. The sun was at an angle to nicely illuminate the snaking channels of Meander Pond.

I thought if I got to the west end of the pond I could look back and see the iced over channels of the rest of the pond just as well, but looking back I lost my illuminating angle on the sun. Still it is an amazing pond to contemplate. The beavers now in the East Trail Pond, spent the winter of 2009-10 here, without much more water than is in the pond now.

Since we approached Audubon Pond from the northeast, I could wade right into the slightly wet ground where the beavers have cut down several ash trees.

In general the woods around this pond are rather clear. This corner is an exception with an old fallen pine tree adding to the congestion of asters and vines.

The beavers could easily go around the tangles but instead it looks like they are enjoying the ins and outs and then finding ash logs to cut and having no trouble dragging them down to the pond.

On the pond side of the thickets, the beavers finally cut down the large choke cherry tree that they tasted a month or so ago.

I should have checked on how many branches the beavers have trimmed off the cherry but we were due home for lunch in less than a half hour, so we hurried over to the bench on the north side of the pond. The middle of the pond was ice free, but along the shore I could see the bubbles the muskrats left as they swam in and out of their burrow under the trail out to the bench.

There were no signs of otter or beaver activity out near the bench. When otters are in the pond they often can’t resist pooping on the bench. The beavers continue stripping the big ash that fell west of the pond as well as girdle another big ash behind that one.

I took a closer look at the ash stump the better to appreciate the artistry of the beavers’ gnawing.

I saw what I am pretty sure is a fisher’s poop. Justin suggested it was bird poop, but that is exactly where stump hopping fishers like to poop. Plus the poop is twisted and a bit large for a mink.

The beavers have completely girdled a larger ash nearby and perhaps they are trying to cut it down. If so, they seem to be challenged by a old dead trunk lying next to the tree. When they move around the tree to gnaw a circle around the trunk, they go up on the log so that they wind up making a cut a foot higher than the other one.

My analysis seems critical of the beavers’ skills which I am loath to make. A bit farther back in the woods they are girdling another ash, but I didn’t walk over to take a closer look.

Meanwhile they cut down another large shag-bark hickory near the pond with, once again, the crown falling conveniently into the pond.

So far they have cut one small branch off it.

Shag-bark hickory is not a favorite food of beavers. Even the beaver family now at the East Trail Pond never cut down shag-barks near the Meander Pond. (Well, I should check that. They did taste one of the many there and maybe did cut it down just before they left.) They did expand their meals to include basswoods but not shag-barks. Obviously these beavers have a taste for them, and it looks like they are taking the branches they cut off them to their cache outside their bank lodge in the embankment nearby.

I’ll try to keep an eye on this cache and try to figure out how much of the shag-bark bark the beavers actually eat. I suppose it is possible they are responding to an instinctual imperative to fill up a cache without necessarily thinking through whether they really want to eat the bark, or if they will only eat it when faced with starving. But here I am implying that the beavers don’t know what they are doing, and obviously they do.

November 24 we had snow yesterday, ending late morning, that amounted to about 2 inches, wet and heavy. Fortunately the leaves were down on all but the oaks. I got out this morning before it warmed up enough for the snow to melt. I headed out on Antler Trail and saw the tracks of three hunters and only one deer. A stayed on the East Trail all the way so I could look over the dam, and I saw that, judging by the tracks on the snow and ice, the beavers had been out in all corners of the pond and the at the dam. Continuing down the trail, heading up pond, I saw that they crossed the trail and headed up to the crown of the tree that fell across the trail a few days ago.

While most larger branches in the crown appeared to be cut off, there was a considerable pile of sticks and twigs on the snow beyond the trimmed trunk.

I saw drag marks left by branches the beavers dragged back down to the pond.

There were no worn beaver trails up on the slope. Now and then I could see individual beaver foot prints and I also saw crisscrossing trails.

The snow was not deep enough, and it was melting away as I walked around, for me to conclude that wood chips that appeared to be on top of the snow were gnawed off by the beaver after the snow. But I saw a trail in the snow leading to wood chips by a small oak that the beavers had worked on before the snow. I think I can conclude that the beavers cut the tree down after the snow, or, cut the tree enough so that the wind blew the tree down.

The beavers had not cut any of the branches in the crown of the fallen tree, nor was there any gnawing on the trunk.

I was surprised to see that the trail of a beaver in the snow looped around the largest red oak that they are girdling and the beaver gnawed into the tree some more. Stripping and eating the bark off a big tree is not a simple operation. Beavers commonly gnaw over an area 3 or 4 times and eventually gnaw into wood that, in the considered opinion of humans, has no nutritional value for the beavers.

As surprising as the renewed work on the huge oak, was their gnawing again on a smaller oak that had been cut enough for the tree to fall and get hung up in other trees. I have a theory that beavers avoid getting too close to unstable trees. I see here that a tree once obviously unstable is not avoided until it falls. A beaver came back to gnaw more bark above the cut, I think.

Closer to the pond there were wider trails left in the snow by the beavers going in and out, plus a bit of crisscrossing. The water in the pond where the beavers got out was still open, suggesting that they were about there early this morning, and the water did not have a chance to freeze.

Ten yards down the south shore there was still ice floating where the beavers had come out. The trail in the snow on shore there was not as noticeable as the other opening. Perhaps only one beaver came in and out there, while the other hole in the ice was used more.

However, there were nibbled sticks on the ice around this hole which suggests that this ice was thick enough to support a beaver. So maybe this is where the beavers came out first, and then the other opening was used more as it got warmer. (All this thinking is pointless and fun, and seems to justify taking these photos, which I always find pleasing to look at.)

When ever there has been ice on the pond, I’ve checked the burrow along the shore to see if I can tell what animal is using it based on bubbles or lack of bubbles. Today there were bubbles under the ice, and there was open water right above the burrow. Yet there seemed to be no other commotion, no animal climbed out of the pond there.

I’m beginning to think a muskrat is using it, even though I haven’t seen a muskrat in the pond since the summer. But muskrats can be very discreet in their ins and outs, so to speak, unlike beavers and otters. There was not a long trail of open ice out in the middle of the pond. Open water snaked 10 or 20 yards from the lodge and then, evidently, the beavers swam the rest of the way under the ice. I’ve beavers swim much farther under ice but usually later in the season when the ice is thicker.

Turning my attention closer to shore again, I was pleased to find an almost perfectly circular hole through the ice.

That hole was on the way to a wider break through the ice and I followed a trail up the slope and saw that a beaver had gone up to begin cutting a larger tree next to the smaller maple they cut down and didn’t strip much off.

Then I saw evidence that beavers respond to pond freezing by making a point of getting out from under the ice and doing some work even in areas they've been ignoring. The beavers have not done much lately in the far corner of the pond just behind the south end of the dam. Last fall they cut, girdled and almost cut many trees here. Today I saw that they came out from under the ice here, made a wide trail around a well gnawed tree they haven’t addressed for months and resumed their gnawing.

That break in the ice didn’t reach the dam, but, again as if everything in the ice had to be aesthetically pleasing, there was a parallel break in the ice that reached the dam farther out along the dam.

I walked out on the dam to that opening and saw where a beaver came out of the pond up on the snow,

The beaver collected some thin branches in the open water, I assume by going over the dam and foraging through the shrubs down there.

As I continued along the dam looking for a beaver trail in the snow going over it, I passed a square cut in the ice. Not that a beaver cut it. The ice probably just broke that way when the beaver's back humped up under it.

Then I saw trail, not well used, with some stalks collected behind the dam,

Evidently foraged from the pool below the dam.

I didn’t see evidence here that any beaver went beyond the small pool of water and into the meadow below the pond. However a few yards farther along, I saw another trail down to a pool below the dam,

and I thought I could see beaver trails going beyond the pool and down into the meadow.

When I got off the dam, I walked through the meadow on the old boardwalk and didn’t have to go far before I crossed a beaver’s trail and saw where it nipped some shoots from a bush.

It nipped larger shoots off that bush last winter.

When I was back on the dam, I took two nice photos. The beavers opened a trail through the ice behind the north end of the dam.

And while on the dam, I looked back and took a photo of the pond. The ice in the middle of the pond was melting, and I assume the beavers opened trails there during the night.

I hadn’t seen any breaks in the ice or trails over the dam that I thought could have been made by otters. There were no signs that the otters had been up on their latrine on the rock on the north shore. However I did see that a beaver walked up the slope through the snow to the left of the rock. It walked right by the otters first big scent mound below the rock without apparently paying any attention to it.

It didn’t go up on the rock but went above it and then made a somewhat circuitous route over to the huge twin trunked red oak they have been gnawing on for over a year. Judging from the wood chips on the new fallen snow, the beaver climbed up into the crotch of the tree to do some gnawing.

Of course, one can suppose a beaver did this without any thoughts of the otters that have been up on this rock off and on during the last month or so, but, on the other hand, why choose a cold damp day to renew old work. Once it saw the otters had not been back, maybe the beaver justified its climb by taking a bite of something however old. Of course, if one of those two huge trunks toppled over there would be plenty to eat. As I walked along the ridge north of the pond, I saw a collection of stripped logs below. This area gets the morning sun early and is the only spot along the shore of the pond where the beavers have been leaving logs like this.

Standing on high, I took a photo showing the areas of open water that mark where beavers had been, including a nice curving trail to the northwest end of the pond.

Sometimes when I am able to watch beavers foraging in a pond for a couple hours, I will see how they work in all corners. But I usually see them working that long in other seasons. In the late fall, cold afternoons and quick sunsets means I am lucky to see beavers move around the pond at all. Beavers can be active during the day in the winter but then where they managed to keep the pond ice open determines where they can go. So today I was lucky to see how the beavers managed to touch every corner of the pond, sample all types of vegetation from small shoots from the base of previously cut shrubs to cuts on huge oaks that they’ve been gnawing for a year. When I got to the end of the East Trail which affords a view of the end of the north cove of South Bay, I saw a muskrat on the ice

It stayed on the ice nibbling a piece of vegetation long enough for me to enjoy the quick ripples in the water made by the muskrat's rapid jaws and sympathetic tail.

November 9 to 16, 2011

2011-11-29T18:59:00.000-08:00

November 9 as we headed out on a sunny relatively warm morning, we saw a flock of snow buntings along the gravel roads of TI Park; no snow here yet, and none in sight. We parked ourselves high on the ridge north of the East Trail at 10am, time enough, I hoped, to see otters relaxing after the morning feed, and to see a beaver on patrol, keeping those otters in line. But all we saw were very clear views of the pond. From that height we had a good view of the lodge.

Judging from a photo I took on the 4th, there are more logs up on the top of the lodge, where I think beavers jam them to keep otters off the top of their lodge. As the vegetation in the pond dies down, I can get a better view of where the beavers might have a cache, and decided there was none to be seen. So my guess is that they are sinking most of the logs and branches they bring into the pond. As I headed down to check the otter latrine on the rock at the foot of the slope, I took photos to get a better perspective on the large scent mounds the otters fashioned.

The scent mound on top of the rock,

is still not as big as the one they fashioned on their trail beside the rock.

The otters have not done anything of note to that bigger scent mound for a few weeks. That said, I don’t think they did anything to the scent mound on the rock since I was here on the 6th. I do think otters have been here since the 6th. However, at this time of year it is difficult to judge how old any given scat is. The scats I first saw here on the 6th still look fresh.

But I did see scats smeared on the rock a bit up from the other scats.

And I think the otters left those scats on their way to add their marks to the small flat above the rock.

I also took a photo of what looks like their rolling area in that their scrapping there does not seem be as intense as on the other part of the rock.

That said when I first saw this area a month or so ago, it struck me that the otters had rolled dirt down into a rut. As I went higher up the slope, as I left, I finally saw a juicy fresh scat that was still redolent with the characteristic odor of otter scats.

The upper end of the pond still has trails through the surface vegetation. The wood ducks haven’t been here the last few times I’ve come, so that leaves the beavers to make the trails.

As we came up the trail, hurrying to get up on the ridge to sit and watch the pond, we passed a tree that the beavers cut down on the south side of the trail and saw where another tree on the north side of the trail had been tasted.

The beavers have to climb to get up to this spot which is not unusual for them. Indeed the slope is a little gentler here than where they climbed up in the winter.

After many years of watching beavers, I’ve still not developed a theory of when and why beavers climb high up ridges to cut trees. The beavers cut branches off this tree and evidently took them away. They are also gnawing the trunk which, I think, is too big for them to get down to the pond.

Leslie stayed up on the ridge to watch for birds and I walked over to the south shore of the pond. I wanted to cross along the dam, walk around the whole pond and rejoin Leslie. I must admit that the tree cutting the beavers are doing along the trail worries me. Some official might get the notion that they have to be trapped and removed. As the trail goes around the pond, it gets closer to the pond and the beavers cut larger trees.

One they cut in the last few days is hung up in other trees and didn’t fall across the trail.

Meanwhile the beavers seem to be making the most of the tree that do fall to the ground. They have just about completely stripped the bark off the tree that fell parallel to the pond.

Knowing how pokey I would be crossing along the dam, I wanted to hurry past all this beaver tree work that I was familiar with, but I kept seeing juxtapositions that I had to photograph. The photo below show the tree they felled, the stump of a smaller tree they felled and hauled away and the trunk of a huge red oak that they have girdled and began to gnaw into.

The moral of the photo is that it is hard to generalize about what size trees beavers like to cut. Then I have to pause and enjoy how the beavers’ gnawing paints a tree. Standing there today, I was sure the beavers had worked again on the twin maples just up from the pond.

Here is the photo from November 2

Today I think their gnawing on the tree on the right hand side of the photo has reached a point where the beavers will not gnaw anymore. They'll simply wait for the wind to blow the tree down. That said farther down the shore is a bitternut hickory that they left off gnawing months ago. Again, I figured that meant the beavers were waiting for the wind. But they began gnawing it again.

I finally got to the dam, and as beavers often do, they have built up the south end of the dam where it makes sense that water will overflow if the pond fills up.

The last time I walked along the dam, about a month ago, I saw that the beavers pushed mud up discreetly and as walked below it today, it looked like the beavers were doing the same, simply patching weak points.

Along most of the dam ahead all the grass had not been covered with mud.

I get the impression that a beaver senses a possible weakness without going up on the dam. It begins with one heave of mud, and that might serve,

Or it might have to push more mud up on the dam, especially when the mud it pushes up rolls over the dam.

Of course, it is not so simple as that. Beavers seem to appreciate having small pools of water below that I assume they help to fashion by allowing some water to leak through the dam.

The pool above seems to be convenient to getting to cattails. At this damp time of year, it is difficult to tell when the mud pushed up on a dam is fresh. A paler shade of brown, ironically, is a give away. During dry times, the pale mud is in the process of being baked. I did find some definitely fresh mud.

But I continued to be surprised at how little mud had been pushed up, especially along sections of the middle part of the dam where the water was less than a foot from brimming over the top of the dam.

I paused from studying the dam and looked back at the lodge, and saw that I had found the angle from which to the take the official portrait of the lodge. I was startled anew by how beautiful this pond is and how lucky I am to be able to walk around it at my leisure.

When I turned back to the dam, there was more beauty to see, but also unease. Despite a passing familiarity with this area of over 20 years, I am uncertain as to why the dam is precisely where it is.

Beavers are capable of making long dams like Otter Hole Pond dam and Second Swamp Pond dam, but it seems to me that in making both those dams, a slight narrowing of the valley, marked by large rocks, dictated the line of the dam. What the beaver faced here seems more complex. The north end of the dam cuts the stream off and then I am not sure why they took the line they did across the valley. Perhaps there was an old dam here. I’ll have to study old photos. Or they simply tended toward the west, cheating toward slightly higher ground where they would not have to make the dam as high as the dam to the north blocking the stream.

Already in a state of grace, when I stepped back to get more perspective on how much water the dam held back, I saw fresh otter scats below the dam.

I’ll have to check these in a month because I am not sure of the solid matter in the black mass. Fish scales usually don’t sort out like that.

Another curious thing about these scats was that there was no scratching associated with them. Otters rarely pooped below the dam, and probably it's just because the vegetation is wet and thick below the dam, not easy to scrape.

Back facing the dam, heading north, I took a photo to show that the beavers were cutting cattails below the dam, and I inadvertently took a photo of a buttonbush. There are buttonbushes below the dam especially along the north end, and while buttonbushes can grow in water, I think they mark ground more prone to be dry. So here’s a theory: the line of the dam follows wetter ground where it would be easier for the beavers to dig up mud.

There are larger pools of water below the north end of the dam, more or less the creek bed, and when things freeze up and vegetation dies back I’ll be able to see if the beavers fashioned dams to back up water into the pool, probably.

There are trails over the dam into the pool, a wide one probably made by the beavers,

And a narrow one, perhaps made by the otters.

I suppose it is more likely that otters enter and exit the pond where I saw their scats at the center of the dam. But looking down into the meadow, which 6 years ago was a magnificent pond often enjoyed by otters, I wondered if the otters were actually denning in that meadow. Two years ago I saw evidence of an otter family denning in the grasses below the Upper Second Swamp Pond dam.

Planning ahead for this fall, I had expected a dearth of observations since I would be hemmed in by the hunting season. I didn’t expect this pond to give me so much pleasure. Part of the plan was to compare then and now photos of Shangri-la Pond, which I will do, but not today. I did take photos showing views of the former pond today.

There is still a little puddle left behind the busted dam.

We want back up the East Trail and then as we headed around the west end of the pond, we saw rippling in the water, and then saw the beaver making it. It hunched up and nibbled a twig

and then it bit a small branch off one of the large branches sunk in the pond and carried that over to the nearby north shore of the pond and nibbled the bark off that.

I assumed that this was a beaver that had been on guard for otters. Beavers seem to view me as an ally in that -- otters always over react to my presence. The beaver knew that my walking around the pond more or less otter-proofed it for that day, so the beaver was free to relax and have a bite.

November 10 we went to our land late enough in the day to see the beaver in the Deep Pond. It was a chilly day so we walked down the road to White Swamp first. There the beavers have expanded their foraging to some larger trees where the shore leaves the road, maybe hornbeams. I didn‘t take a close look.

They continue to take willows along the shore, but have left plenty behind.

The hunting and trapping seasons are so relentless in this part of New York State that I don’t want to get too involved with animals here. When the swamp freezes and at least hunting stops, I’ll try to get a broader view of what the beavers have been up to. Meanwhile, I haven’t seen the one beaver on our land for a few weeks. As we walked back up the road to our land, I corrected Leslie when she offered that it was too early for the beaver to come out. I said it liked to come out an hour before sunset, do a little eating and then go back into its lodge. We sat by the dam at 3:45, and, in the far end of the pond, the beaver was out, pulling a sunken branch toward the high slope.

It went directly toward an area where I know beavers had once dug a burrow. It dove, taking the branch and disappeared. There are logs, branches and perhaps mud on the slope above the burrow.

It surfaced five minutes later, sniffed the air and then swam back and forth warily in front of that burrow.

Then it dove back into the burrow, evidently not up to swimming down to the dam, as it often has, maybe because we were both there. It was getting cold so Leslie headed back to the car. I waited another five minutes and then took a photo of its recent heaves of mud on the dam.

I also took a photo of its mud work in the middle of the dam.

It keeps pushing mud up on the edge of this work, also pushing up plants with the mud.

And it is pushing mud up on the grass where there is no imminent threat of water draining out. We went away for a long weekend trip on the 11th and I didn’t get back to this pond until the 16th. During the 5 days we were away, the beaver didn’t push more mud up on those areas it has been building up. I saw maybe one small fresh heave. However it did push mud up on the grass where is unlikely the dam will ever leak.

Even though it was early in the afternoon, I sat in the chair by the dam. I noticed that there appeared to be more mud pushed up on the bank lodge below the knoll, plus there were cattail stalks floating in the water there.

While taking the photo, I heard a splash, like a muskrat snapping its tail. Come to think of it, when we were watching the beaver in the pond back on the 10th we heard the same type of splash coming from the tall grasses along the inlet. Back to the 16th, I saw ripples and then I saw a large muskrat swimming toward the lodge. I lost sight of it and then I saw it running on the land heading to where the inlet comes into the pond. Before leaving, I got closer to the bank lodge under the knoll. It certainly looks like the beaver is well protecting it with mud.

Perhaps it wants two dens to live in, the knoll dam and the burrow in the slope.

November 15 we got back from our trip yesterday, and today I wanted to keep out of the car. So I went to check up on what the beavers and otters have been doing on the island. I waited until the sun came out in the afternoon. I hurried to get up on the ridge north of the pond, currently the best spot for seeing what is going on in the pond. On the way up the trail, I saw that the beavers cut, mostly stripped and even segmented a red oak. It fell across the trail but it is probably not big enough to alarm park officials.

The beavers left a relatively high stump. Maybe while cutting the beaver stood on the trunk of the dead pine tree nearby, but that strikes me as a dangerous way to do it. Beavers are not that agile and they like to get away fast if a tree they are cutting starts to fall. I saw that they had tasted three or four other trees, all oaks I think, in the area.

Then I settled down on a rock and watched but there were neither beavers nor otters out in the pond. I saw what looked like a pile of branches in the pond relatively close to the lodge.

I’m not quite ready to conclude that that is this winter’s cache. The beavers have been cutting oaks, which still have their leaves, and I didn’t notice too many leaves in that pile. When the pond freezes, I’ll know, though I’ll be careful not to get too close. I went through the ice at this pond last winter. As usual I waited 20 minutes for something to happen and then went down to see if there were fresh scats in the otter latrine. I could tell as I eased myself down the ridge that the otters had been there in a big way. There was a line of huge scats on the back on the rock, about foot back from their previous line of scats.

Before I got to the scats, I saw some serious digging in the dirt, thought I must say this scraping seemed uncharacteristic of otters. They usually scrape up grass, or moss, not what appears to be just dirt sprouting a few small green plants.

And I had another distraction before I got to the new scats. First I thought there was more scraping lower on the rock, then with a second look I thought it might be a slide.

There is not that great a drop along the rock here but I like to picture a family of otters sliding there because I am still not sure a family has been coming here. I only heard one otter here, a week or so ago. Of course, one otter can make a slide. The line of new scats only added to my confusion in that regard. When I have seen otter families scat, I have noticed a tendency for mother and pups to scat in the same place, but I usually see a variety of shapes and sizes of scats. Today I saw 6 splats of scat, all large, and all about the same shape.

In the winter especially otters often scat on top of old scats and eventually the pile of scats can get to be 6 inches high. Perhaps there is a group of adult otters visiting the pond, not a family with pups. If we have a snow fall soon, I maybe be able to tell for certain. Meanwhile, I sat on a rock and enjoyed the scats, smell and all, and then I took a photo of each, and I will restrain myself and only share one.

As I sat on the rock, I got my best perspective on the huge scent mound the otters had on the center of the rock.

Then I raised my stare a few inches and saw the beaver lodge out in the pond.

The hallmark of the American naturalist is encompassing extensive if not varied landscapes and great distances. Our least traveled naturalist, Thoreau, puts me to shame. But my continually circling the same piles of poop, and don’t forget the smell does bring me closer to how the neurons fire in the brains of the animals I watch, sometimes gives me an unaccountable brainstorm that explains the otters’ persistent reiteration of the same black smelly theme on various granite rocks. Two summers ago I convinced myself that an otter mother used a rock on the shore of the Lost Swamp Pond as a map of sorts to familiarize her pups with the preferred route to South Bay. Today I convinced myself that the large scent mound on this rock, surrounded by so many healthy poops, is nothing less than a form of otter voodoo directed at the beavers and their lodge which they have otter proofed with logs crisscrossing its top. We think that scent mounds mark an otters exclusive rights to an area. The likelihood of any wandering otter coming into this pond by coming down this ridge is highly unlikely. Ergo, the otters are sticking it to the selfish beavers. I had enough daylight to check the beaver work at Audubon Pond so I left the otter voodoo. Before I left the East Trail Pond, I took a photo of the large tree in the pond that the beavers have been cutting for a few months that finally fell, perfectly for them, square into the pond.

I checked the trail between Thicket and Meander Ponds where I have seen otter scats this summer and fall, but there was nothing new there. The Audubon Pond beavers are maintaining their same level of activity. Indeed they seem more energetic than usual. The big ash that fell flat to the ground toward the pond has been trimmed and stripped, save for about one third in the middle of the tree.

I’m not sure why the beavers are slow to gnaw that bark. Perhaps because it is covered with moss.

Their girdling and gnawing of a nearby and larger ash tree is also impressive.

These are softer ash trees, but trying to cut this one down would be a challenge for any beaver. Not that they shy away from hard wood. Along the shore of the pond, they continue to cut down shag-bark hickories, as well as gnaw on their exposed roots.

I must say that when beavers gnaw on harder wood the sculpture they leave behind is more striking.

The beavers here have gnawed shag-bark hickories in other falls, but this year they are not only cutting them down, but trimming branches, cutting off logs, and stripping the bark of the trunk.

Meanwhile the sun was going down, tinting the beavers’ cache pile with gold.

I went down to South Bay and checked the otter latrine on the grassy slope overlooking the entrance to the bay, and while I didn’t see much new scrapping, I saw some small scats in the grass, not that fresh but new to me.

So an otter was here in the last few days.

November 16 inspired by the fresh otter scats that I saw at the East Trail Pond yesterday, I got an early start and hiked out to see the otters. As soon as I sat down up on the ridge north of the pond, I saw ripples around the lodge. A beaver pulled itself up on the lodge and walked slowly half way up the side of the lodge facing the dam.

It wasn’t bringing up mud, or a branch or log, and didn’t stay up there long. It went slowly back down in the pond, not the least suggestion of a slide down the sloping lodge, and dove into the water. It rooted around briefly and then surfaced below the lodge and got on the side facing me. It didn’t climb up very high on the lodge, and then groomed itself, back and side and head.

Then it went back into the pond, dove, rooted around, seemed to get up on a sunken log and nibble something, then swam back over to the lodge, a few feet away, climbed up on to its grooming spot, briefly groomed itself and then climbed higher up on the lodge.

It didn’t get up to the top mainly because of all the logs the beavers had pushed up on top of the lodge to, in my opinion, prevent otters from getting up there. This beaver showed its lack of agility as it slowly climbed over one of the lower logs.

I’m not sure why the beaver climbed the lodge. Inspecting the otter proofing? Seeing how much more mud had to be packed on it? A brief lookout for otters? It went down into the pond, dove and evidently swam into the lodge because I didn’t see it again in the pond.

Seven minutes after it went inside the lodge, a young buck walked slowly along the dam.

Rather than going down to check the otter latrine below me, I walked down the ridge toward the dam to check another likely spot for otters to latrine and scrape up a scent mound. But first I turned back and took a photo of the latrine where the otters do have their scent mounds just to show how unlikely it would be for another otter to find it.

Then I took a photo of the grassy mossy slope strategically located by the inlet creek and dam. There were no otter scats and no scratching there.

That said, back in the days when otter used the pond that filled the whole valley, they never latrined here. One year, I think, they did latrine where they are latrining now. On my way back around the west end of the pond, I took a photo of the big tree they cut down that fell so conveniently in the pond. They continue to cut off branches, but no stripping of the trunk yet.

Then I checked out the work they’ve doing on the south side of the pond that I could see from the trail. A beaver began making a second cut on a maple that jumped off its cut stump but didn’t fall down.

This is a ploy I use when a tree I cut gets hung up. It’s a way to remind gravity of how it is supposed to behave and to make the tree lighter so I can push it back and out of the crown the tree is hung up in. I don’t think the beavers will get this tree light enough for them to do that. Then I went up the little canyon where the beavers had cut an ironwood almost on the top of the ridge. That relatively small tree had been hung up and Ottoleo and I pushed it down. No beaver had come back to take advantage of our favor. We went to our land in the afternoon and I ended my brief vacation from collecting firewood. I headed down our inner valley to saw two maple that the beavers girdled into logs. Of course, I took a look at the beaver ponds below. They had more water, suggesting that my hope that the hole deep in the dam would be naturally plugged by leaves and other floating litter was coming to pass. The Last Pool had water backing up to the lodge.

The channel heading down to the Boundary Pond was full of clear water.

The upper Boundary Pond had enough water in it to give beavers comfort,

And there was enough water behind the dam for beavers to survive.

But there are no beavers here. I wasn’t seduced into thinking the trails in the duckweed were made by beavers. Cold water is slowly subduing that floating plant; perhaps some ducks are making trails through it.

November 2 to 8, 2011

2011-11-12T19:11:00.001-08:00

November 2 I tried to get to the East Trail Pond soon after the sun began warming up the sloping latrine that the otter or otters have been using there. The wind was coming from the southeast which made sitting above the northwest end of the pond the place to be, theoretically. But as I sat high on the ridge, I saw the tricks the wind can play including coming down the valley to the west and even gusting from the valley to the north. When the wind get over 15 miles an hour, it plays through the valleys seemingly willy-nilly, or put it this way, all these segmented curving granite ridges lure the wind every which way. Not that my wafted scent alerted any animal out in the pond. I sat long enough to see that there were no otters or beavers out. I did see a wood duck in the pond right below me. A small flock of cedar waxwings flitting in and around the kept me entertained. I slid down the hill and took a photo of where I had been sitting which was right behind and above a small truncated white oak that the beavers had started to cut down.

Then I checked the otter latrine and got the impression that the otter had not been back here. At least there were no new scats. I took a photo looking from below the latrine hoping that would provide an illuminating angle on some of the otter scent mounds.

Then I took a photo looking down on the biggest scent mound, hoping the bright sunlight would better define its heft.

Standing closer to the pond, I took a photo of the winterberry bushes, though the waxwings had flown off.

Satisfied that an otter was not around nor a beaver on watch, I walked around the pond and took photos of the trees the beavers have been cutting, which I have neglected to do the last few times I was here. The photo below is not very good. The trail the beavers had made angling up the ridge is quite dramatic and the major attraction for the beavers is not the tree they are girdling to the left of the trail but another girdling job almost at the crest of the ridge.

The sun was shining right where the beavers had girdled the trunk, actually making it harder to appreciate, in a photo.

These beavers first came up this ridge last year in the fall and then throughout the winter. No trips up during the spring and summer and beginning a month or so ago, they started coming back up. But most of their recent work is on the south shore of the pond. They did a magnificent job of stripping one long narrow trunk that fell square down pointing directly at the pond.

As a rule, I think it is foolish to try to tell the age of beavers by the way they gnaw trees, but seeing three deep cuts in the trunk just a few inches apart, encourages me to think that there may be a couple kits here.

I have been writing about beavers and sharing it on the web since 1999. Thanks to the growth of the web and increased interest in beavers, my observations have become more and more irrelevant. And, it seems to me, almost unpalatable because they deviate so much from the accepted wisdom about beavers. It is indeed possible that my observations have become too focused on this one beaver family that I have followed for 10 years more or less. Beavers are supposed to feast on fast growing softwoods, and have an eye for smaller trees which are easily transportable and used by beavers to make and repair dams and lodges. But this family has a taste for girdling the largest oaks and maples in the surrounding woods.

It makes a good bit of sense for beavers to girdle and eventually kill large trees because it is to the beavers’ advantage to open the ground to sunlight and give other vegetation, including small softwoods, the chance to grow. Next to the girdling of the big tree, there was a cluster of smaller trees, two ash and two maples. It will be interesting to see if all four are cut.

A maple the beavers have been cutting for about a month, that I sat behind one evening while waiting for the beavers to come out, fell parallel to the pond and along the top of a small granite cliff, not the most convenient place for beavers.

But judging from the branches that they cut and stripped, the beavers worked easily enough along the edge of the cliff.

It would be fun to see them trying to cut the remaining branches.

The beavers resumed gnawing on side-by-side maples. Hard to tell but judging from the color of the gnaws, this may be the third time that the beavers resumed gnawing these trees, last year, this spring and now.

Beavers generally make steady progress in segmenting the trees they cut down into logs. Here are three photos of a maple they cut back in late September. On the 28th it still had a leafy crown,

By October 5th the leaves had been eaten off the tree,

and now all the branches are cut. I don’t know why the beavers didn’t gnaw bark off the trunk

Farther down the pond toward the dam, another maple that fell into the water seemed to have gotten the same treatment.

Perhaps the beavers are reserving the trunks of these trees for gnawing in the winter because they are closer to the lodge. Beavers cache branches by the lodge, but never enough, in such a shallow pond, to kept them fed. Speaking of the cache, the vegetation out in the pond is dying down and I think I am seeing a cache pile growing a few yard south of the lodge.

I strained the editing to get that photo of the cache which puts the pond in an unflattering light. To make up for that I took a more artistic photo showing beaver work, the pond, and the beautiful ridge north of the pond.

Finally I checked the dam which is well built up along its south end. This is quite an engineering marvel since it transverses the widest part of the valley. (The old dam, which backed up water that covered maybe three times the area of the current pond, was built across the narrowest part of the valley.) So I don’t second guess these beavers, but I can’t figure out why they don’t start building a dam below this one.

Other than this general build up at the south end of the dam, they seem to be building up the dam in smaller segments where I assume the trouble spots are.

I’ll try to walk along the dam before the pond freezes. It would harder for the beavers to make repairs, if I mis-step once ice forms.

November 3 we worked at our land today and the first thing we did was walk down the road, for exercise, where we saw that beavers had cut more or the willows between White Swamp and the road.

There were nips at two spots along the shore.

Given the low angle of the sun, I couldn’t tell if the water out in the swamp was muddy.

There is a pipe under the road draining a small pond of water surrounded by willows, the low point of a big pasture that 80 head of cattle keep well trimmed. There was a pat of mud above the pipe on the swamp side that a beaver might have pushed up. But there were no signs of beavers being in the pond on the other side of the road. Back at our land, I checked on what the beaver at the Deep Pond has been doing. The beaver has pushed up more mud and expanding the wall of mud beyond the gap in the dam that it had to first patch.

The mud wall is growing beyond the gap in the middle of the dam, too.

This beaver hasn’t made its mark as a tree cutter or a log hauler, but it is up the highest beaver standards when it comes to pushing mud up on the dam.

It appears that the beaver is dredging up plants with the mud it heaves up, which must help stabilize the mud.

I haven’t checked the bank lodge under the knoll in the southwest corner of the pond. It is difficult to get to because I have to climb up and over the knoll to get a good look at it. In the summer I usually approach from the other direction and hop over the inlet creek, but that area is flooded a bit now so getting there that way is not so easy. Parting the bonesets along the west shore, I saw a small pat of mud up on the shore.

However what trails there were through the grasses along that shore didn’t lead to any beaver work. Deer and raccoons also pass this way. I managed to get up on the knoll and found that I didn’t have to work my way through the dense honeysuckles to get to the other side. Enough leaves were down so I could see that the beaver had pushed mud up on the lodge.

That suggests that it is denning there now and planning to spend the winter there.

November 4 we are on the southern shore of a large island in the middle of the St. Lawrence River and when there is a north wind we can be fooled into thinking that there is no wind at all. Once we went around the headland, we could feel the wind, cold wind because the temperature was about 40 degrees, and I steered the boat so we went up the lee shore of Murray Island. When we rounded the Murray headland we faced the white caps but managed to get over to the lee shore of Picton Island. The wind along the northeast shore of Picton was not that strong but conditions were not good for rowing along that rocky shore. I puttered past where the otters left fresh scats when we were here the 31st, and didn’t see any new scats there. I saw new scats on a rock in the same area they latrined before, but they weren’t bunched up as so many were on the 31st.

Unable to get close to the scats, I wasn’t really able to characterize them. As I steered the boat around Quarry Point, I thought I saw a trail up through the grass to an old otter latrine. We have finally had a few below freezing nights and I wondered if the cold was making those latrine on the south shore of Quarry Point more attractive to otters. Those rocks get warmth from the sun in the morning that the north shore never gets. We docked the boat and I hopped up the rocks to the grassy ledge. I got a photo of scratching up a trail,

But I didn’t see any otters scats nearby. This mossy area retains its green but most of the ledge had dead grass falling over with no signs of otters going through, and no scats.

When we got back into the calmer water behind Murray Island, we realized South Bay would be calm too. So we docked on some rocks just below the otter latrine at the entrance to South Bay. Up on the grassy ledge I saw a trail coming up from the water, and scratching down to dirt. But there were no scats.

I followed the animal’s trail higher up the slope and saw some more scratching that combed the grass and moss.

In a pile of dead leaves below the scratching I saw the glint of grayish, scale-laced scat.

So an otter was here. Then we continued up the ridge (never seen any evidence that otters do this,) and enjoyed the mosses on one of the most beautiful rocks on the island. Two kinds of mosses predominated, sometimes sharing the same knob of rock.

The top of this ridge is formed by a roll, a rib, a wave, a snake, a magnificent stroke of ancient wisdom….

That we always enjoy walking down.

Then I checked on what the beavers have been up to around Audubon Pond, and, as always, kept an eye out for otter scats, but I didn‘t see any. As for beaver work, they cut down an ash in the woods west of the pond that fell directly toward the pond.

The beavers seem to prefer stripping the bark off the trunk rather than cutting all the branches and taking them to the pond.

They also stopped trying to take a large maple log they cut to the pond, and instead are stripping bark off the trunk where it lays.

They seem to be paying less attention to these woods and concentrating on a grove of ash in the northeast corner of the pond. Here they are cutting smaller ash and taking branches and logs to the pond, going down a gentle slope.

That said, they are stripping the bark off two larger ash trees here, that conveniently fell for both beavers and humans.

This man-made pond is too well kept and doesn’t support as much wildlife as beaver-made ponds. The state park people mow the grass on the south and east sides of the pond. The woods on the west side keep down undergrowth which leaves the north side where beavers might shop for smaller things to eat. There are a few cattails in the water, but the shore is relatively dry. Beavers evidently don’t eat asters. So to survive the beavers cut down trees, even shag-bark hickories. Where ponds are surrounded with dense vegetation, the beavers’ foraging patterns make an impression. I can get a feel for the beavers’ likes and dislikes. But here the foraging seems more humdrum. In the southeast corner of the pond, the beavers had cut one maple and taken a few logs to the pond. One large log remains on the slope.

And the beavers cut another maple nearby, and have begun segmenting that.

We walked along the embankment to get back to our boat. The cache pile in front of the bank lodge along the embankment seems to have a few more branches on its outer edge.

While these cache piles are designed to feed beavers during the winter, I’ve often seen kits eating in them at this time of year. It is important for them to fatten up for the winter. That I don’t see any nibbled sticks in the cache is another indication that the pair of beavers here don’t have any kits. There were some stripped sticks on the other side of the lodge, away from the cache.

Probably leftovers left by an adult.

November 6 I took a hike with Ottoleo and Chris Baird out to the East Trail Pond. Heading over Antler Trail we were diverted by picking ticks off our pant legs. Then along the South Bay trail Chris scratched trees with holes hoping to lure out a flying squirrel which he did earlier this year. Since the beavers and otters have been so active at the East Trail Pond, I expected to have plenty of show to tell about. So I had, and with the smell of fresh otter scats to accompany my lecture.

Otters had just been there, and given the number of new scats and their size, I think there must have been more than one otter.

There was another huge scent mound up on the rock. Since I was with others, I didn’t make a close study of it. Perhaps an otter combined two neighboring scent mounds into on. Plus I have difficulty picturing how an otter makes such a mound beyond raising ground litter with its churning hind legs. How does it shape the mass or is it accidental?

I took advantage of having human bodies around to help put the otters’ work in perspective.

Their better eyes also helped. I opined that there were probably not fish to speak of in the pond, and Chris saw one wiggling below us. Then we turned our attention to what the beavers have been up to. Looking at the lodge, I keep thinking I am seeing a cache pile, off to the right in the photo below.

In telling the history of the East Trail Pond beavers, I mentioned their dramatic sojourn in Shangri-la Pond just over the ridge. So before showing the beavers’ recent lumbering on the south shore of the East Trail Pond, I took the “boys” (30 and 24 years old respectively, MS and Ph. D. students respectively) over to what remains of the beavers’ works in Shangri-la Pond. The lodge remains in relatively good shape.

The beavers used logs from some very old lodges in the upper East Trail Pond for bracing their dam and, I assume, building their new lodge, but they didn’t come up to this empty lodge which is only about 50 yards up creek from the East Trail Pond. After a brief history of the dam which failed catastrophically twice in one month in 2009, we went across the East Trail Pond meadow on the boardwalk. I thought the three of us crossing on or below dam might damage it. Going up the south shore of the dam, I noticed some new girdling of a small oak up on the ridge.

To our surprise, a good bit of the well shaded south side of the pond was still frozen. Ottoleo tapped into it and found it about ¾ of an inch thick. We could see ice breaks consistent with a beaver busting the ice with its head.

While I hope there is a kit or two in this family, I must say that the bubble trails we saw under the ice and the few cracks in the ice that we saw could be done by just two or three beavers out in the pond.

However, there were interesting bubbles under the ice seemingly going into an old burrow that while probably made by beavers had been used by otters when they used to raise their pups here years ago. Of course, muskrats could also use the burrow.

However I have never seen any otter scats or muskrat poops around this burrow. Beavers typically have an auxiliary den. So a beaver probably left the trail of bubbles. Meanwhile a flock of waxwings were perched on top a dead tree on the shore of the pond, seemingly oblivious to us.

Then I showed them the beaver work heading up the slope south of the pond. Comparing photos from the 2nd and today shows how much bark stripping the beavers had done on the maple that fell parallel to the pond up on a rock ledge.

As you move away from a beaver pond you usually see that beavers prefer to cut smaller trees. A beaver demonstrated that by starting to cut a small oak growing out of a larger one.

But after I shared that lesson, Ottoleo pointed out that a beaver had tasted two of the bigger trunks.

So who knows what these beavers, who like to cut large trees, will wind up doing. The last tree the beavers cut up on this slope was a small one.

It was easy to push down, so we did the beavers a favor. We’ll see if the beavers come back to finish the job.

November 8 meanwhile the beaver at our land continues to bolster the dam and slowly spreading mud along the whole length of the dam.

There were two interesting things on the dam, a granite rock about the size of a softball pushed up by the beaver and caked with mud,

And a frog which got up on the dam by itself, and on this cold day, was not disposed to move no matter how close I got to it.

We saw a frog on the dam here four days ago

Today the frog was sporting some green.

This has been a warm fall, but the pond could be frozen over in a few weeks.