Wearing my snowshoes, I carefully climbed off the trail toward the water where a single hole in the ice provided access to the beaver’s underwater world. Their lodge is on the opposite shore at the edge of a vacant lot’s lawn.  On this side, the Forest Preserve provides this buffet; buckthorn and dogwood are the favorites, but elm and honeysuckle grow here, too.  The property owners of the mowed yard may not welcome feasting beavers, but the Forest Preserve does. Especially when they’re clearing invasive buckthorn.  If the beavers stay with this strategy, they may do okay. 

There are cross-country ski tracks ahead of me – the only other marks in the newly fallen snow beside the beaver tracks.  Judging by the stride of his ski poles in the snow, the skier didn’t even slow down. He lives next door.  Maybe he didn’t notice, won’t  notice, the beavers.

After I finish my snowshoeing, and Tybee, my Labrador, is sufficiently exercised, I return alone with my motion-activated camera.  I placed it facing the hole in the ice.

The next few nights would be bitter cold, so I only left the camera out a few days over concerns the batteries would drain quickly.  Usually, I leave it for a week – unless I’m too impatient to see what it may have captured!  Two days later, I retrieved the camera. There were no new tracks near it and just a few images. Disappointed, I tucked it into my jacket and continued my hike.

Only twenty more feet down the path, there are mazes of tracks in and around trees, across the trail and back down to the shore. I back-tracked and ducked into the trees where I spotted a hole in the earth a yard or so from the frozen pond shore.  It’s a tunnel to the waters below the ice!  

I was careful not to approach too closely, unsure what effect my presence might have on the beavers returning to the area.  I placed the camera in sight of the earthen chute and continued gleefully down the path on my snowshoes.  Tybee, who dawdles to take in all of the smells wherever we go, has absolutely no interest in the beavers. 

A week passed before I was able to get out retrieve the camera. There were two pictures of deer, a few mallards, tree squirrels and a single coyote.  And two hundred beaver pictures!  (I need to get a new trail camera that will give me better nighttime images, but still!).

The camera stamps the images with the date, time and air temperature.  It’s interesting to see all of the different times of day and night that they were out.  I assume that I’m seeing at least two beavers, but no images contain more than one beaver and these images don’t have enough detail to differentiate between individuals, so I can’t be sure.

On the day that I picked up the camera, I explored the beaver hole more closely.  It goes straight down a two to three feet before turning toward to water.  I couldn’t see into the turn and didn’t think reaching into it would be wise. I also collected some souvenirs.

I’m excited to see the new beaver family. I hope they continue to feed from the Forest Preserve land, stay away from ornamental trees and stay under the radar of the local landowners.

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The post The Beavers Next Door appeared first on Exploring Nature by Sheila Newenham.

There are beavers in our pond again. I’d put some crabapple cuttings in the fire pit and on the habitat behind the woodpile for my voles. The next day there was this well-worn muddy path from the pond, and most of the cuttings were gone. My husband cleaned out the culvert.  This is the first problem that needs solving if the beavers are to stay.  There are other problems to living with beavers that we’ve seen before.

The culvert drains my pond and another upstream diverting most of the suburban runoff on a winding path to the Fox River.  Notice the naked, bark-eaten branches.

I put out my camera trap and more crabapple branches.  And then the floods came ( we got 4.5″ of rain on one day flooding the firepit and vole habitat. Read about it here), so there were no beaver pictures.

A Daylight Visit

However, yesterday evening as I stood in my kitchen, I noticed a furry head making a wake coming in from the left. “The muskrat is here,” I remarked. “No! That’s the beaver!” I excitedly corrected myself.  I watched the beaver climb out of the water onto the bank on the far side of the pond where I’d cleared the buckthorn, honeysuckle, and garlic mustard to plant native woodland flowers years before. I slinked out the door with my camera in hand.   The two Canada goose families were on the lawn. As long as they don’t alarm or flee, the beaver shouldn’t be concerned either.  He chewed on an old, rotten landscape timber that had been relocated by the weekend’s flood.

Zig-zagging closer with one eye on the geese, I crept through the yard.  The beaver ambivalently dropped back into the water, swam at the surface for about 20 feet to the end of the pond, and then hauled out again.  Waddling across the neighbor’s mowed lawn, he entered the woods and resumed foraging.  With the beaver so occupied, I tiptoed up behind the thick, gnarly trunk of my old willow tree. I kept watching and taking pictures. One pair of geese and their four goslings quietly slipped into the water and moved off to the other side of the pond.  They’d had enough of my antics.  The second group, a family of three, who are notoriously less concerned about just about everything, continued grazing.

The beaver got back in the water, causing a wake as he paddled away.

Then he began to curve around.  He was swimming straight at me.

I zoomed out and continued to photograph.  And zoomed out some more.  The beaver paused three feet from shore, about twenty feet from me. He gazed at me for a moment and then curled under the surface with hardly a ripple.

The water doesn’t even seem deep enough here for him to dive.  In a moment, he reappeared closer still but with his back toward me (the ultimate sign of trust) gliding toward the other end of the pond again. Past my dock, he veered toward the shore where the family of geese had relocated. He swam directly toward them just as he’d approached me.  The goslings were onshore eating and the parents were in the water.  They were not having it!  One of the adults rushed the beaver, who recoiled in a rush of water and disappeared.

Amazed

I took 199 pictures. These are the experiences that make me think I must be putting a lot of good out into the world – to have a beaver sighting in my own backyard and get some shareable photographs is unreal. To have beaver to come over to see me – that’s magic. My heart is full.  I hope we can find a way to live together. My wish for you is that you will find things in your life today that fill your heart, too.

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The post Living with Beavers appeared first on Exploring Nature by Sheila Newenham.