beaver – Eyes on the Wild

The beaver(s) have been very busy building a new lodge for the upcoming winter. My blue kayak is for scale:

The beavers are completely nocturnal, so each morning I take a photo from the shore, and compare it to the previous day for progress.

They build a heap of vegetation, pretty haphazard. As it grows they add mud, then more vegetation, including limbs up to maybe 3″ diameter, but also hemlock twigs and other leafy branches. I created a short stop-motion movie out of a series of shots, but you’ll need sharp eyes to spot the difference from day to day. A green branch gets added, but then wilts and turns brown or gets covered by woody debris:

Their raw materials come from naturally fallen trees, or ones they have cut themselves:

And which finally fell in a windstorm some days later:

They felled the small hemlock below, and then returned and pruned off all the side limbs:

If there aren’t enough trees close to the water they sometimes build canals, which allow them to stay in the water for longer and also float trees down to the pond:

And in this case it looks as though they were used as a source for mud, which they scraped off the banks:

Mud also comes from shallow areas of the pond. In the photo below they scraped a mud bank next to the lodge of all its vegetation to get at the mud:

I tried very hard to catch them in the act of building, but it’s tricky when they are nocturnal, and 30 minutes walk deep in the woods behind my house. Eventually I got up at 5.45am, drove part of the way into the woods in the dark, and positioned myself just as it was getting light enough to see the lodge. I did this three mornings in a row, and finally saw a beaver pushing a big lump of mud up onto the lodge. By the time the light was good enough for a decent photo he had stopped work for the night, so this is the best I can show you. He’s in the bottom right-hand corner, sleek and wet from the pond, with his back to the viewer: