The past month has conspired against our beavers. Massive storms wiped out much of the dams. Super high tides finished the job. Our beavers have seemed to hunker down and take a low profile in all this. There hasn’t been a Worth A Dam sighting in 15 days, although Jean talked to Moses who had night footage of mom and kit together. Are they gone? Are they washed out? Have they finally thrown in the Martinez towel?
For the past two nights we sat beaver sentry and were rewarded with nothing but raccoons for our efforts, although a very lovely night heron fished from the secondary and waded onto it to show us that it wasn’t ‘really’ gone. We left willow two nights because we figured it would only get taken by beavers (or koala bears!) and it appeared to be inconclusively rifled through each morning.
We decided that desperate times call for desperate measures, and dug out the old night wildlife camera and thought we’d risk it being stolen. Jon did his best to camouflage and we didn’t think anyone would notice anything except the flash. 5 pictures were taken which means something was moving in the willow we left. But they were disappointing and sadly contained no beavers to speak of, although the willow is fairly obvious!
Sigh. Looks like the lens got a little moisture over the years! The best evidence came from the primary dam where there were two new bright shiny teethmarked chewed sticks lain. I suppose they could be the work of beaver vandals who just gave up smoking, but I’m thinking that might be as much evidence as we are going to get for now. We’ll try the camera experiment again soon, and keep an eye on that primary dam!
Of course we’ve endured long spells with no beaver sightings in the past after washouts. And dad left for months before and still came back home. We all know better than to panic. We are just impatient for this
