It’s getting colder and beavers are busy all over trying to keep up with their demanding lives and jobs. We are starting to see more and more articles like this one from Alberta Canada.
Busy beavers chew down trees in Weaselhead Flats for new dam, winter prep
It’s an especially busy time to be a beaver in Weaselhead Flats. So busy, in fact, that trail enthusiasts who have recently visited the area might have noticed that many trees have been chewed to the ground, and water in the park’s popular beaver pond is shallower.
According to Lisa Dahlseide, a naturalist with the Weaselhead/Glenmore Park Preservation Society, this is because the beavers-in-residence are hard at work to prepare food storage for winter — and have built themselves a brand new dam.
It led to the need for some at-home repairs, she said.
“[The new dam] altered the water levels quite a lot in the beaver pond,” Dahlseide said Tuesday on the Calgary Eyeopener.
“And so, they’re also doing some renovations on their lodges as a result of that … [and using] a little bit of extra trees for those two construction projects.”
There is lots to be done in the winter. Keeping ponds deep enough to avoid a solid freeze requires adjustments. And stocking the larder is a mountain of work, especially when you have teenagers and kits and yourselves to feed for four months. How do beavers do it? It’s hard enough on us to limit our shopping to once a week during the pandemic. We’re always running out of something we wish we had like cilantro or green onions and wishing we could sneak to the store and get some more. Beavers make it an entire winter without going the store.
Beavers have their benefits.
For example, their dams, which are built to provide a habitat and protection for their young, also create ponds and wetlands that provide habitats for wildlife, and water moving through them is purified.
“At the Weaselhead Preservation Society, we honour the beaver. We want to promote coexistence with them, because we recognize that they are a very critical keystone species,” Dahlseide said.
“Without them, we don’t have that wetland, and the wetland is what provides an ecological service to humans. And especially in that area, that wetland there is filtering and cleaning the water very close to the ring road.”
That’s a nice start of the list of ways those beavers are helping you. Dahlseide isn’t burdened overmuch with beaver ecology knowledge, she says they are crepuscular and thinks their are 5 families living in the little park so we’ll just leave that for now an say, thank goodness for the handful of Canadians who appreciate beavers.
This from Valemont B.C., about 500 miles northeast of our friends in Point Moody. Not much of an article but a dam pretty photo shoot.
Busy beavers on Dominion Creek walking trail
The Dominion Creek walking trail is not passable due to a large beaver dam. The dam spans both the creek and the path creating a pond on the other side. There is evidence of busy beaver construction on the banks as well.
Isn’t it beautiful to see what beavers do in the winter? I never tire of looking at it, And our Saskatchewan friend Mike Digout’s movie of the beaver breaking through ice hit 11.1 million views this week, which is probably never gonna stop surprising him. I’m just glad so many people have a single moment where they enjoy beavers instead of killing them.
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