It wasn’t three months ago that I last wrote the Bangor Daily News to inform them that this stolen photo was the property of Ms. Cheryl Reynolds. They assured me the error was unintentional and they would take it down. You can tell the quality of their sincerity and alarm with this new article this morning.
Last time they stole this photo it was for an article by Mr. Smith of how much fun beaver were to trap. This time he’s writing about how even though they’re annoying and stupid they’re still sometimes fun to observe.
Apparently, he has never found them ‘fun’ enough to take his own dam photos.
It’s always exciting to see bears and bobcats, but how about beaver?
Both Mainers and tourists love to see – and sometimes even interact – with wildlife. I’ve probably had more encounters with wildlife than many folks, given the time I spend outdoors in the wood, and on the waters of our state. Here is the second in a series relating some of my more memorable encounters.
Beaver
Beaver can be destructive but fun. We have four beaver houses on Hopkins Stream that passes by our house. We had two relatively new apple trees on our front lawn one year, and when I went out to get the morning newspaper, I did a double-take. One tree was completely gone – a tasty treat for the family of beaver living on the stream. That year I put metal pieces around the trees I wanted to save, and that did the trick.
Beaver love apples, but they’re not smart. After they eat the apples, they also eat the tree! If you look carefully, every fall you’ll see a beaten down path from the stream across our side lawn to the apple trees, where the beavers chow down. One evening I pulled into the driveway and my vehicle’s lights lit up a huge beaver in the driveway with a big red apple in his mouth. Wish I’d gotten a photo of that!
Beaver are not great at sharing their space either. Quite often, fishing a favorite stream up near camp, a beaver will come out of its house to slap the water with its tale, a warning to me to get out of their water. One time I was standing in the water where a small beaver dam had created a nice pond full of trout, when a beaver came out of its house, slamming its tail on the water. When I didn’t immediately retreat, it dived and headed for me. I could see it coming. Not sure of what it planned to do to me, I quickly retreated up stream.
A few years ago beaver moved into the bog on my woodlot and built a dam on a tiny brook, completely flooding the bog and making it hard for me to get through it and to hunt there. I asked a friend to trap beaver there that winter, and he caught several small beaver, but no large ones. The flooded water now covers a huge area, so I asked my trapper friend to return this winter. He scouted around and reported that he’d seen no sign that beaver were still there, and recommended that I breach the dam and drain the water. I’m going to do that soon.
That’s right. George knows beavers are unintelligent because even though they like apples – they eat the apple tree! (We, of course, are certainly smarter, because since we like our scrambled eggs in the morning, we never, ever eat the chickens. Right?) He also complains that beavers flooded his BOG. Because you know it was such a nice dry patch of land before the beavers ruined it.
I can only assume he knows what the word means.
More secret messages for California. This time with some of my favorite antiquated images of beaver.
I’ve been happily enjoying Moby Dick, most recently because the narrator’s intelligent, critical voice when he reviews famous images of whales reminds me of Wikipedia Rick when he did the same thing with historic writing about beavers. I was especially moved by his words about the dangers of the sea and how ignorant we are of this from the land.
“That same ocean rolls now; that same ocean destroyed the wrecked ships of last year. Yea, foolish mortals, Noah’s flood is not yet subsided; two thirds of the fair world it yet covers.”
Herman Melville
