Friday night creek watchers saw a first in beaver behavior maturity. Keep in mind that we’ve regularly seen our three kits picking up sticks and experimenting with where to lay them down, but each time they have demonstrated silly, childish, kitish and irrational attempts, like taking sticks OFF the dam and swimming away with them. So Friday, when we saw a kit swirling about mud clouds under the water and grabbing mouthfuls of sticks and leaves, I didn’t hope for much.
“If he does something useful with that, I’ll eat a bug.” I told Cheryl.
Remind me never to doubt our beavers again. The kit swam straight over to the gap and climbed up on it. Then proceeded to lay the mud and sticks directly over the pathway, tamping them down with his nose and paws. Remember that in the high flows we had the past few days the gap was the only part of the dam that was ‘leaking’. The adults must have spent a lot of time doing just that, so he was just following in Dad’s footsteps.
A Real Beaver Behavior! We were so proud. Sniff. All growed up.
Well not quite ALL growed up because after laying the single application the kit decide that was plenty of work for one night and swam off over the dam. Not exactly the sustained labor we’ll see later.
Stay tuned!
Yesterday, we had a beaver visitor from Sebastapol. He is on the board for the Leadership Institute for Ecology and the Economy and a friend of Brock’s. He came down and waited very patiently with us, discussing the possibility of beavers in the Atascadero. Unlike the last few nights there were no beaver sightings for a very long time. At seven he needed to head back home, and at 7:14 we saw the first very tardy kit. It was a great conversation though, about what beavers could do to help his watershed and how to manage difficult behaviors. The institute teaches a course for people planning careers in shaping policy that are interested in sustainable goals. The course is nine months with one day of classes each month, divided into topics like food, and water. Brock lectures for them on the water section, and I made sure I plugged the idea of adding a short beaver lecture to the water day. Here’s one of the projects he’s been involved in.
What else is new? I got my final arrangements for the beaver conference yesterday including my room and meal allowance. Thanks Len. I promptly posted the speakers agenda on the Facebook for for the ‘Save the Tay Beavers’ group and Paul Ramsay wrote back very intrigued. He says despite the distance he’s very tempted. Paul was involved with the quarantine of the beavers imported from Norway for the trial and is adamantly opposed to trapping the free beavers. I think given how terrified the scottish fishermen are about beavers, they ALL need to be there to hear Michael Pollock. But that’s just me.
