A gentle article this morning from Cuyahoga National Park, Beaver Marsh. Yes, there is such a thing. For now, anyway. The intern who wrote it isn’t quite a beaver scholar but her heart is definitely in the right place.
GUEST COLUMN: A look at Cuyahoga Valley National Park’s Beaver Marsh
Throughout the year, the Beaver Marsh in Cuyahoga Valley National Park teams with life. Depending on the month, you may be serenaded by frogs, watch turtles swim among lily pads, glimpse a beaver nibbling on a willow branch, or hear northern cardinals call from snowy trees.
Let the opportunities to make new discoveries lure you back to the Beaver Marsh each month.November should not be an exception.
November is an active month for beavers as they prepare for winter.
They are primarily nocturnal, but are frequently observed at dawn or dusk. You may see them collecting softwood branches, such as willow and aspen, which they store in under-water caches in front of their lodge as a winter food supply.
You can also view one of their lodges from a pullout [I think she means dams] along the boardwalk.This gives them a wider area to swim and minimizes dangers from predators on land.
Once the marsh freezes, their world becomes constricted. They no longer have open water to swim easily around their marsh. They will spend more time in their lodge, using the underwater entrance and exit to access their stored food cache.
To delay freezing, beavers will break up the ice. Look for spots where beavers have used their heads to break up ice from below its surface.
While they are native to Ohio, they had disappeared by early 1900s.
Insect populations, which have diminished in the surrounding uplands, linger into November. Birds that feed on insects are drawn to the marsh. [After their eradication by the 1900’s], beavers started returning to the valley after over a century absence.
By flooding the area, beavers awakened long-dormant seeds of wetland plants. This salvage-yard-turned-magnificent wetland shows the potential for nature to recover when we give it [AND BEAVERS] a chance.
The easy walk is accessible by wheelchair or stroller.
The park looks beautiful, and you can imagine how empty it is at sunrise. This morning the temperature is reported as 34 degrees. I haven’t even met them and I can promise you those are certainly the luckiest beavers in Ohio without a doubt. There’s NPS photo from the marsh labeled as a beaver that’s actually a muskrat. (They get a letter). So the entire state isn’t too beaver-educated out there or beaver-friendly. Apparently a local photographer Ron Skinner has been able to get some nice photos of real beavers. Here’s one that I particularly like.
Beavers show up in unexpected places though, that’s for sure. I received an email yesterday about some beavers in SAN DIEGO COUNTY, between Temecula and Fallbrook on the Margarita river. The man who hiked in to see their handiwork said he read about it on Duane’s Nash’s Southland Beaver site, and said that there was a step-ladder of dams all along the creek.
Be still my heart!
You might not know why this is such a big deal, but fortunately you’re reading THIS website and you already guessed that I’m going to tell you. The Margarita River is not very far from Skinner Reservoir in Riverside county, which is where the famous beavers were trapped in 1999 ‘because they were a threat to endangered birds’. Defenders formed Friends of Lake Skinner who sued the department of fish and game and the metropolitan water district with the help of a very smart attorney who became a patron of this website. It also was the subject of some awesome research by folks who also became friends of this website.
That case was eventually won by the good guys at the appellate level.
Think about that for a moment. The state and water district chose to spend 100’s of thousands of dollars for a court case they eventually lost, which meant they had to cover the cost of the defense expert witnesses like Sherry Tippie from Colorado and Donald Hey from Chicago, in addition to the not inconsequential legal fees of our buddy Mitch Wagner.
And after all this and 20 years later the beavers are back anyway.
Lake-skinner
