Photo: Cheryl Reynolds
Last night Worth A Dam kept an eye on our beavers while all the world was watching brightly colored explosions and some of its inhabitants were making rather noisy explosions of their own. After the first big bang at the bridge the bi-yearling seemed to make a decision that he wasn’t going over that dam until things got quieter. He carried large branches into the lodge so the kits would feed inside and we didn’t see much of them for the duration of the night. At one point he sat motionless in the water, watching the bank to see if there was trouble. Whale-watchers call that behavior ‘logging’ but we had never seen it in our beavers. Clearly he knew tonight was different.
Necropsy results received from UC Davis via Lindsay last night indicate the following conditions present in Mom beaver:
1. Meningoencephalitis, (inflammation of the layers protecting the brain and the brain), associated with amoeba or protozoans
2. Pneumonia
3. Malocclusion and secondary gingivitis, (due to the broken upper tooth)
4. Conjunctivitis grossly, but only mild to moderate.inflammation on histology
Conversations with our vet friends have suggested that the infections could all have been triggered by the broken tooth and spread from there. We will keep asking and trying to understand the sequence. For now it means that she was dealing with a host of problems, and we are again awed that she was able to bring three healthy kits into the world.
When we left last night at 11 things had calmed down and the steady stream of cars had cleared from downtown. Two cautious kits made their silent paddle around the pond to get branches on their own. All the appreciative people, all the families with children, all the defiant teens and all the angry drunks went homeward. We wished the beavers a happy independence day and left them to their privacy.
If seven maids with seven mops
Swept it for half a year.
Do you suppose,” the Walrus said,
“That they could get it clear?”
“I doubt it,” said the Carpenter,
And shed a bitter tear.
I haven’t posted about the trauma in the gulf lately not because it isn’t ongoing, and not because it isn’t continually horrific beyond anything we can possibly imagine but because we’ve had a singular focus lately for obvious reasons. This video caught my attention today and just had to be posted. Dr. Pincetich used to work for SPAWN. I tracked him down last year and we exhanged information about the positive relationship between beavers and salmon. He even invited me to come to a watershed training he was doing at Samuel Taylor and say a few words about beavers. SPAWN will be at the beaver festival this year, but Dr. Pincetich has moved onto to studying turtles. Wow, some timing. He has pretty alarming things to say about Corexit. I particularly like his language about ‘turning a two dimensional problem into a three dimensional problem.’
