Yesterday beaver watchers were treated to the sight of three beavers in the bank near the footbridge. Three! This morning we watched from 5:30 to 7:00 and saw no one but these three little fuzzy ducks, who had gone to nap on the bank while mom preened. Two days ago there were four and a week ago there were eight, but such is the life of baby ducks! Lets hope these last three are the smartest ever.

What I was able to see, though, was video footage of three otters at the old lodge taken on wednesday morning by Moses who sadly declined to share it with the website. They were popping out of the water, chewing dramatically and going in and out the lodge. Otters are talented in lots of ways, but they can’t dig their own burrows or make a lodge. They are ‘obligate nesters’ of a sort. They often use abandoned beaver lodges to have pups, who are born helpless and furless and unlike beavers, can’t swim for weeks. Every year we have seen otters march hopefully into our beavers lodges and watched as beavers marched them right out. This year things may be different.

After a while the otters started to do something I have never seen before. Ripping out tules and carrying them into the lodge. A lot of tules. Bedding? Certainly they aren’t planning to eat them. It looked very much like nesting but it is late in the year for mom to pup I think, and unlikely that two others would be with her when she did. I can’t imagine what was going on but I’m inclined to think that it has something to do with why none of our three beavers went upstream to sleep yesterday. Hmmm. Stay tuned and keep watch on the upper pond.

Yesterday I got word from Sharon Brown of Beavers:Wetlands & Wildlife that an article she wrote with hydrologist Suzanne Fouty was appearing in this Sping’s issue of LAKELINE magazine. It’s sadly not available online, but I’ll give you an illicit taste in case you want to track it down. Great work ladies, if I wasn’t a beaver fan already this would be a powerful sell!