There’s a nice story this morning about watching beaver activity as we head towards winter from Marshall Helmberger of Minnesota.
The busy season
It’s the busy season at our neighborhood beaver pond, as the locals prepare for the impending season of scarcity. The signs of activity are everywhere, particularly along the pond’s edges, where the resident beavers have recently felled at least a couple dozen youngish aspen to put away for the winter.
It all seems pretty familiar. We fill our own wood sheds and stock the pantry and freezer with the season’s produce, and the beavers do pretty much the same. This time of year, the beavers are cutting aspen and willow and storing the branches and smaller trunks in a huge cache under the water, just outside one of their two lodges. These caches are readily visible this time of year— since some of the smaller limbs often stick out from the water— and are an easy way to tell if beavers are planning to spend the winter in any given lodge. Beaver lodges can last for decades and they can fall in and out of use over the years, so this time of year I always look for the telltale signs of a fully-stocked pantry to determine if a lodge is currently active.
Once the ice arrives on the beaver pond, which could happen this coming week given our recent cool down, the beavers will be locked in for the winter. They’ll live the next several months within their dark lodge, only occasionally venturing out of one of their underwater exits to grab a bite. While their pantry of sticks is their primary source of winter food, they also store large amounts of fat in their tails this time of year, which they will also rely on during the winter months. A beaver’s tail, in the fall, is usually substantially larger that it will be when the beavers emerge from their lodges next April or May.
Don’t you wonder what that’s like? Or which family member you like enough to be stuck in a closet with for three months out of the year? I’ve been fairly lucky in terms of opportunities to see beavers, but I will always regret not getting to see this. The tell tale food stash and the signs of beavers cracking through the ice to get whatever they can forage. I’m not entirely sure I believe the last sentence about their tails being smaller in May, but I bet our beaver size has a lot to do with not needing to live off reserves. Marshall does a nice job in this piece by capturing the urgency of late fall.
Speaking of beaver authors, I heard from author Ben Goldfarb that he just had a very enlightening chat with our city council man Mark Ross about the beaver story. He said it was helpful to get the city perspective on the story. (I would just LOVE to be a fly on the wall for that conversation, wouldn’t you?) I bet there were lots of fears of flooding and very few honest concern about voters in his tale.
Meanwhile it you want to get the story from the other perspective, why not listen to the talk I did Tuesday from the convenience of your desktop. I really appreciate fur-bearer defenders for getting this online and sending me the link! This will give the whole story plus some never before disclosed secrets from behind the scenes. (You can thank them for doing tall his by dropping 5$ in their donation jar.) I just realized that the anniversary of that big November meeting is a week after halloween! Perfect timing to hear it all again or for the first time. I think my voices sounds lower, what do you think?
