Tongass National forest lodge Cam

So Jon met one of the teachers from the field trip at the beaver dam last night! She just had to see them for herself! Apparently two children from her class came down wednesday and saw two kits and an adult! They described the adult as ‘mom’ (I didn’t want to trigger the abandonment panic by telling 60 7 year olds that mom died) so the adult must have been nuzzling with a kit or letting him take a back ride. The kids were SO excited they were celebrities for the day and the class couldn’t get any work done.

Sweet!

I also wanted to pause this morning and remind you all to look at the webcam in the early hours by clicking on the green arrow in the left hand margin. Sometimes it is true you see nothing, but when the beavers happen to stroll by they are a delight to view! Eyes closed and methodically grooming, or carefully chewing the bark off of one of their stored sticks. Yesterday there was a kit on the left side and a adult coming out of the water, brushing off the glistening drops. It made me realize that having a wet beaver anywhere near a dry one must be an irritation, like when you’re laying in the sun and your brother gets out of the pool and shakes the water from his hair at you.

The dry, sleeping kit didn’t produce the squeal of a human in a similar situation, but he did wiggle his nose in irritation, and end up moving out of the way. Then the big beaver expanded into the empty space and kept grooming, eventually sitting on the little beaver’s nose which caused another upset. Beavers must be pretty good-natured to live at such close quarters with five or six family members for three months. I won’t even speculate what it be like for humans.

Hopefully we’ll get more child visitors this weekend. Don’t forget to look at the webcam!

Uh-oh. Looks like we broke the dam-cam. I can’t help it I keep telling people how enormously cool it is, especially between 8:30 and 9:30 in the morning, and I guess it just got a little more bandwidth than it could handle. (Well, who hasn’t these days? ) The USFS worker who turned me onto it connected me with the techno biologist fisheries ranger who’s keeping track of it. He’s been kind enough to tell us what it would entail to operate our own and we swapped stories of what a great guy Bob Armstrong is. I just wrote him in a panic asking where my beaver pictures were and he said he’s on his way out to fix it now. Whew, we’re might get beavers back for the long holiday weekend!

Beaver people are good people!

So this should mean I offer a pithy and well-crafted post undistracted by grainy whiskered beaver images as they settle in for their morning chew and groom. Hmm. Well this morning offers another beaver piece from the Berkshire Eagle, talking about beavers flooding and chewing trees at a place called Greylock. The remarkable part of the article is that it describes a beaver deceiver fairly well,

A beaver deceiver works three ways with the first being the length of the fence making it difficult to dam the whole waterway. Second, the shape of the fence forces the beavers to dam away from the culvert, which is against their nature and third, forces the beavers to dam along the fence. This means that as the beavers dam away from the opening of the stream into the body of water gets further away, the sound of flowing water diminishes. The sound of flowing water triggers the beaver’s natural instinct to dam. If the sides of the fence are at least 12 feet long, beavers will typically not even bother to dam there. Cesan said it may be time to consider using beaver deceivers at the Glen.

You can’t tell from the article who he’s quoting about the way it works but the language is almost word for word from Mike’s DVD, except for the term ‘beaver deceiver’, which is obviously Skip Lisle’s term. See for yourself:

Maybe there’s only one way to explain a beaver deceiver? And everyone does it the same? Or maybe someone from the Berkshire Eagle educated themselves? Someone in Massachusetts has certainly been beaver management trained! And how rare is it to see an article from the commonwealth without a single reference to the inconvenient trapping laws?

The one thing the article DOESN’T do is mention the obvious fact that regardless of how many beaver deceivers you install, it’s not going to protect your trees, which should be wrapped with wire or painted with sand. Oh well, you gave a nudge for beaver mercy, let us know when you’re ready to finish the race!