Life In The Beaver Ponds

On St. Patrick’s Day, March 17^th, the average daily high temperature is 39° in our little corner of the world in northern New York.  However this year it was closer to 60° and a wonderful afternoon for an ATV riding opportunity to determine what the local beavers were doing.  In midafternoon I did just that.

Last fall Bucky and Eager, our resident pair from the big pond, ejected their offspring from the den.  One merely crossed the farm road to a smaller pond 20’ away.  Another relocated to a former drainage ditch across a small meadow from the big pond.  This later one I named Little Beaver in deference to his parents, and also as a namesake for the comic book character of my youth the young helper of Red Ryder.

On St. Pat’s Day I first stopped at the ditch Little Beaver dammed off last fall, and where he spent the winter in a bank den.  The ice has completely thawed from his running water ditch.  His dam is yet holding up in fine shape.  He built it well.  The branches and limbs he stored near his den last fall have all been stripped of their bark which was used as food through the winter.  As the ice melted and released the stripped branches from its icy hold they have floated with the slowly moving water to the dam area.  They will be used as future dam building material.  Nothing wasted in this small world.

I then proceeded to the area of the other two ponds.  The larger pond of Bucky and Eager is mostly frozen over as of yet, and may remain that way for a day or two.  The smaller pond of the two, on the south side of the road is ice free.  The runoff from the big pond is running through a sluice pipe into the smaller pond, and this water movement thawed the smaller pond sooner than the large one.

Although I notice the above water den of Bucky and Eager appears to be in good shape I have no knowledge of the bank den in the smaller pond, or if the kit remains in it.  I saw no evidence of life in that pond such as debarked branches as in Little Beaver’s ditch.