Category Archives: Beaver

Grapes, beaver pond, sycamore, beggarticks, bananas, cypress swamp, dogs 2022-08-10

A walk in the woods one summer day.

[Grapes, sycamore, banana, cypress swamp]
Grapes, sycamore, banana, cypress swamp

Those grapes were ripe and tasty. Muscadine, Vitis rotundifolia. This is down by a beaver pond. Continue reading

Cat face, beaver pond 2020-06-16

Back in the 1930s, during the Great Depression, my father and grandfather paid off the mortgage on the farm through income from turpentine. This is a catface, where the bark was scraped off a pine tree so its sap would ooze out, to be caught in a metal cup nailed below on the tree.

[Catface and beaver pond]
Catface and beaver pond

The rest of the tree long ago was logged.

Behind the pine tree stump and the adjoining oak tree, you can see a beaver pond. Continue reading

Cottonmouth moccasin v Yellow Dog and Brown Dog @ OPF 2016-11-29

At the far side of the pond, Yellow Dog spotted a moccasin before anybody else. The small but deadly Agkistrodon piscivorus didn’t stand a chance against the pair of experienced snake wranglers, Yellow Dog and Brown Dog.

Can you see the snake? (Tail, lower left)

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Beaver ecology

We like our beaver pond, but the beavers are a bit too ambitious. Here’s how they operate.

Haemig PD (2012) Ecology of the Beaver. ECOLOGY.INFO 13,

The forest beside the stream also changes after beaver occupation. When beavers cut down trees for food and for building their dams and lodges, they select the species of trees that they prefer, and leave other tree species standing. Consequently, after many years, the forest beside a beaver pond is usually dominated by different tree species than it was before beaver occupation, and in the gaps where the beavers removed trees, bushes and saplings now grow and with them the animal species that live in the early stages of forest regeneration (Barnes and Dibble 1986; Johnston and Naiman 1990; Pastor and Naiman 1992; Donkor et al. 2000). In addition, when the beaver pond is formed by the dam, water floods and covers the roots of trees that formerly stood along the stream bank. These flooded trees die because the standing water prevents their roots from getting air….

In Wyoming, a survey showed that owners of private lands believed that they benefited from beaver engineering because Continue reading

Fourth of July Beaver Dam Expeditions

The pond was too dam high, and the beavers were girdling trees far out from the usual shore, so we set sail to pipe the beaver dam. Dogs waiting for us to get the boat to the deep water:

Dogs waiting for us to get the boat to the deep water

Lily:

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