In Search of the Beaver Dam Arcadia Lake 02/16/14

Sunny and 75°F. Light wind, becoming gusty at times.  

Warning: This will be a long post with lots of photos, so you might want to get a snack and get comfy.

I waited all week for Sunday to get here! Meteorologists predicted perfectly warm weather and I planned on getting out for a walk. They were right! It was still very dry out, we need rain bad. Turner’s pond is so low and starting to take on a weird yellow green color. I don’t know how deep it is in the center, but I’m guessing it’s just an old farm pond, so not deep. It looks less than 50% full.

After passing the pond I was distracted by the thought of water. There is a wetland area off to the north of the trail where, in the spring and summer, I sometimes hear deafening frog calls. I figured today was  a good day to check it out and possibly miss all the people. If the weather isn’t absolutely perfect, most folks don’t come out here. Today I expected a crowd.

I veered off the trail and went straight to the seasonal frog chorus zone. I didn’t see any activity or hear anything, not even one frog jumped in the water for cover. There were some deer prints and possibly coyote. It was quiet, too quiet.

I moved on toward Spring Creek, which was just out of sight.

Walking toward the creek I saw tons of beaver damage, old and new. I immediately had a purpose – find the dam! I followed the beaver activity and it got more and more intense. In this first photo, willows of some sort are mown down regularly by beavers. These are actual trees that keep trying to come back out with new growth only to be chewed down again.

Some fresh coyote scat. This time in the middle of the beavers trail, so it’s not just human hiking trails that they like.

Here is another area with the same type of continual beaver damage to willow trees. I’m starting to wonder how many beavers live over here.

I spotted this little bag worm, who made its home out of willow leaves. It’s a bit adorable to me. Maybe because one summer day when I was a child, mom paid me a penny for every bag worm I could get off our old juniper. She quickly figured out what a driven young woman I was.

I few yards further and I was seeing fresher beaver damage. I find it amazing they can do this. If only we could hire them to do our tree trimming.

I’m not sure what’s going on here, it could be beaver damage or some other creature. I see claw and tooth marks.

Crazy beaver activity in this area – trail after trail of activity and damage.

I came out to Spring Creek and saw a tree that is about to be in the water. Look to the right of the tree roots at the sandy area of the bank. This area was covered in coyote and raccoon tracks. At the base of the fallen tree, where the roots are hanging on, was a raccoon latrine. I never knew they did this!

This is a photo of the raccoon latrine on top of the roots of the falling tree.

One of the clearer coyote tracks that were all along the bank by the falling tree.

Looking for food? Claw marks from a critter digging in the sand.

This old tree was very interesting. It had plenty of scratches from animals and also some raccoon poop on top. Any Star Wars fans might think this looks familiar – if not, google Jabba the Hutt.

Jabba the stump was right beside the creek, which had so many animal prints and beaver slides that it was almost impossible to identify anything. Notice how rough it is. Normally water flow from rains would smooth it out or create ripple patterns on the sand. Every bit of that is covered in tracks. Either the activity here is super abundant, or we are that overdue for rain.

Here is a sample of an area showing beaver and coyote prints. Coyote in the middle, beaver between the coyote and the right edge of the photo.

Active beaver areas have marking of their dragged tails, which smoothed the surface of the mud while wiping out most of their paw prints. Look to the left center in the water where there are the clearest prints I could find this day. Those prints don’t look like beaver, maybe skunk or woodchuck – no idea really.

This photo shows a beaver paw print in the water on the left, plus tail drags on the mud. A bonus coyote print in there too, just to the left of the stick.

This is a beaver print in the mud with some tail drag marks. Sometimes a beaver print looks more similar to a bird, like goose or turkey, than a mammal.

I was getting very close to the dam at this point. I came out onto a bank that overlooked the lake. There were tons of birds everywhere. Below are Double-crested Cormorants perched in dead trees in the lake. They will not breed here, but will migrate north. They are only here for the winter and or migrating.

Here is a closer look at them. They look similar to ducks in some ways, but their bill is more like a seagull, and they perch upright as opposed to how ducks rest – floating in the water or standing on the ground with their bodies horizontal to the earth.

Taking pictures of birds is hard! I saw some flying Whooping Cranes, plus a row of some sort of gull hanging out on a sandbar.

There were maybe 4 Great Blue Herons, that quickly flew away.

Ok, so after I scared away every bird within a mile, I turned around and saw the dam! Boy is it impressive! I’ve seen a few dams in my life, but nothing near this size. There are a some Cormorants perching in the background that I failed to scare off.

This photo is more of an overview of the beaver dam area. Some slides to the left. Willows that are regularly chewed down are showing from the middle to the right of the photo, those aren’t shrubs or grass.

I will have to make it over to that side some day and get a closer look. At this point I was way off track and followed the shoreline around to where my car was. This area made me so sad. I could not believe the amount of trash, and briers to boot! I’ll have to look into it and see if there are any trash pick up events this spring. Just horrible, and this is only one small sampling of acres of land covered with trash. Notice there is also some older beaver damage showing.

I came across another raccoon latrine in the crotch of a huge old fallen tree.

I had wondered around for 3 hours and hadn’t packed in lunch or water, so I headed to the car. There were large family groups with shiny new backpacks entering at the trail head. It’s nice to see entire families out hiking together. Hope they enjoyed their wanderings on this perfect day.