Beavers

You're sitting by the shore of the Pond. It is evening, quiet, barely a ripple on the surface. And you hear a splash.

Not the gentle, drawn-out SPLOOooosh-sh-sh of a goose, feet and wings extended, gliding in for a gear-down landing. And not the flat SPLAT of a fish flopping back after launching itself in pursuit of an insect.

Tree gnawed by beavers uphill from the dam, a few feet from Rattlesnake Hill Road, January, 2007.

No, this is the spill-your-drink, "What-the?" ker-THUNK of someone heaving a bowling ball into the Pond. It is loud, deep, echoing, and most definitely attention-getting.

And then you see the perpetrator: a beaver, swimming placidly, its head and that broad flat tail barely rippling the surface. The beavers are nocturnal, rarely seen in daylight around the Pond. And they're not that easily spooked. You can get quite close to them, if you are quiet. Sometimes, it seems, they just like to make their presence known.

Beavers in Foster's Pond have become plentiful - there are at least a half dozen of them, in at least three dens - bringing down surprisingly large trees and large swaths of shoreside brush. Most shoreline property owners can point to a tree (or several) felled by beavers in the last couple of years.

January, 2007: Night by night, over a period of less then two months, beavers brought this brush to the sluiceway of the dam. Volunteers removed it each morning and stacked it here for later hauling away. (The woodchip piles are man-made, and will be spread on the accessway to the dam at the end of the restoration project.)

One place to find them - and to measure their capacity for work - is the Foster's Pond Dam. During the winter drawdown, they respond to the sound of water rushing through the dam's sluiceway by stuffing the narrow outlet with branches, muck, and debris, stopping only when skim ice prevents them from floating the material to the dam. Every night, they attack the "leak". And every morning, a volunteer removes the debris and piles it near the accessway, to be carted off at a later time. The sheer quantity of the material earns the rodents an E+ for effort.

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