For me winter usually resolves itself into walking around the swamp ponds checking the holes through the ice and snow that go down to water or at least under the ice.
In the best years I can see how otters make their way from hole to hole and leave tokens of their success catching fish under the ice, often curious excrements around the hole.
In relatively cold, dry winters, I can lie on my belly, stick my camera under the ice and reveal what the otters and beavers bumped into as they move around under there -- remember, though, that there is precious little light under there so a camera with a flash shows too much.
Well that photo from late February 2005 makes it look rather Zen under there. I'll try to get another photo in here to show that there's room to run in under the ice. But those were other years. There are no otters in the ponds this year, and this year two beavers died as the ponds were freezing. I know little about the beaver that died on the north end of the Big Pond dam because the only parts the coyotes left behind were a bit of the lower intestines.
And then as I described in Death of a Beaver, Part One, we saw a beaver dead under a tree trunk it had cut back on December 27, 2007. I took the photo. Leslie, Ottoleo and Justin are studying the situation.
That photo puts the beaver in perspective, relatively small animal, but I've been waiting outside of holes too long and my imagination spreads under the ice. To me, in the winter, a beaver grows as big as the pond covered by the snow and ice, its very fur hard up against the granite that confines the pond.
I like that photo showing the pines on the north shore of what I call Shangri-la Pond. The pines remind me that under the ice, while it might not be evergreen, much is alive. Really what I am saying is not that the beaver is as big as the pond, but that the pond is alive, the creation of the beaver. And that was the nub of my problem this winter. I feared that the beaver who died under the falling tree on December 27 was the matriarch of the pond. Obviously the matriarch gave birth to all of the younger beavers in the pond, but how responsible was she for the creation and maintenance of the pond? Was I about to see the pond and the beaver colony in it die in a slow fashion leaving me with an empty spring?
My plan in beginning of this blog was to dig deeper and get the videos from past years, and I think they go back seven years at least, to show who I think is this dead beaver, building and maintaining other ponds, but that is slow work. The best I could do was edit a video which may be my last video of this beaver alive. I mentioned it in the earlier blog entry, how I saw an adult beaver trying to keep a kit from coming up out of the pond, and I speculated that perhaps this was the matriarch, not trying to hog the food herself, she did after all bring branches into the pond, but to keep the kit away for fear that a tree might fall on it. And so rather than the beaver witlessly running back to the pond as the tree teetered and fell, she might have been running down to keep the kit away. Well, probably not, but here's the interesting video:
Anyway, my digging into the past still hasn't begun, but I have been standing watch outside the hole, the same hole the beaver came out of that ill-fated day. And at least one beaver has been coming out, though here it is March 16 and I still haven't seen a beaver. Usually during the winter I see a beaver around its hole, but we've had more snow than most winters, punctuated by short thaws, and I haven't seen a beaver in Shangri-la Pond nor the other seven ponds I watch. But the limbs on a red maple that fell almost over the hole in the north canal of the pond has been trimmed.
It's hard for me to explain how this excites me: the gnawed tree comes alive! The pond, the beaver, is growing!
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