Leave It To Beaver(s)!

It took three years, one month, two weeks, and five days, but they're back! Dispersing young from the Upper Pond had disappointed us over the last three years by just moving on, but May 15, 2019 was to be different. I was on my way to tend to a trail issue that evening and walking above Preston Pond on the western ridge. The leaves weren't out yet so I had a clear view of the entire lake when motion in the marsh at the north end caught my eye. The binocs revealed a beaver moving down the feeder stream from the Upper Pond in what seemed a near panic. It entered Preston Pond and swam straight and fast as though its life were at stake. Finally, across from the ledges on the east shore, it slowed and submerged. It was odd behavior for a beaver. I guessed I had chanced upon the moment a second-year had been chased from its natal pond - in this case, the Upper Pond, whose colony, unlike Preston Pond's, survived the trapping in 2016.

Sure enough, when I arrived at the Upper Pond a few minutes later, at least one of the adults was still in a highly agitated state, slapping and swimming back and forth very energetically. I had things to do before dark so I moved on but just in case the dispersing youngster was considering staying, I avoided Preston Pond when returning. Over the next few days, I documented his work (I say "his" since according to Cree and Innu I've talked to up north, typically, it is the young males who establish a residence and the females look for a male with a good set up) on the dam and noted that he had made castor mounds at points around the pond and there were numerous feeding sites along the west shore where the forage was dense. His dam building skills were pathetic but improved quite quickly. The lake level rose to the point that the old submerged dam was again mostly submerged and Bonnie and I could access the main lake with our canoes, but we avoided the pond a bit not wanting to spook him off. We saw him from time to time though and he was probably used to people from growing up on the Upper Pond which is immediately next to a hiking and VAST trail, so after a couple of weeks, we guardedly celebrated having a beaver back in the lake.

Then, on or about June 6, his castor mounds worked. A neighbor informed us that he and his wife had seen two beavers on the pond. We took the canoe out that evening. There were no dispersing young adults upstream of Preston Pond other than his sibling so possibly a dispersing female from the pond across the Stage Rd from us caught the scent. We spotted them almost immediately and watched the pair of them canoodling together up at the northern end near the collapsed west shore lodge. We now can again enjoy an evening paddle around the pond. We always see them and while they still give us a slap or two, they seem to becoming used to us. They aren't to the point that the former beavers were (swimming along with the canoe and playing with one of our dogs; those photos and videos are farther back in this blog), but these two have decided, as untold numbers of beavers have in the thousands of years before them, that Preston Pond is the place to live.