Beavers Feeding On Birch Bark In The Winter

Every now and then my neighbour, Morgan, complains that there are no photographs of beavers on this blog.

Well, here are some that I found today while looking for illustrations to go with an article that I have written for 'Reforesting Scotland'.

Two of the photos were taken with an infra-red trail camera in the winter of 2008 and the other is a year younger.

I have had very little success so far this winter with the trail cameras. I have managed to catch a young fox, roe deer, pheasants, and an otter sliding its way over a dam.

But the beavers seem to have become very shy of my efforts and I seem not to have arranged things right with batteries, settings and so forth.

Here is a very short and apparently speeded up clip of that otter speeding over the dam.

Dams and Canals

I posted these photos quite a while back. You can see the notch in the dam. It seems to have been built as an overflow, but it looks as though beavers and perhaps otters use it as a slide as well.

In the original enclosure there is a dam of about sixty metres length. The end of it has been turned into a canal. This is the short canal that skirts one of the exclosures that Kevin Jones built when he was doing his PhD here some years ago.

The idea was that the exclosure would stay and others would come and go on with some monitoring.

The beavers, however, have thought otherwise and broken into the exclosure. The willows in there are their reward.

While looking at the southern end of the long dam I mentioned I found a lot of beaver droppings. Here is a photograph of one lot. You can see one or two floating. The rest are visible, but sunk.

More about Dams and Something about Trail Cameras

I took this photograph of the Lowest Dam on the Burnieshed Burn in December 2008.

This photograph, although taken from a different angle shows the dam as it is now. I took the photograph ten days ago on the 21st of January.

An interesting aspect of the changes that are taking place on this burn is the increased sighting of dippers (Cinclus cinclus).

Here is that dam again.

What have we here? A squirrel, I think.

I have been setting my trail cameras this winter, but haven't had much success with them. It may be that the beavers are more suspicious of that pink light as the infra red is triggered. Besides the one or two successes that I have had seem not to have made it onto YouTube. Do we lack ban width?

It is high time that I published this post, so here we go.

Perhaps my cameras will show some good results when I inspect them next.

That slide again and signs of the thaw

Here is another photograph of the otter's slide. The thaw is with us now and the beavers are back at work.

The beavers are busy stripping the bark from trees they felled in the autumn. You can see some freshly stripped tree trunk in the middle of the picture.

The moment the thaw got under way the beavers at this burrow began to go out and about again.

A bit Breughelly, but where are the peasants?

Open Water and Beavers in a Time of Freeze - Otters slide.

The recent ban on wildfowl shooting in Scotland by the Scottish Government highlights the difficulties that wildlife suffers in times of extreme frosts.

It is one of the many advantages of the beaver that it keeps open holes in the ice for some time after the rest of the water is frozen over. Here is one such hole by a lodge.

There is a skin of ice of two thicknesses: the one in the middle of the hole having been broken the previous night, perhaps. In the snow to the right of the ice hole are some stripped twigs.

And here is another, more extensive area of freezing over water in the wider ice-scape.

I photographed this from the lodge a week or more ago when one of the shots showed a canal in the ice over to the other side of the pond.

Gradually the open water is icing over, but long after the rest of the pond has become icebound.

Now what is this? Could it be an otter's slide?

Boars, robins and beavers

Wild boar feeding at Bamff.

The first wild boar came here just after the beavers in 2002.

This group, however, came here this past autumn.

The robin (Erythacus rubecula) is a beneficiary of the wild boar. About six of the birds congregate round the boar when they are fed.

Usually they benefit from the boars' work, turning over the ground to reveal the larvae of various invertebrates, but here feeding time seems to bring in the robins.

Until the last few days when it has been relatively cold (around -6ºC over night) the beavers were active, felling trees.

For the last three nights, at least, they have not ventured into the stubble turnip field. This surprises me a bit because I should have thought that, energetically speaking, it would have been worth the beavers' efforts to go out into the field to graze the turnips.

I took this photograph some days ago. You can see how the beavers have kept the waterway open to the other side of the pond.

The middle of the water is frozen over now.

Winter - Did the beavers have trouble entering the warm burrow?

Here is that dendritic pattern again under a dusting of snow. The photograph shows further bifurcations at the end of the main branches since the earlier photographs.

The main lodge in the western enclosure.

The dam at the other end of the lodge pond in the western enclosure.