A Beaver feeding and a heron watching

Another evening and a few more attempts at digiscoping without the UCA (Universal Camera Adaptor). I seem always to leave it until the light is failing and the camera shutter goes off at 1/8th of a second.

I set up the telescope and hardly had I set about scanning the pond when the head of a drake teal delighted me. A look to the left and to the right of the bird and there was a duck. After a while I shifted the telescope and saw the ripples of a beaver, as yet under water, but about to surface and, perhaps, to land. It did and quickly began to set about the sedge.

At about this time a pair of herons appeared. After some minutes this one of the pair had settled on the other side of the pond and stood, waiting for something to spear or grab.

Beavers in the Big Pond

This was a cold, bright evening. Louise set off for her creative writing course and I gathered myself together and headed for the Big Pond.

Arriving at the stockade that was erected last year to handle wild boar, I found a number of the animals keen to meet me in the hope of being fed. However, I had other things on my mind and they ran away into the wood.

I set up my folding chair, extended the legs of the tripod, slotted the telescope into the mounting, sat down and began to look around. It wasn't very long before I noticed this animal grazing on one of the sedge rafts.

And here she is again. I was using my Canon Ixus 750 again without the Universal Camera Adaptor - quite a feat to my mind and too often not very successful. The difficulty of fixing up the UCA is that it is very hard to look through the telescope with it in place.

This is another beaver that I watched swim across the pond, land and start to graze.

I may have taken this photograph before the previous shot. All these photos have been cropped.

Beavers grazing on sedge

Gilbert was here this week end and announced that he was fed up with seeing photographs of beavers on this blog. He was keen to see beavers and, best of all, would like to take Adam Elias to see the beavers as well.

After some discussion we agreed that it would be very hard to prevent Adam from talking, even though he is an exemplary two year old, and so we should leave his first beaver viewing to another time soon.

I took this picture with my Canon Ixus 750 held to the lens of the telescope. There are three beavers in the photo. They are grazing on a sedge raft, eating what new shoots they can find.

Toads and Beavers

Yesterday, the tenth of April, I encountered several toads and pairs of toads crossing the drive that leads to my house. Some had been crushed, but those that I found alive I carried to places of safety and hoped they would make it to the ponds. This is one of the pairs that I took to a pond and wish them all the best.

In the evening I spent some time at our Big Pond. The place was alive with the chorus of toads singing. The waters seemed to boil with their activity.

In due course a beaver appeared and swam around to check out the evening.

This is another shot of the same beaver. The photo was taken with my Nikon D40, using a 50mm lens, attached to a telescope.

Later I watched the two dark beavers feeding. One spent a little time grooming itself, but by that time the fading light made it not worthwhile trying to get a digiphoto of the creature.

Beavers at the Big Pond

Yesterday evening Adam and I set off with telescope and tripod to see if we could digiscope a beaver successfully.

Here are a couple of results, taken after I had removed the camera from the Universal Camera Adaptor. I found the UCA rather frustrating because the camera kept turning itself off almost as soon as I had got it focussed on the scene ahead. In this way it was impossible to see what I was looking at - hopeless!

Without the steadiness of the UCA, however, I could not hold the camera steady enough and so you see the soft focussed results.

Practice is the answer.

Adam had been looking through the telescope and had spotted a dabchick. He beckoned to me to take a look and I realised that there was something dark in the top left of the glass. I moved the telescope slightly and saw these two dark beavers. They were nose to nose inspecting each other. After some moments one walked off round behind the rushes, leaving the other to groom itself

Here it is. Shortly after this a paler beaver swam across our field of vision. These were probably the same animals that I saw last week.

The Wet Wood -A cold and windy evening

Yesterday evening I took my equipment and sat in the blustery wind to watch for the emergence of beavers from their lodge in the pond in the Wet Wood. Each flurry of wind ruffled the water and raised my hopes, but none came.

A roe deer walked through the trees in the distance and a rabbit loped out. Above me wood pigeons raced home to roost on the north-westerly gale. Some crows slogged by.

This photograph shows very clearly the way that beavers buttress their dams.

The water level of this area has been raised considerably by the dams

The first signs of growth are beginning to show. The reed canary grass is putting those purplish shoots and a wetland forget me not is growing some leaves. The beavers and other herbivores must be very grateful for this new vegetation.

Reed canary grass is often thought of a an aggressive coloniser at the expense of other aquatic plants, but it is serving a valuable purpose here.

British Summer Time

Yesterday was the day when turning off electric lights happens for an hour. In our case we forgot. Luckily for our reputation, however, Morgan reminded us that we had told him to turn his lights off this time last year and here he was to keep us right this year. He bustled up to our kitchen with an iron candelabra, so there was nothing for it but to offer him and Barbara a drink.

Morgan was full of advice, not least his regret at the apparent demise of my blog. As I was concentrating on cooking at the time much of this flew over my head, but the dart about the end of the Bamff beaver blog stung me into action.

Now that we are past the Solstice and British Summer Time is back, the evenings are longer and the beavers are more easily seen. Here are a couple of photographs I took with my compact digital camera looking through a telescope. Digiscoping is the name of the game so, as I become more familiar with the telescope, I expect to do more photography this way. Its great merit seems to me that you don't have to get so close to the animal you want to photograph and run the risk of disturbing it.

I set off far too early with a folding chair as well as telescope, camera and binoculars, and sat for two hours before the beavers emerged from their lodge - the first lodge they built in the Big Pond. The evening before I walked round the pond and saw a pair of teal. This evening there were water hens, little grebes and mallards. I saw a trout jump. The evening before, during my circumambulation, I saw the tumult of frogs and toads copulating in the shallow waters.

I saw three beavers at the lodge they built in the autumn of 2002. Two were dark and there was a paler one. Perhaps the two black beavers were the original sisters from Poland that came to us in July of that year? They worked away at the bark of the birch they had felled, but the brown animal took to the water and swam over towards me. 'Ha!' I thought, 'It has smelt me and is coming over to have a look.' And so it was. I could see its nostrils flaring and, in due course it slapped its tail. The beavers at the lodge disappeared and the brown beaver slapped its tail again. It lay off shore, waiting for me to pick up my kit and leave, and had the grace not to humiliate me any more as I headed away from the pond through the darkening spruce wood.