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.

For some years this lodge seemed to have been abandoned, but this autumn it was clear that the beavers had decided to live in it again. The whole edifice has been freshly coated with mud and has been extended somewhat.

The freshly stripped sticks in the foreground have been added to this dam, the lowest of the three big dams on this stretch of the Burnieshed Burn, within the last week.

The field that runs along the north side of the Burnieshed Burn was sown with stubble turnips. These small turnips are sometimes called '100 day turnips' because they are sown sometime in June with a view to letting sheep graze on them quite early in the winter. They are not as frost hardy as swedes, but convenient as a catch crop.

On the 30th November and 1st December I posted photographs that showed the way that beavers spread out of their burrow and made their solitary ways into the field of stubble turnips. These were plucked from the ground, gnawed and left to be consumed later.

Here is a fast flowing stretch of the reinvigorated burn, just below the middle of the big dams along this stretch of the burn.

The Glenfiddich 'Spirit of Scotland' Awards' Dinner took place at the Prestonfield House Hotel in Edinburgh on Tuesday, 8th December.

The centre piece on each of the tables was a bottle of Glenfiddich whisky frozen into a shapely block of ice.

Louise and I thoroughly enjoyed ourselves, but the whisky was still imprisoned in its iceberg when we left.

Tracks in the Snow and Trail Camera Shots

About an inch of wet snow fell last night and was followed by a slow thaw today.

There seem to be a disproportionate number of hind feet but, if you look carefully, you will make out some front feet among them.

My brother-in-law, David Gibbon, has complained that there are not enough photographs of beavers on this blog.

He is right. I have to get to grips with the trail cameras. I put out one and had it all set up. With amazing forbearance I left it strapped to a tree for about ten days. I returned to the tree, undid the strap and carried the camera off in expectation, though remembering past disappointments.

Once in my office I took out the memory card and stuck it into a card reader. There were no photographs - not even of me, peering into the lens.

As you see, this photograph was taken nearly a year ago. I was very pleased with this.