Lyme wildlife – beavers

In late October I purchased a new set of wildlife cameras, which allowed me to move the older cameras to a completely new location. It’s not far from the earlier locations, and located along a brook that has been dammed by beavers. I quickly discovered a path that had clearly been recently (and heavily) used by the beavers, commuting from the water to the woods, where they had felled several trees and must have been dragging the branches back to their pond just upstream of their dam. I placed a pair of cameras on a single tree – one camera pointed uphill toward the woods, and the other aimed downhill toward the water. I placed another camera across the brook where the dam met the shore. Within hours my memory cards were filling with beavers! Read on…

In this first video you can see the two resident beavers – one fat, and the other even fatter – heading up and down the hill. I include only a tiny fraction of the nearly 200 videos captured here. It’s really impressive how well they drag huge branches back to the water, with their teeth.

In this second video, at the other location, we see the beavers maintaining their dam. Sometime after November 20 there was heavy rainfall, and the stream swelled, damaging their dam. You’ll see them busily trying to repair the dam… but also dragging new material off into the darkness for some other purpose.

These cameras caught other visitors to the beaver pond; more to come in the next post!