The Beaver Pond

Beavers are fascinating animals, one of the few mammals (in addition to humans), that deliberately alter their environment. When beavers dam a stream they create a pond which helps to protect them from predators and enables them to ferry food and the building materials used to construct their lodge and dam, and store their winter food supply.

A beaver lodge is a hollow dome constructed of sticks and mud with underwater entrances –

Their dams are also built using sticks and mud and can be quite long (reportedly one in Canada extends over a half mile from end to end) –

Beaver ponds create habitat for wood ducks –

And green herons –

Insects –

And plants –

And turtles, frogs and more.

After finding a beaver pond at the edge of the Big Woods –

– that had an active colony of beavers, I decided to put a camera trap near the lodge to capture images of the beavers –

It wasn’t just beavers that appeared on camera, an opossum was there –

A mink too –

Even larger more charismatic mammals: a bobcat –

And a black bear –

Because the camera trap was aimed low enough to photograph the beavers it was too low to get photos of the whole bobcat or the whole bear – my apologies.