Friday 26 February 2010

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.

Wednesday 17 February 2010

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.