Beaver's unfinished business
Late this afternoon, while exploring the park near my house I came to a spot where there were several trees beavers had worked on and then left without felling. The tree in the picture was the most precarious one. And I was standing under it, taking pictures.
This is the area where where there is always some evidence of beaver activity and where I photographed beaver dams before and wrote about them in this and this and this post.
Not far from the tree that will come down during the next big storm, I saw a beaver dam across the creek.
5 comments:
Never mind your peer review hat, where was your hard hat? OSHA may cite you for being in a contruction area without a hard hat.
It looks like the beaver gnaws evenly all the way round, surely that makes the direction of fall pretty random? Hasn't anyone told these beavers how to fell a tree properly?
The intelligence of some rodents is vastly overestimated. I stopped the squirrels pulling our bird feeder off by putting a small padlock from an xmas cracker on it. It still hasn't figured out how to pick the lock!
If a tree is completely straight & if there is no strong wind, I suppose the direction of fall will be more or less random. But most trees lean one way or the other or may have larger branches on one side & consequentyl, will probably fall in a pre-determined direction, although I doubt the beavers can guess that direction.
I have seen beavers but usually early in the morning. As soon as they are aware of your presence they dive and do not reappear. I think they may be mostly nocturnal diners. Has anyone ever seen or read of a beaver being crushed by a tree they were felling? Maybe they are "smarter than we think they are?
Once I read in a book review that the author of the book being reviewed had seen a beaver crushed by the tree it had felled. I remember neither the author's name nor the book's, though.
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