Squirrel Creek Campground

The view from the developer's lodge

Squirrel Creek Campground, Alaska -- August 19, 2014

We arrived in late afternoon, took campsite 16, and made the trailer ready for habitation.

While the redhead fed the dog, I made a recce to a large beaver lodge across the lake.

The trail soon petered out, but beaver skids and felled cottonwoods told me I was in a development zone.

It was the kind of development I like to see; so I turned back to fetch 3 cameras.

Again I beelined to the lodge, and found it gloriously covered with mud pies and giving off a strange gamey smell.

If that was the smell of castoreum it wasn't the beaver scent I use.

I set the infra-red video camera at the lodge, and staked the two still cameras at the beaver skids.

And I did a little experiment. I dabbed castoreum on the trail of the less active one.

A sudden splash caught me off guard!  Tail slapping. An insolent beaver was keeping tabs on me.  Three of them were cruising offshore.

Dinner was on the stove when I got back, and I was in my bunk when my wife reported that some men were coming through camp.

Two young guys with backpacks, fishing rods, and a big yellow lab on a length of logging chain traipsed past the trailer with the determination of Lewis and Clark.

They were heading right to my beaver sets.

I poked my head out the door.

"Hey guys!"

The first fellow just kept going.

"I've got several camera traps staked near the shore line."

The guy with the dog turned his head.

"Just want you to know the scent lure may attract the dog, okay?"

He looked at me with a slack-jawed expression, nodded, and was gone.

This was bothersome.

Suspicion and revenge scenarios flooded my thoughts. They passed through camp an hour later.

My suspicion was undeserved. I found my cams the next morning.

The video cam had failed -- a shame, because it looked like
they had a mud fight at the lodge last night.

Disappointment -- moisture on the lens
and wrong camera placement. 

And damn! The skid by the felled cottonwood was another failure; it had 9 blurry pictures of beavers hauling limbs toward the pond.

But the castoreum set came through with 130 photos triggered in 3.5 hours.

Okay, there were no prize winners, but at least the beaver was recognizable as a beaver.

Checking out the scene soon after I left.

Wading through the dew-drenched brush to check those cams was a delight, and the experience visited me with an afterglow during the long drive home.

Responding to the castoreum on the skid late later that evening.

We passed hundreds of beaver works along the Alcan and Cassiar Highways, and almost all of them called -- 'get in your canoe and check me out'.

I decided to spend some time appreciating beaver lodges in the Sierra Nevada when I got home.

Beaver Spice

"Anyone care for a beaver-flavored Pepparkakor?"

Readers of this blog are well aware that when it comes to mammalian scent the codger has a discerning nose.

A recurrent theme in my summer workshop is that camera trappers who disdain scent as an attractant miss opportunities to pixelate their quarry.

So I was terribly gruntled this afternoon when Chas Clifton sent me a link to an article titled Beaver Butt Secretion Good for Baking. Thanks again, Chas.

And don't skip the remarks of the wussified commentators. I am sure none has seen a beaver's butt, let alone sniffed one.

I vouch for the captivating power of beaver castor.

That greasy paste is a rich mixture of various plant phenols, including molecular relatives of vanilla, and it's as close to a universal mammalian attractant as it gets.

We have a scent sniffing exercise after my evening lecture on olfactory attractants.

The class is understandably hesitant -- "Hey man, this is weird" -- so I tell them it's "very California", like wine tasting and aroma therapy.

Then I open a jar of Mud Road, take a deep whiff, and roll my eyes. 

Soon the jars are moving around the table, and when the participants aren't gagging their facial expressions are precious.

But with Castoreum it's different.

It's hard to get certain participants to surrender that spicy smelling jar to their classmates.

They just keep sniffing with this dreamy look, and of course everyone wants to sample it.     

So I'm not surprised that the Swedes have approved castoreum as a cooking ingredient.

I hope The Local follows up on the article, because I want to know how many Swedish grannies will be inspired to add castoreum to their pepparkakor.

I know I'll never get the redhead to do it.

A beaver dam bipass

The Sierra Nevada beavers are now using PVC. It's a labor-saving innovation.

Okay, I'm pulling your leg.

I took this photo yesterday in Plumas County, where a homesteading beaver tempted fate by damming the creek next to the local landowner's house.

The "environmental logger" who lives across the road learned of his neighbor's resentment, and advised him to use PVC to trick the beaver.

The PVC device is a called the Clemson beaver pond leveler, but its really just a bipass of sorts.

According to the beaver specialists, "Beavers repair dams in response to the sight, sound, and feel of running water. The Clemson leveler transports water through a dam in such a way that beavers cannot sense it and as a result, beavers don't attempt to plug the leveler."

It doesn't work all the time, but so far it has given this beaver a stay of execution.

Return of the Motown beaver

[Photo by Detroit Edison]

Hot off the press via The Outdoor Pressroom -- beavers are returning to the Detroit River after an absense of nearly a century. While Detroit has its problems, and this isn't going to fix it,  its still a happy wrinkle in the troubled city. 

And the good news is that the beavers aren't covered with sores. In other words, the river's water isn't toxic.

And what's more, the Detroit riverbanks have requisite trees and woody vegetation that beavers eat and so cleverly craft into architectural wonders.

Check out the video of the Motown beaver at work here.

Problem-solving beavers

Terry Schulz at River's Wind has been camera trapping a problem-solving beaver in southern Washington state. It cut a log, but the log won't fall. The beaver won't give up. Check it out here.

Cliff Wheeler also recently posted photos of another beaver solving the problem of the "intruding stick".

If you dig beavers, check Cliff's posts on his own clever beaver. Follow the story in his September postings.

One cooperative beaver

I staked the camera at the end of the dam where the water rushed through the gap. This is where I expected the action, but it was impossible to set the camera there. So I pointed it at the dam itself, thinking Bucky would waddle over the sticks to reach its construction site.

It was late afternoon, the mossies were thick, and Brian waited patiently as I went through the usual self-torment. Would the rodent amble across the dam, or would it swim to the gap? Would it incorporate the camera into the dam, as it apparently did with Brian's camera a couple years ago? And how often did it visit the dam? (I had only 4 days to get the picture). Or was it even here? Maybe it was working one of the less accessible dams on the Mora River.

I took a small bottle of birch oil from my pack -- this minty-smelling stuff IS improving the smell of that nasty sack -- and dipped two thin twigs into the bottle. I laid them on the dam at two points in front of the camera. Then I took a deep snort of the oil. Aroma therapy.

Well, at the end of the week I found that it worked. Bucky stopped long enough to sniff the first twig.



And then the second one.



All but one of the other photos were false triggers. That one picture made it clear that the engineer was busy at the other end of the dam.

That made for one cooperative beaver and one happy codger.



Postscript: Brian informs me that since our visit the beaver(s) have constructed a new dam, downstream from this one. Check out the benefits of beaver dams in Laura Klappenbach's Wildlife Blog.