Suzy took me to see a beaver dam that was built in the last few weeks. You can see from my big dog that it’s no more than a few feet high.
This is a second dam downstream, and it stretches halfway across the stream. You can see that the beavers are using stones as well as sticks in their construction. This is a classic high altitude, snow-fed stream. See the wall of stones on the left? It’s about six feet high, thrown up when the water is running high during spring melt.
At first glance, it looks like this dam starts at this end of the stream, and ends at the other side. Instead, it’s a small piece of a humungous engineering project. The pond behind the dam isn’t very deep because it’s a part of a larger scheme to move water to the right.
The dam doesn’t end on the other side of the stream… it goes on and on and on. Here the beaver have patted up a rim of mud to hold in the water. Look closely and you’ll realize that this edge is weeded–that’s the only way it’d be so clearly delineated.
Farther along the same dam the mud is shored up with sticks, and it still goes on.
In some places along the dam, the water is less than knee height. In some places the water is nearly waist deep, and my dog has to swim.
This dam isn’t very high, but it is exceedingly long. After we bushwhacked hundreds and hundreds of feet we realize this couldn’t be new construction. The beaver are taking over a spot that had been dammed before. And sure enough, after crossing over the newly filled pond we found an old lodge that was reoccupied.
I bet this lodge was once surrounded by water. Looking out from from the lodge towards the dam,
you can see there’s a lot of newly impounded water. The dam is all the way back at the big cottonwood tree, extending hundreds of feet to the left, and I think to the right as well.
This is the meadow to the right of the photo above, with Jessie standing in 6 inches of water. If you look closely, straight back from Jessie there’s a silvered old stump of a tree that was felled by beaver long ago.
There’s a new sheet of water moving across this land. If people’d just let them build, these beaver will be making some big changes around here. If you want to see the biological complexity of an acre increase right in front of your eyes, add a pair of beaver and step back.
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