Changes

The entire valley floor was flooded.

      For better or worse, it is early February. The winter has gone through her usual assortment of moods. There has been cold, wet, warmish, and snow, sometimes all within a day or two’s time. At one point the streams were up out of their banks after a day or two of steady light rain. Then a day or two later the temperatures dove to well below zero. The weather has been full surprises.

The stream chewed away the bank
beaver;s home.

      The weather has caused changes in the landscape that would have been difficult to imagine. Along the stream below our home a handful of trees fell, the soil around their roots eroded away when the stream swelled up out of her banks. The newly uprooted trees created great caverns, some making craters in a path along the water’s edge that we have used for years.

      During the previous two winters a dozen or more trees from our property tumbled across the stream. The recent high water stole a couple of them away and moved others into big knots. It is hard to imagine how some of the trees, which are actually quite large, can disappear downstream without a trace. Chunks of ice have beaten the bark off of others that still lay in the current.

The  fallen trees bridge the stream.

      In a couple of places jammed logs and ice have forced the stream to seek entirely new routes. Water rushes across where last summer a gravel bar forced the stream into a huge U turn. A bank beaver had his den underneath a streamside fir tree that was whisked away creating a cove. A deep hole that always held trout is filled with logs and stumps. An undercut bank, where a big trout loved to hide, has caved in. Next spring it will be an entirely different stream to fish.

      Up the hill from the house an early winter storm blew a handful of fir trees across a long abandoned logging road. Every year or two one comes down, but this time a whole cluster fell. That tote road used to make for easy walking and I would often walk it in bird hunting season. Deer, moose, and bears follow it more than humans and now their footprints detour around the fallen trees. If nobody goes up there with a chainsaw to cut those trunks out of the road the new path will be the game trail.

Woodcock cover going past its prime.

      It is not only weather that changes things. Time does too. Forty years ago a friend shared a favorite woodcock hunting spot with me. To get to it we would walk across a field then hike down railroad tracks before dropping to a flat beside a river. Twenty years ago I went looking for that spot and I could not find that field. After an hour of looking I realized a stand of softwood trees covered what I remembered as an open pasture. There had been a few scattered spruce or fir trees in that field, but now it is a forest. The railroad tracks looked the same and so did the mammoth silver maples along the river.

      About twenty miles to the east is a huge alder patch where I have bird hunted for forty-five years. It has always been thick cover and wet underfoot. Seven or ten years ago I noticed wrist sized poplars popping up in clusters, but mostly I followed my dogs and hoped for woodcock and noticed little else. Now there are poplars thirty or forty feet tall in there. I don’t know when they snuck in, but they are shading out the alders. I still refer to the place as the alder patch, but the name isn’t apt anymore.

The ancient apple tree is being
crowded out by the forest around it.

      Up the hill from our home is an old apple tree in a stand of young hardwoods. A few fir trees are nearby on a small knoll, enough to give the ruffed grouse some shelter, but mostly it is hardwoods about as big around as a bowling ball. There isn’t another apple tree within a mile in any direction, so this lone apple has become something of a landmark. Any observant hunter or hiker is likely to notice and remember it. Competition with the hardwoods trees for sunlight has caused the apple tree to grow quite tall. Its branches really reach for the sky.

      This year that apple tree had only two or three apples and the leaves on the branches were few. The taller hardwood trees now steal the sunlight and in a few years that apple tree will die and the landmark will disappear.

      The natural world keeps changing even without the hand of man. The forces of nature move streams and blow over trees. Plants and animals compete for resources to live. Nature is restless.

      Life goes on.

Bank Beaver

     The bird hunting certainly was not the best. For almost two hours of walking my dogs and I had only found a couple of grouse that stayed up high in the softwood trees and two woodcock.  Finally, we were back on our side of the stream and only a couple of hundred yards from our home. It was time to direct the dogs back up the hill toward the house, but the younger wirehair, Maggie, stopped to stand like a statue beside the stream.

     Now the stream isn’t too wide, maybe fifteen to twenty feet, and only three feet deep in the deepest holes. Where my youngster stood, the bank rose about two feet above the water right next to one of the stream’s deeper holes.

     I walked up to see what held her interest, but beneath her nose only a small depression marked in the ground. For a minute we stood discussing the find, or non-find. Well…I discussed and she just stood like a statue.

     Next to us the stream made a hard turn to the left. About eight feet away, in the middle of this bend, stood an island. Two springs before, the run-off had chewed land away around it. The water slipped quietly around that corner less than two feet below us.

     Suddenly the water boiled into a million bubbles and swelled up, creating a mound that bulged toward the little island. My dog jumped back and I swung my shotgun in its direction.

     Then all was quiet.

Looking upstream at the home of  the bank beaver.

     I remember talking to Maggie and wondering what we had witnessed. The bubbles fizzled and the water became clear. The stream returned to quiet. Did it really happen?

      Then a beaver popped to the surface, swam about, only to disappear heading downstream.

     The next day I asked an old-time local about it and he said, “Oh, that was a bank beaver. For a long time it was thought they were a separate breed, but it has been learned they are the same as any beaver, except they live in a stream that is too large for them to dam up. They tunnel into the bank to make a lodge.”

     Who ever heard of such a thing?