Winter World_ The Ingenuity of Animal Survival - Bernd Heinrich [65]
12
ICED-IN WATER RODENTS
The snapping and painted turtles that come in June to lay their eggs in the sun-warmed sand in our driveway would not be here were it not for the beavers, whose dam meanders across a valley between wooded hills. The beavers predate all of us humans in this landscape, having been here for thousands of years, except when they were once temporarily driven out by trappers due to a fashion in hats in Europe. Their dam remained. Parts of it are ancient. It has likely been broken and torn out thousands of times, but it will always be repaired or rebuilt. This dam holds a shallow pond of several acres, which is where the turtles come from in June, and also where they return in the winter to be safely under the ice. Without beavers this would be unbroken forest. There would be no painted or snapping turtles, no bullfrogs, green frogs, mallards, Canada geese, dragonflies, giant predacious water beetles, snipe, Virginia rails, willow flycatchers, yellow warblers, red-winged blackbirds, sunfish, minnows, catfish, kingfishers, great blue herons, mink, or muskrats. It is a rare day that I do not pause at this beaver bog to soak up the marvels. I record what I see to keep it for later. The following is a journal entry on the day before the final freeze-up.
9 Dec. 2001
It was 20 F yesterday morning under clear blue skies, but by afternoon high clouds were drifting in. Very promising—snow is surely on the way.
I wake up in the night, look out, and see white ground. I can not sleep any more as I anticipate a dawn with the first real, powdery snow, after the slush we’ve had so far. I get up, grab a cup of coffee, and head down the driveway to the beaver pond at 6 am. Since nights now last almost 15 hours, it is still night when I get there.
Fine feathery snow crystals drift down. There is not a breath of moving air. The sharp clean smell of this new snow prickles my senses and excites. Within a minute I stand at the edge of the pond feeling peace, and just barely hearing the tinkling of snow crystals falling on my jacket. They amplify the stillness.
The freeze-up is late this year. The pond was only covered yesterday with its first thin sheet of ice. Before that its surface reflected the dark shadows of the surrounding pines, now light from the moon that is barely visible through thinning clouds illuminates a white expanse except for two dark bare patches of water. There the snow is wetted into a layer of gray slush. One patch is around the beaver lodge at the opposite side of the pond near the dam, and the other patch is by the mound of decaying cattails where the geese nested in the spring. I can just barely make out two black lumps along the edge of this slush-patch. They look like stumps, but I don’t remember ever seeing any stumps near there. They would not attract my attention, except that they have no white topping of fresh snow on them. There is snow on every blade of cattail leaf, and on every twig of alder and arrowwood bushes around me.
Nothing has changed twenty minutes later. It is still dark, and I’ve not heard a peep of a bird, nor seen a wiggle of the two black shapes although I imagined that one moved slightly. But in the dark, under gently falling snow, one can all-too-easily imagine all sorts of things, wonder about them, and come to absurd conclusions based on unrestrained imagining. After another 20 minutes, with the first lightening on the eastern horizon, come the first calls of goldfinches. In the daytime I recently had seen a flock of about 80 feeding on white birch seeds. The birds stayed closely bunched, and like one organism they synchronously and erratically flew off the tree, circled, and alighted again at the same tree. They hung like Christmas ornaments from the twigs and twirled around them to extract the seeds out of the fruiting cones. Showers of cone bracts drifted down and peppered the snow on the ground.