An Evening at the Beaver Pond
It was about the time we first heard the woodcock peenting – the male’s plaintive mating call that sounds like a creaky floor board – in the meadow below the house this spring that Freddie and Michael’s pond thawed. About a quarter of a mile north of us, Freddie and Michael are our nearest neighbors. Their post and beam house sits, much like our house, at the top of an expanse of open field that descends gradually down to a large, federally protected wetland. The pond lies half way between the house and the wetland and toward our side of their property.
Freddie and Michael are ideal neighbors. They bring us fresh rhubarb from their garden which we, i.e, my wife, Cheryl, gives back to them baked into strawberry rhubarb pie, though, she has to cut the pie in half and bring it to them the same day she bakes it otherwise I’ll usually forget that I’m only supposed to eat half of the pie. And I’m welcome to rinse off our dogs, Aldo and Bela, in the pond after they’ve been chasing frogs and tadpoles in the wetland or for all three of us to take a cool dip after I’ve been toiling around the homestead on a hot summer day. As ponds go, Freddie and Michael’s pond is of medium size, about 100′ in diameter, not overly landscaped but with a fairly dense copse of alders, birches, aspens, and some scotch pine along the south bank that blocked the view of the water from our deck except in winter, of course, when we could see through the bare branches of the deciduous trees but when the pond was merely a circular impression in the austere winterscape between our house and theirs. Then, last fall, I noticed yellowish stumps gleaming in the afternoon sun where some of the alders and birches had stood. Seems, a family of beaver had moved from the wetland into the pond.
Beaver & Branches
Posted by Gustav under Equipment,Spring,Tripods,Vermont,Wildlife | Comments (4)
