Beavers, that is! Yesterday my favorite librarian and I went with our dog to a café opening in Rutland, Massachusetts. (I'll be posting more on that on GeoCafes.) To make a proper outing of it, I looked for a place to walk the dog in Rutland, and found a section of the Massachusetts Central Rail Trail, appropriately located on Depot Street, where presumably there was once a depot.
We rightly guessed that our dog Crumpet would enjoy this wide, shady walkway with us. She is shown here on a causeway between two ponds, one of which I later learned is named Thayer Pond. At the western edge of the pond, I noticed what looked like a beaver lodge, but I was confused.
Dead trees in standing water are another indicator of possible beaver action, since they are most likely to be upright only in the first few years after inundation.
We could see the lodge pretty well from the main path. The dam was easy to see, but difficult to photograph. In this image, the dam is only evident by the fact that standing water is present to the left and not to the right.
Lagniappe: back to that first time
I should mention that my master's thesis involved in-depth measurements of 33 different artificial ponds in the vicinity of the Miami Whitewater River. I measured them on every available map and aerial photograph and I physically measured the sediment in them. So became fairly adept at identifying ponds and their dams, and can sometimes spot beaver ponds with confidence from New England highways, but I was in this region for 25 years without seeing any.
So I was happy -- downright giddy -- to see a textbook example of a beaver dam in May 2022, when my favorite librarian and I were on the Vermon Inn to Inn Walking Tour. The dam was much easier to photograph.
This was such a treat -- I stood there transfixed for quite some while.
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