In Beaver World

by Enos A. Mills

AN UNPLASTERED AND A PLASTERED HOUSE

In the autumn of 1910 I made notes concerning eighteen houses. These I watched during October and November. Thirteen were plastered; a willow-grown one and a weed-grown one, both of which had thick walls, were not plastered. The remaining three were not greatly in need of additional thickness, so received only a scanty covering of sticks. Two of these were broken into by some animal during the winter, while none of the others were disturbed.

Beaver frequently show good judgment in that important matter of selecting a site for the house. Ice and sediment are two factors with which the beaver must constantly contend. In the pond the house is commonly placed in deep water, and apparently where the depth around it will not be rapidly reduced by the depositing of sediment. Keeping the house-entrance, the harvest-pile basin, and the canals from filling with sediment is one of the difficult problems of beaver life.

To guard against the rapid encroachments of the deposits of sediment, one group of beaver, apparently with forethought, built a dam that formed a pond from the waters of a small spring which carried but little or no sediment. I have noticed a number of instances in which a pond was made on a small streamlet with greater labor than it would have required to form a pond in a near-by brook. As there were a number of other conditions favorable to the brook situation of the house, the only conclusion I could reach was that these selections for colony-sites were made with the intention of avoiding the ever-encroaching sediment,—for in some beaver ponds this sediment is deposited annually to the depth of several inches.

Ice is one of the troubles of beaver existence. It is of the utmost importance to the beaver that he should have his house so situated that the ice of winter does not close the entrance to it, and also that the deep water in which his pile of green provisions is deposited does not freeze solid and thus exclude him from the food-supply. The ice fills the pond from the top and compels him to be constantly vigilant to save himself from its encroachments. Many a beaver home has been built alongside a spring, around which the beaver dredged a deep hole and in this deposited the winter food-supply. The constant flow of the spring water prevented thick ice from forming, both around the food-pile and between it and the house-entrance.

Large numbers of beaver do not possess a house. Beaver who live without a dam or pond commonly do not build a house, but are content with a burrow or a number of burrows in the banks of the waters which they inhabit. In the severe struggle to live, there is a tendency on the part of the beaver to avoid the building of dams and houses, as these reveal their presence and put the aggressive trapper on their trail.

Many colonies have both houses and burrows. Apparently the houses were used in the winter-time, the burrows in summer. One beaver burrow which I examined was about one foot above the level of the pond and twelve feet distant from it. The entrance tunnels were sixteen feet in length, and began a trifle more than three feet under water near the edge of the pond. This burrow measured five and a half feet long, about half as wide, and seventeen inches high. It was immediately beneath the outspreading roots of an Engelmann spruce. The majority of beaver burrows are about two thirds the size of this one.

One November I examined more than a score of beaver colonies. There was no snow, but recent cold had covered the pond with ice and solidified the miry surroundings. Over the frozen surface I moved easily about and made many measurements. One of these colonies was a fairly typical one. The colony was on a swift-running stream that came down from the snowy heights, three miles distant. The top of Long’s Peak and Mt. Meeker looked down upon the scene. The altitude of this colony was about nine thousand feet. The ponds were in part surrounded by semi-boggy willow flats, with here and there a high point or a stretch of bank that was covered with aspens. The tops of a few huge boulders thrust up through the water. All around stood guard a tall, dark forest of lodge-pole pines. These swept up the mountainside, where they were displaced by a growth of Engelmann spruce which reached up to timber-line on the heights above.