From Our House to Yours. . .

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from all the LaBarque Creek beavers & Divine Bunbun. Like the beavers, I stayed home. And had something good to eat. And read The Other Side of Desire: Four Journeys into the Far Realms of Lust and Longing. But there's nothing more to long for when you live in a snug little home in rugged rural Missouri.

Crunch Crunch

You'll never see another photo like this one: The beaver team down on the LaBarque thought they'd fell this mature creekside oak -- which would have been the largest timber in their dam -- but then changed their minds, apparently. Wonder why? Their jaws got tired? Too much chance it would fall the wrong way and create a fatality? Too tall to guide down their mud chute into the creek? They've simply abandoned this particular tree.

The Beavers are Back

At dawn hearing shotguns too close to the property, I later suited up to look for trespassers, and instead found enchantment: a new beaver dam across LaBarque Creek. (Video: 2 minutes 20 seconds.)


Beavers dive and swim beautifully. The dam creates a pond deep enough to discourage predators and hides an underwater entrance to their lodge, where they sleep just above the rushing water. At right is a photo of what they did to a tree. If a tree trunk is too big for their purposes, they gnaw off and use the branches. Beavers eat the tree bark and the cambium (the soft tissue growing between bark and wood), and adults are 40 pounds or more, and sleek.

Busy Beavers

Beaver dams create deep diving pools that are inconvenient for their predators. Here's the new beaver dam on the creek, and a close-up of a slender branch they lopped and stripped with their teeth. The bark was food; the stick is building material. Back in '01 on a moonlit night a friend and I crept down to the creek and watched a beaver clan at work.

It sounds like: Crunch crunch crunch crunch, Ker-PLOOP! (that's one of the beavers diving into the creek). He or she then swims silently, along with the current, head above the water, nosing along a branch, either stripped or with bark. He or she gets it to the dam area, and the engineer beavers take over from there.

The last beaver dam here was built in 2001; it was three times this size, strong enough to walk across the creek on, and so tightly built a branch could hardly be pulled from it. The beavers of '01 felled trees a foot in diameter (crunch crunch crunch) and permanently changed the course of the creek. A torrential flash-flood destroyed their dam and they moved on, and there haven't been any more until this year. They work mostly with slender new trees, so this dam isn't quite as spectacular. A conservation guy told me not to worry about the fallen trees, because if beavers chewed them down, that was nature.