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.