SLO Beaver Brigade – Page 10 – SLO Beaver Brigade

Go Beavers Go

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My musical friend and fellow Beaver Believer, Roberto Monge, created a song for the beavers. I love it. Here it is…

Go Beavers Go by Roberto Monge

Here are the words, so we can all sing along when we march in parades for the Beavers 🙂

Go Little Beaver go

Go little beaver and dam it

The water it’s precious

Go little beaver and build it

The pond is nutritious

Go little beaver eat it

The willow’s delicious

Go little beaver and damn it

The water it’s precious

GO GO GO

Chew that willow SLO

Luckily we happen to get to “Shelter In Home” while friends have their camper-home camped at our place. Sheltering at home with others is really great, by the way. We’ve been visiting the beaver dams in the mornings this past week. The rains were enough to wash out a section of the dam, water level dropped almost 2 feet. Do you see the washed out section of the dam in the picture above behind our heads?

The Beavers haven’t started to rebuild yet, makes me wonder if they have new little’s they are tending to instead??? Any ideas anyone?

We did get to see tracks of a few other friends, though…

One of my favorite tracks to see. That hind foot with the opposable thumb, so like our own. It’s usually smushed up on top of the front foot like it is here, but each track is decipherable here in the clear mud, which isn’t always the case. We usually call this “Ordered Chaos” cuz there are toes going in every direction, but they consistently look that way.

Great front and rear tracks of our friend the raccoon. But whose track is that they are walking on???

We will keep you posted on the rebuild!

Just a bunch of trackers at the recently revealed sand bank.

Salinas River: Wood Duck

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I made it to the Salinas River today to visit the beaver dams.

If you look really really closely in the middle, you can see the wood duck!! Atascadero, Ca. 2.26.20

Such a great time of year to go, the leaves on the willows have not yet budded out so you get a clear view of the bird life. Today I lucked out and actually got a photo of the very elusive Wood Duck.

This might not sound like a big deal to you, but I’ve been talking about seeing a wood duck at the beaver ponds for about 10 years. And whenever I’ve taken folks out there to see it too, that elusive little duck just slips into the cattails long before anyone gets to see them.

So I get responses like, “Sure you saw a wood duck, just the most beautiful duck to see. If I was going to tell a story, I’d tell a good one like that, too.” Ugh. But today, I had a camera, and I have proof. YAY!!!

Photo by Sage Taub, Atascadero, Dec 2020

Expanding North American beaver populations throughout the wood duck’s range have also helped the population rebound as beavers create an ideal forested wetland habitat for wood ducks.^[8]
I just read this quote in Wikipedia for Wood Duck.

See, it really is all about the beavers!