Trail marking

[jbeegoode]

Got picks of that beaver dam? Hunting beaver with a camera would be my personal  sport.
Jbee

[BlueTrain]

I have neither camera or cellphone, so no pictures. I think that beaver only come out late in the day, just about when I'm sitting down to dinner. I was lucky enough to see one once but I probably never will. I don't have the patience to wait around to try to see one at work but there is no mistaking the beaver dam.

[John P]

Building roads in West Virginia is difficult but it is of great assistance for people who want to leave.

Didn't John Denver have something to say about roads in West Virginia? I'm sure he did.

As Dr Johnson said when reminded of the lovely scenery of Scotland, "The finest sight a Scotsman ever sees is the high road that  takes him to London."

You often see beavers' work (but rarely beavers at work) in the woods and on the streams around here. I've seen them swimming quite a few times, but if they see you they'll slap their tail loudly on the surface, and dive out of sight. A conversation we've had several times:
My wife: "What's the name of that place where a family of beavers were swimming all around the boat?"
Me: "Buckley Dunton Lake, dear."

It's in western Massachusetts. We enjoyed that trip.

This one was in Vermont. It makes it easy to say, "We've come far enough. Let's turn around."
(Feeble attempt to restore this thread to relevance--I was nude when I took that picture.)

[BlueTrain]

It's also been said that the best way to stop an invasion from Scotland is to have a tollgate. John Denver mentions the Shenandoah in the song, too, but the Shenandoah River is not in West Virginia.

That beaver dam is pretty big, nothing like the little one that I see. It is barely over eighteen inches high on the downstream side. There have long been beaver dams on this particular creek as well as about a half-mile away beyond a main road, which drains into the big man-made lake, which in turn drains into the creek where the present beaver pond is. The one beyond the road flooded a large area, too. People don't really care to have too much wildlife near their homes because they damage trees, shrubs and flowers. My wife and I were watching a deer in our back yard until the deer began eating something my wife was growing. She quickly said, "Okay, that's it!" and went out and shooed the deer away. There is also the problem of collisions with cars, too. People have a deer problem while the deer have a people problem.

[John P]

John Denver mentions the Shenandoah in the song, too, but the Shenandoah River is not in West Virginia.

Not entirely true-you get a few miles of it just before it joins the Potomac.

Oops. I'm mixing up the people on naturist discussion groups. You're in Virginia, not West Virginia, right? They may have refused to stay in your state, but they do get a share of that river!

[BlueTrain]

That's not enough to merit being in a song, is it? But nobody writes about the Guyandotte River or the Kanawha River. I take your point, though.

I do live in Virginia, to be sure, but I grew up and went to school in West Virginia. I move here around 1972. My daughter lives in West Virginia now, in Martinsburg.

I participate in only four or five different forums and I use the same call sign for all of them, which really should be "Blue Train Rover." 

[jbeegoode]

Arizona beaver dam:
https://thefreerangenaturist.org/2017/07/23/okay-lets-try-that-again/

Beaver had to be reintroduced. They had been hunted out. The water has been stolen to feed cattle, The cattle stomp and denude anything left. There are a few flowing year round streams here. The beaver are creating more. They keep the rains from running off. Things grow back, slow but sure. This only is happening in protected areas. Eventually, they restore the habitat, but it is freaky for us, who are used to knowing trees in the desert as precious and seeing a beaver chomp a bunch of them down.

Seeing all of the aspen coming back thick as to block the hillside made me wonder. If, when the beaver were in the mountains, the springs were more than bathtubs and cisterns? More ponds, less seasonal flows?

AND no crude comments of the nude women folk mind you!

Does the water get mucky and stagnant where the beaver builds a dam, or does it flow through? Can you swim in it? depends? There are very few beavers in Arizona and all were reintroduced.
Jbee

[BlueTrain]

Here, at least, a beaver pond will not be deep enough for swimming. It only needs to be so deep and they won't build it any higher. It also depends somewhat on the lay of the land to begin with, of course. All the ones that I've seen are free flowing (the creeks, that is), flowing over and through the beaver dams, which can be somewhat sieve-like in places. So they are mostly not stagnant but that is not to say there are not places in the beaver pond that get a little stagnant because they aren't in the channel, if a creek can be said to have a channel. The particular one I've been observing has been muddy off and on because of the higher than average rainfall. Further downstream, the creek is running clear now but the pond was still a little cloudy as of the last time I was there. It's hard for me to say what effect they would have in places that have less precipitation.

[John P]

What BlueTrain said. No, you won't get much of a swim in a beaver pond; they're shallow and muddy, which is fine for the beavers' purposes. In the Northeast, the beaver were wiped out long ago, but in the last 30 years as old farmland has reverted to woods, they've moved back in. Now they're a nuisance in some places, but they're protected and you're not just allowed to kill them.

Going back through the photo archives, I found another picture of one, where the pond is totally covered with algae. Not very inviting for a dip!

[jmf]

It's the same  in the south of France
JMFP7082721 by jacquesmarief, sur Flickr

[BlueTrain]

Both of those are much larger and deeper than the one I'm keeping track of. But previous beaver ponds in the area have been rather larger. I have no idea what local park officials think of beaver ponds.

[John P]

Thank you Jacques, great picture! And very informative too--I had no idea that there were beavers out and about in France. But when I looked it up I found that in fact the Eurasian beaver was never completely wiped out in France, and it's getting more common:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurasian_beaver

The Wikipedia article says that in Britain beavers were hunted to extinction in the 16th century, but they've been re-introduced to a few places, and they're surviving.

[BlueTrain]

That is one interesting hat the fellow wading in the beaver pond has, the one with the light blue backpack.

[Greenbare Woods]

I have no idea what local park officials think of beaver ponds.

I can't speak for any particular park official, but there is widespread understanding that beaver ponds are beneficial to the whole ecology.  Among other things the ponds slow runoff and help prevent flooding downstream.  The ponds prevent erosion of stream banks and over time create flat areas for diverse vegetation and animal life.  Many park managers encourage beavers and their ponds. 

[eyesup]

Some places in the US can also be confusing.

I once lived in Texarkana, TX which sits on the state line of Texas and Louisiana. The center N/S road in town right on the state line was called, wait for it . . . . . . State Line Rd. Made for some interesting situations with regard to city police jurisdictions if there was a chase. State and county were pretty cut and dried but the city crossed county and state lines. I was only 22 at the time so much of it has blurred into the mist.

Up in Utah the city streets of most towns are based on N/S/E/W naming system. Traditionally there is a 0,0 point in town usually at the intersection of streets named Center, Main or some other generic label. Streets are named in block numbers in increments of 100. For instance, E/W streets, north or south of the 0,0, are called 100, 200 or 300 North or South. N/S streets 100, 200 etc. East or West. At that point the address is added to describe the location on the street from the 0,0 origin, e.g. 273 S 500 E means that the building is in the 200 block south of the E/W 0,0 line on the street 500 E(ast), which is the 5th street east of the N/S line on the 0,0 origin. The 1st time I ran into this it was confusing. If you think about it for a while, it begins to make sense but I have to keep refreshing it every time I go there because I don’t go there enough for it to stick.

Colorado has the weirdest highway naming I’ve ever seen. Roads, not in city limits, are either by number or letter. 13, 33, 45 etc. usually initially on section line roads. Depends on the county you are in. I’ve seen roads named with fractions on roads between the section lines, GG1/2 , 54 1/4, etc. Very odd. Each county does it’s own thing. Free associating when it comes to naming roads.

Duane