If you live in the Baltimore area, you may have noticed that it rained today. I thought it might be fun to look at the USGS stream data for Minebank run.
Whoa, look at that.
As it usually does during a heavy rain, the stream went in to flood mode. I imagined that the dam was probably overwhelmed.
I decided to drive up to the park to see for myself.
I was wrong. The dam was still there. Which was a very pleasant surprise.
breached on the 15th.
The dam was breached once already this month, on the 15th.
The beaver pair repaired it pretty quickly, and have been reinforcing it; apparently
On my last visit to the camera, I made several observations.
1--The last of the two dams has been breached. This is from the rain and melting snow that we experienced recently. As of this writing, there is more snow that will soon melt.
We'll see what happens.
2--There are two beavers in what certainly is a mating pair.I wish I could tell you that from my brilliant tracking observations. But I'm not that brilliant. Keep looking below and you'll see video proof that there are two.
3--Those two beavers have been very active. There are tracks and slides on both sides of Minebank Run. And they are very well used. There also are several medium trees cut down, again on both sides of the run. There are two food caches in the run, and thee were two dams. The first was washed away completely about two weeks ago. I hope the beavers rebuild the one that still stands.
Meanwhile, I got lucky, and captured some great video of the beaver pair at work.
This picture shows the camera as I set it up on the 7th. You can make out the camera attached to a stump in the left center of the picture. It's focused on a tree the beavers had already cut down. That tree is across the image in the upper half.
I captured a great series of the beavers working. You'll see that it didn't take them long to reduce the tree to almost nothing. They appear to have dragged to branches to the winter food cache in Minebank Run.
I checked the camera today, and was delighted to find a lot of fun videos. I plan to write an expanded post later this week.
Among the videos was this interesting series of a fox hunting.
In the first video, you can see the fox go into its pounce position. It has smelled prey, and is ready to get a meal.
The camera is set up to record video for 30 seconds. Then it stops and saves the file. After that, it's ready to go again. Sadly, that means that the camera missed the first pounce. Look closely, and you'll see that the fox is about two feet to the left of where it was at the end of the first video. Obviously, though, it didn't catch dinner. It is poking around and trying hard to find the target that it missed.
This third video shows another unsuccessful pounce. Look closely at the lower left and you can see the prey running away, and almost being caught. That's in the beginning of the video. Then you can see one frustrated, hungry fox.
I was fascinated to see these videos, and hope you enjoy them. Stop by Cromwell Valley Park soon, and perhaps you'll get a glimpse of the fox too. Wish it a Happy Christmas when you see it.
