The dam was breached, the dam was repaired, and the camera missed it all

The dam. 23 February 2014.

As you can see in this photograph, melting snow combined with some rain, overwhelmed and breached the dam.

I thought it might be fun to see if I could capture some videos of the beavers repairing the breach. So, I put the camera in a location overlooking the breach and aimed it in such a way that I thought would do exactly that. I was exactly wrong.

Apparently the beavers were able to swim up to and repair the breach without triggering the motion detector on the camera.

The dam. 9 March 2014.

Four videos are posted below.

The first two are fun to watch. You'll see that a groundhog likes to use the dam as a bridge to cross Minebank Run. With the dam intact, that's one happy groundhog. With the dam breached it's not such a happy critter.

The third video shows one of our beaver pair swimming about in the pond.

The fourth shows a pair of ducks swimming about in the beaver pond.

Which reminds me of a fact revealed by a study in Yellowstone National Park.

"Increases in beaver populations have strong implications for riparian hydrology and biodiversity –Wyoming streams with beaver ponds have been found to have 75 times more abundant waterfowl than those without."
http://oregonstate.edu/ua/ncs/archives/2011/dec/yellowstone-transformed-15-years-after-return-wolves

More later.