AS BUSY AS A BEAVER

THE PERENNIAL GARDEN, CLEANED UP AND MULCHED (should have been done last fall)

THE BEAVERS HAVE BEEN VERY BUSY...

...INCREASING THEIR TERRITORY...

...THEY MOSTLY WORK THE NIGHT SHIFT

Monday, 8:00 AM.  34 degrees F, wind NE, very strong.  The sky is overcast and there has been a pelting rain.  The humidity is 83% and the barometer 30.02".  It was tough walking into the wind this morning, but our sails were billowing when it was at our backs.   It is a gloriously nasty morning, the sadistic wind thrashing the trees until they groan.  Nice to get in out of it though, and stand in front of the gas fireplace in the library.
   I finally took the bull by the horns (actually the rake by the handle) yesterday and cleaned up and mulched the perennial garden.  It should have been done last fall but I was occupied with a futile attempt to fill the freezer with venison.  And then it snowed.  And snowed.
   The beavers on the North Branch of Pike's Creek have been more industries than I, mostly the result of the activities of their night shift.  They have made vast improvements to their impoundment, the waters of which now clearly cover several acres.  In the past it has been but a puddle.  I attribute this to several factors: 1) a great lengthening and heightening of the dam; 2) ample snowmelt from the past winter; 3) although I cannot prove it, a probable increase in the beaver work force due to decreased trapping.
   In any case, the visual and environmental impact of the beavers industry is considerable and extends far beyond the dam and the pond, as the beavers go some distance to cut trees to build and reinforce the dam, and to consume as food.  The sheer genius of the beavers' activity is apparent in that as the water backs up behind the dam it floods more woodland, making the trees the water engulfs easily transportable by water, when cut, to the dam site and their lodge.
   I am reluctant to "lawyer up" here, but I am compelled to ask who now owns the land the beavers have flooded.  Will the Army Corps of Engineers  claim it as a navigable waterway; will the Bureau of Land Management claim it as federal land, as it has claimed land along the Red River between Oklahoma and Texas; will the Environmental Protection Agency declare it an immutable wetland, which the beavers must now maintain as such in perpetuity? Or will that Orwellian agency require the beavers to destroy the dam because it interferes with the migration of anadromous fish? If the beavers should gain title to the dam and pond through adverse possession, will they have to pay property taxes to Bayfield County and the State of Wisconsin; and if so, will it be paid in cord wood or, cruelly, in beaver skins? Will the beaver dam have to pass annual safety inspections conducted by the State of Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources?  Do the beavers even have standing in a court of law in this matter?
   Life is as complicated for a Castor canadensis as it is for a Homo sapiens. Especially when one is "as busy as a beaver."