Just a really quick post about an evening spent in the Durham area on an evening last week. I’m afraid you’ll have the excuse me for the vagueness of the location due to a sensitive sighting.
Sara and I set out without much expectation on yet another stiflingly hot summer evening, just to get some fresh air as much as anything – but it turned out to be a pretty good evening, nature-wise.
In a meadow, a couple of House Wrens sang back and forth. They’re a fairly small bird, but they manage to sing quite a loud distinct song.
The usual suspects were also in attendance: Black-capped Chickadees, Red-winged Blackbirds, Common Grackles, and plenty of mosquitoes. This year seems to be a bumper year for American Redstarts, as I have seen many of them in various locations. I’d like to get a good photo of the male (who has bold black and orange colours). On this occasion, only a female would co-operate, peeking out from behind the leaves of a Willow tree. She is mostly grey with a yellow patch on her flank and in her tail.
We began looking out over a marshy body of water when Sara thought she had seen a Muskrat. For anyone unfamiliar with North American fauna, this is a medium-to-large sized rodent that lives in marshes and streams that can chew down trees. It not only sounds like a beaver, but it also looks like a beaver. A muskrat is smaller than a beaver, but the scale is hard to judge from a distance. A muskrat has a smaller and more pointed nose, and it has a long tail rather than the familiar paddle-like tail of a beaver. Muskrats are easily confused for beavers when seen poking out of the water – I have seen people on Instagram posting a photo of a muskrat, only to exclaim that they have seen a beaver. One time, I was walking through a park with my camera, and some guy started yelling for me to take a photo of a beaver in the creek. It was a muskrat. I took a photo to keep him happy and have been saving up the opportunity to be passive-aggressive about it until today, dear reader.
Sara and I tend to assume, when we see a reddish-brown semi-aquatic mammal, that we are almost certainly looking at a muskrat. Beavers are just not very common as far south as The GTA. But suddenly, this creature we were watching from a great distance, lifted its tail. It was paddle-shaped.
We were really delighted to watch this guy for a while. He swam around the perimeter of the marsh, occasionally taking mouthfuls of reeds. He was in no rush and seemed to be just enjoying an evening swim. We lost sight of him behind Lilypads and Cattails a few times until he finally disappeared from sight altogether. It was the first time either of us had definitively seen a beaver in the wild, despite our best attempts for several years.
We didn’t really know what to do with ourselves afterwards – nothing was going to top this! I joked that it was a shame he didn’t just come up to the edge of the marsh so I could get a closer photo. Not likely. A few moments earlier a guy was raging into his phone about his current living arrangements. Someone else walked by generously blasting their music from a loudspeaker so that they could be certain that we could share in their enjoyment. Now that bicycles are the pandemics hottest must-have item, several cyclists blurred past us trilling their bells unnecessarily. We looked for birds again. Actually, another female Redstart appeared for a less shy photo.
We were about to leave, but on a complete whim, Sara walked back a little to the edge of the marsh…. and, unbelievably, the beaver was right there. He could fully see us right next to him, but seemed quite calm about it and hung out with us for a few minutes.
As if to prove a point, a Muskrat suddenly appeared from the bank and stood right next to the beaver. My telephoto lens magnifies enough, and these guys were so close to us, that I couldn’t actually fit them both into a photo at the same time – but here is one of the muskrat.
Beavers and Muskrats live in the same habitats and will co-operate… sometimes to the extent that a Muskrat might live inside an active Beaver’s lodge – something we suspect might be the case with these Bros.
Coming Up!
A morning spent around Cootes Paradise Sanctuary, Hamilton and a couple of other nearby and not-so-nearby places.
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