Beavers Repairing and Reinforcing Lodges and Dams
Late October and early November is the busiest time of year for beavers. Their entire winter’s food supply must be cut, gathered, transported and piled next to their lodge so that they will have access to it under the ice. Mud, sticks, wads of grass and stones are collected to reinforce the lodge’s thick walls against the cold as well as coyotes and other predators. And dams, the structures which create ponds, must be patched and strengthened to withstand the rigors of winter.
The importance of maintaining a dam in good condition cannot be overstated, for without it, the pond would cease to exist, and no pond means no beavers. As Dietland Muller-Schwarze and Lixing Sun state in the Beaver, a beaver pond is a “highway, canal, escape route, hiding place, vegetable garden, food storage facility, refrigerator/freezer, water storage tank, bathtub, swimming pool and water toilet.” (They defecate only in water.)
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Beavers Gathering & Caching Winter Food Supply
Beavers are busy reinforcing their lodges and repairing dams as the days shorten and temperatures fall. Once these tasks are taken care of, they begin gathering and storing all of the food that they will need this winter, for once ice forms they will no longer have access to land.
Their winter food cache is placed as close to the entrance of their lodge as possible, as the inhabitants of the lodge will be swimming out to this pile frequently to obtain food. After hauling branches and saplings to the lodge, the beaver dives down and jabs the butt end of the branch into the mud at the bottom of the pond. Additional branches are woven into this base layer until eventually most caches weigh two or more tons. One can often see the pile’s top branches and leaves rising above the surface of the water.
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Beaver Winter Food Supply Cache
Once locked under the ice, beavers have only the food that they have had the foresight to store in their pond prior to it freezing to sustain themselves for the next four to five months. Sometime in September or October beavers start cutting down trees and limbing them. (The more northern the latitude, the earlier they begin this process.) Beavers have been found foraging over a third of a mile from their pond in the fall. At this time of year they tend to go further afield in order to find their preferred trees and shrubs – poplar, willow, alder and sugar maples. The branches are carried to the pond and hauled through the water to the lodge. When they approach the lodge the beavers dive down and push the butt end of the branches into the mud at the bottom of the pond and proceed to weave additional layers of branches into them.
Most caches are built as close to the entrance of the lodge as possible. A cache, or winter food supply pile, that feeds a colony of beavers consists of 1,500 to 2,500 pounds of edible bark, twigs and leaves. (On average, a beaver consumes 1 ½ pounds of food per day in the summer, and 2.2 pounds in the winter.) Because beavers don’t eat the wood, they must gather several tons of saplings and branches in order to have enough to survive.
If you look closely at yesterday’s close-up view of the food cache, you will see larger limbs on top of the pile. These larger logs are used to weight down the pile –they often consist of species that beavers aren’t particularly partial to, if they eat them at all. (Note proximity of food cache to the lodge, which is to the left in photo.)
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