Beavers in the "Bunkie"

There are a great many beautiful houses on the Lake of Bays. Tuesday, I had the chance to walk through one of them. It's for sale, and a friend of mine is the Realtor.

The cottage has undeniable Wow factor. If you're in the market, you should see it.

Turns out, however, it wasn't the only house on this property.

Just to the side of the dock, near the bend in the shore that provides privacy from the adjacent human neighbours, there is a beaver's bank house.

That brought me out of the cottage, scurrying down to the dock for a closer look. Lake levels are very low right now, so more of this is visible than the beaver probably intended. You can get a pretty good look at his "larder" -- that scraggly collection of branches anchored on the lake bottom near the house. Beav takes advantage of these during the winter months, selecting something from the menu, taking it into the house to dine on the bark, then tossing the cleaned sticks out to lie along the shoreline.

There will be some clean-up required along this entire shore come summer! On the plus side, if you've got curious kids, these sticks are wonderful -- you can see the tooth marks in them, the 'pencil sharpened' ends. They are collectibles. I know every summer, kids at Bondi Resort are thrilled when we find beaver sticks.

Of course, property owners may not be quite so thrilled -- as is often the case when we try to co-habit with our wildlife. Beavers were here long before cottages along shorelines were even a concept in some feverish imagination. Fur traders used to come through Lake of Bays regularly -- there was a Hudson's Bay post on Bigwin Island for a while -- looking for beaver pelts and other furs. Off went the skins to be turned into high hats and high fashion. We've come a long way since those days, on both sides of the ledger -- the fur traders are gone, but so are the First Nations' summer encampments. The shorelines are broken up by buildings that -- while spectacularly beautiful -- can in no way be called a "cottage", and that bring with them more people, more roads, more encroachment on a wilderness that served the wildlife for millenia. The animals do their best to adapt to our presence, but we have to do a lot ourselves to adapt to their presence...

Sometimes that's not easy. There is nothing more determined than a beaver with a dam or a house to build. Several years ago, we had one move into a small pond on our property. Equipped with his Beaver Engineer Degree, beaver set about turning that small pond into a big one. Who says people are the only animal that changes their landscape? Problems arose when the beaver's dam works resulted in washing out an access road and culvert.
Which we repaired. And repaired again. At one juncture, Brian was going to the pond every morning, climbing down into the culvert and tearing out the previous night's dam building efforts -- which the beaver was cleverly incorporating INSIDE the culvert as the most efficient location. This went on until Brian hurt his back. Half time score: Beaver ONE, Brian ZERO.

Brian also has an engineering degree, so he sat on the bank studying both the beaver and the situation, and the final solution incorporated creating a dam of his own -- complete with stop logs to control water levels, that let the pond fill up, but provided a spill-way feature to protect the road when it overflowed. Beaver seemed content with this, spent the winter, ate all the trees in the area, and then moved on into the big Lake the following year.

Left behind are mementos -- trees whittled down until there is nothing but the trademark chisel-sharp ends left. In one night, Beav 'liberated' over twenty small trees along our waterfront. This meant war... and by the end of the day we had our remaining saplings kitted out in full metal jackets. Some are still wearing this armour years later.

Beaver stepped it up. He dropped a 40' poplar through the roof of one of the cottages. The roof held, except for the holes where the branches poked through into the living room. Chainsaws came out, tree was removed, roof repaired... and Beaver took away all the smaller branches that he'd wanted in the first place.

It was entertaining to sit quietly in the evening and watch the beavers draw V's across the lake. It was fascinating to watch them logging. They are superbly adapted for this, horrifyingly efficient, and never stop to inquire about permits. In the big beaver ponds at one end of our property, where the River Loop trail runs, you can get a good look at the dam construction that can hold back enormous amounts of water. Up along Miller Hill Road, you can still see signs of where one ver dams broke, ashing out four huge culverts and a large section of road, costing about $100,000 to repair.

The beavers we visited this week are probably not thrilled with the low water level. Their den is both more visible, and more vulnerable, than they calculated. People with cottages along this stretch of shoreline will probably find that they have a more open view to the lake this summer. They can replant, of course, and if the deer don't eat the young trees, and the beaver doesn't cut down the larger ones, they may even be able to fill in some of that shoreline... The problem is that neither the deer nor the beaver is particularly concerned with aesthetics along the shoreline. They are all about the Food Factor....