Despite the lack of conveniences like indoor heating and take-out, beavers make a pretty good living for themselves in the winter.
Something Wild: Beavers in Winter
Air date: December 3, 2004
Welcome to this week's edition of Something Wild. I'm Rosemary Conroy for the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests.
You've heard about squirrels hoarding nuts for winter, but did you know that beavers store food too? Although in their case, they store sticks. Lots and lots of sticks. Stick bark, in fact, is what gets beavers through the winter. MM mmm.
Now you and I would find that tough going, not to mention tough chewing, but beavers, with their special digestive tracts and sharp teeth, do just fine. They'll spend the winter hanging out in their lodges and when supper time rolls around, they always have take-out, so to speak.
Or take-in, to be more accurate. Beavers spend the fall piling sticks into the mud right outside the entrance to their lodges. When they get hungry, they go out, grab a stick and bring it in.
Despite the monotonous menu, that dome-shaped lodge is a cozy place to spend the winter. Several generations of beavers hang out together in there. Being strongly built and only accessible from underwater, it is safe from predators too.
Many of the beaver lodges you see sitting in ponds and wetlands, however, are abandoned. Once a beaver tribe has eaten up all the hardwood bark it can find, they move on to twiggier pastures.
In the meantime, other animals like muskrats and otters will often use the empty lodge, which usually lasts a long time.
So how can you tell if a lodge is still occupied by beavers? Look for fresh mud plastered and freshly chewed twigs strewn on top. (Efficient above all else, those beavers waste nothing ? not even debarked twigs). And if you can safely get close to the lodge, you can sometimes hear the beavers inside.
But don?t disturb them by lingering too long. After all, you don?t want to be a stick in the mud ? especially not with beavers around! (ha ha)
Something Wild is a joint production of the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests, NHPR, and NH Audubon.
For Something Wild, I?m Rosemary Conroy.
