I get a little tired of numbered posts, even though I’ve been the one that established them in the first initial place, and we had a ‘Sorting Finds’ post just two weeks ago. But in that intervening time, I collected over 700 more images before I even got the chance to back up the files to an external drive (I have two internal harddrives mostly for backups, and a backup server that’s been down for a while, but then a couple of old harddrives that I use for the same purpose,) so it was time to do another sort, and indeed, it produced a few images that escaped posts back then. You know, all two weeks ago or less.
This is the one that I’m a little surprised to find that I missed, but then I recall that I was hoping for a better followup.
I looked out back one midday and discovered a North American beaver (Castor canadensis) cleaning itself on one of the small tree islands, quite close to the house – both the time and the location were curious, since they’re largely nocturnal and have only left vague evidence that they even visit this portion of the pond at all; I’ve only seen them in the creek off the back of the property, though the evidence of their visits, in the form of gnawed-off saplings and stripped sticks, is found occasionally. I tried slipping out the back door with the camera, shielded from view by a large tree trunk, but apparently it heard me because it was gone when I eased into view. I briefly spotted it making its way out through the channel between the upper and lower ponds and got off a single frame.
Now, I’m not 100% sure this is a beaver, since I’ve seen a nutria on the farther portion of the lower pond when visiting with a neighbor. Nutria tend to be slimmer and smaller on average, but their physique overlaps with beavers at the larger end, and the only other way to tell at a distance is by seeing their ratlike tail, which I never got a glimpse of. Still, I found a beaver stick in the pond not far from where I’d spotted this guy (nutria eat grasses,) so I’m leaning towards beaver.
Just because I captured the two together, I feature this wood duck (Aix sponsa) cruising past a yellow-bellied slider (Trachemys scripta scripta) in the pond. Not quite the lighting conditions that I would have preferred, but I’ll take it for now.
And more on the duck front.
Here we have a female mallard (Anas platyrhynchos) industriously preening herself – I realized during sorting how high her left leg was raised. And this did not escape the attention of the male either:
It’s not nice to stare, but she can’t possibly see him so it’s okay. And it’s her fault for doing that in public anyway. If I had a readership, I would have just lost half of them with that comment, but I probably don’t have a readership because of various such comments in the past. Though I’m not the one staring, you know…
[These images illustrate something that may pose a problem pretty soon: there are lots of intervening small trees and such on the edge of the pond, devoid of leaves now, but not for long, and my view of pond life is going to get much worse. I could always go cut them all down, but I’m trying not to do any more than is necessary, and this spring and summer are going to be the acid test. I’ve also already seen how glutted the surface gets with pond lilies and duckweed and so on, and I’m not even sure the ducks will keep visiting once they get fully established. We’ll see I guess.]