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Мирослав Колар

Бобры готовятся к зиме (окончание)

Two years ago I mentioned the establishement of a new beaver dam less than a kilometr from my workplace. It, and especially the little lake behind it, was clearly visible from the highway. Thus I noticed immediately in the morning of Nov. 27 on my way to work that all the water disappeared from the already frozen over beaver pond. In the middle of the dam somebody dug a big whole till the bottom, as you can see from the first photo I made two days later. Judging from the footprints in the snow, it must have been a rather large group of people. I was afraid all those two years that a beaver habitat so close to a highway might irritate somebody.

I have no idea what happened to the inhabitants of this beaver pond. I couldn't see any footprints of escaping beavers, not any signs that they were killed. Actually I never saw these beavers in those two year in spite of that in the summer I used to visit this place during the lunch break to check on what's new there. Now I am not even sure where their lodge exactly was. I couldn't see the usual winter underwater supply of branches for food. However, around the pond there were numerous signs of intensive beaver activity - large number of felled trees, as one can see from the two pictures. In the second photo, there are three birches originally joined at their root, that were felled by beavers this past fall into the form of a rather regular three-point star, just several dozen meters below the damaged dam.