Beaver dam inspection at The Farm.

Ah, I spent the afternoon at The Farm today and once again my soul is restored.
Roxi followed Dad & I through the woods around behind the Big Pond to see the new beaver dam. It was around 50 degrees and everything looked beautiful and wintry but it felt wonderful.
This is at a little creek that feeds the pond where we used to-no still do-go netting for crawfish and salamanders in the warmer months. We saw this big deer sign. He must be a monster, especially for this area, our white tail don't usually get too big.

We grew up riding horses through these woods and everywhere else. It's a kid's, and a dog's paradise! It's also a grown-up's paradise. I can't imagine life without this little piece of Heaven, don't want to anyway.
Here is Miss Roxi checking out the newest beaver dam. She loves going in and out of the water, it must be the Lab in her! She's growing up just like me; weekdays in town, weekends at The Farm, and she loves it just as much!
Where you see the horizon in this shot used to be woods, until very recently. It's still hard for me to "compute" the new landscape, the old familiar landmarks are all changed. Well, not all of them. We all decided to be happy about it when "The Old Butt Hole" who owned the dam side of the pond died and it was sold off to a farmer who cut his trees for crops. He was nice about it; he could have cut every last tree on his property where it meets ours but he didn't. No use crying over spilt milk. Besides, last summer while floating around out there I thought how it somehow makes the whole pond look bigger, and cleaner having some trees cut.

Here is a beaver lodge; Dad stomps on it to see if he can scare the beaver out but they don't fall for it today. They are nocturnal and very crafty. Dad hunts them at night all winter until they're usually all gone. It's simply a matter of keeping the pond intact; oddly, all their efforts to dam up the pond to make it bigger would wind up causing the "real" dam to break and all the water would come rushing and gushing out.

The "real" dam is right here where this beaver lodge is located. We used to ride the horses across the dam to where the beaver dam is and take the horses swimming. Then muskrats moved in and started honeycombing the dam with these holes. They're so numerous now it would be impossible to ride a horse along here without the likelihood of him breaking a leg in one of these.
Now, you would think the beaver would concern themselves with the business of patching up all those muskrat holes wouldn't you? But they don't, they stuff sticks down in some but not all of them. Now that would be a neat symbiotic relationship, well not in the strictest sense, but it would be cool if the beaver would at least make themselves useful while they're busy cutting down trees!
Here are some of their "works in progress":

This picture is taken from the dam, the flat land you see here used to be woods until recently. Do you see Roxi out in the cold dead duckweed? She's sleeping in bed with me tonight, and I'm too tired to bathe her...that's the beauty of short haired dogs, they're self cleaning.

She was tuckered out the whole ride home. Doesn't she look perfectly clean? My little sugar toed princess! Here it is, 10:30 on a Saturday night and we are both ready to hit the hay. I can go to sleep with visions of woods, deer, beaver and muskrats dancing in my head...
She has the good smell of the farm & the pond. You know how smells take you back in an instant? When I put my nose in her fur it's like I'm 5 years old, in Dad's old Smokejumper's dark green down filled sleeping bag camped out in the springhouse, listening to a deafening chorus of robust bullfrogs and tree frogs, the smell of pond muck still on my hands...
I'm going to pull Roxi close to me tonight so I can dream of Farm things.