Bernie is still here – and he’s a dynamo. This American beaver has taken down 16 trees since he arrived last month and cut them into pieces for various uses. Fortunately, they were in dense growth surrounding a boggy area. He created a new pond, which remains full of water, but does not appear to be a flood threat. At least, yet.
In the above image, you see Bernie eating his dinner one evening last week. The entrée then apparently was a delicious, fresh speckled alder tree chunky and salad. He ate it with a grinding-crunching sound similar, at times, to the sound of a fresh celery stalk being chewed steadily.
He felled that alder the night before and dragged parts of it into that area, a pond that’s adjacent to the one he created. He’s apparently building a winter residence in the original pond. I hope it will be a one-bedroom apartment and not a luxury beaver condo for a colony. I also hope that he’s not thinking of trying to make the two adjacent ponds into one pond by flooding the dirt road between them. Some of his work:
The mud-and-wood dam that he created to form a nearby body of water that we call Bernie’s Pond is a work in progress that is a little more than three feet high and about seven or eight feet long. Bernie’s Pond actually is a visual improvement over the run-off gulley that he started with:
As far as I can tell, Bernie remains a one-man wrecking crew. The hope is that he’s one of those crotchety “bachelor beavers,” and just wants to create a livable small territory that’s defensible against other beavers and his primary predators. (Around here, mature beavers are preyed upon mostly by coyotes, black bears, and humans.)
If Bernie remains a bachelor, we probably will be able to work out an accommodation with him. If he wants a large family and large watery territory, we’ll likely have to make some tough decisions about trapping and transporting him and his kin.
(Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, October 15 and 18, 2025.)