Birthdays, Migraines, and Wildlife

The last weekend was both busy and slow.  Saturday we collected The Child and visited my folks to celebrate my Dad's birthday.  He'll be 90 next year; when that happens, we'll have to plan a large celebration with fancy food and champagne and maybe a Mozart Quartet... Or something.   This time around was a modest affair with immediate family.  

Sunday started out typically. Mark and I had talked about getting up before dawn and going to Delta Ponds to try an spot some more beavers.  I woke up around 6 AM, peered between the blinds at what I thought was an overcast morning, groaned, and burrowed further under the covers.  

Around 7 AM I did toddle out of bed and found Mark in the living room.  The sun painted high clouds magenta, and the waning full moon hid behind the two pines to the west.  I realized I was a Bad Husband for keeping Mark from his early morning nature walk, and said that we should go—but Mark said we could go in the evening.  

After breakfast, I thought I'd join a Zoom writing session of folks I know, but then I got a blind spot in my vision as I was trying to catch up on social media on my phone and the next thing I knew, there was a vibrating spiral of blue lightning in the middle of everything, which put the kibosh on reading or doing anything requiring sight.  

I ended up napping outside all morning on our deck furniture.  In the sunlight. It got up to 65F.  This is two weeks after the snow and ice storm and about a week of temperatures in the mid-20s.  I think I might have gotten a mild tan.  

Luckily, my aural-migraines aren't too bad; although my eyes didn't feel like they were focusing properly until the mid-afternoon.  I convinced Mark to go to Delta Ponds a little early, and we headed out around 4PM.  Mark thought we were there a little early, but as we were walking along the place where we'd seen a beaver the week before, I heard a nibbling sound, and there was a great big beaver sitting on the bank just below the walkway stripping the bark off of a twig.  Mark saw a smaller beaver near-by. 

January Wildlife

The Willamette Valley is slowly recovering from last week’s ice and snow. Several friends and acquaintances have had scary encounters with trees falling on or near their houses and cars; the most famous victim of weather is the Cascades Raptor Center, which lost an aviary to falling trees and is currently a deathtrap due to partially fallen tree limbs.

The other evening, Mark and I took a walk along the Willamette River and the inlet into Delta Ponds before shopping at the local mall. Rain fell, and I was glad for an umbrella.

A gang of kids sat on cardboard in a circle out of the rain under the Valley River bridge. Mark initially wanted to see logs, debris , and other flotsam as it came barreling down stream, but all we really saw were small twigs awash in the gallons of water rushing along the downed trees along the river banks and bridge pylons. I peered into the glooming grey, hoping to see an osprey or maybe one of the Skinner Butte eagles, but all of the birds must have been hunkered down elsewhere.

We left the bridge and walked along the bike path along the river toward Delta Ponds. Through the leaning trees and fallen branches, Mark pointed out a white heron in the shallows. Water washed over trees growing from slender eyots near the river’s bank. We saw some ducks between the river and the path, and when we rounded a corner where the inlet flowed into Delta Ponds, there was a tree stretching up bare branches laden with cormorants. On rainy winter late afternoons, the looming cormorants take on a gallows aspect, as if they were awaiting some watery menace to surface and dispense nacreous bounty.

A sign along the path listed likely animal residents of the waterways and I was surprised that river otters were on the list. We walked farther, not quite to the sluice gate near a car dealership, and then Mark saw a large animal swimming in the current. I thought it might be an otter because it was swimming more quickly than the nutria we usually see, but when it hopped out of the water and onto a bank below us, we saw the wide flat tail of a beaver. Mark was elated. We followed the beaver back toward the Willamette. I’m not sure if it was looking for downed branches to drag off somewhere or roots to eat or what, but during most the time we saw it, it made an almost dog-like whining, as if it were muttering to itself that “no, this branch isn’t right.”

The last time we saw a beaver up this close was around February 1, 2020, also during a flood, when the beaver in question was gnawing on an oak growing next to the bike path. I had forgotten how big they are. 

Bike Path Beaver

Friday evening after some errands, Mark and I went for a walk along the Willamette River.  Thursday, Mark had been walking along the Delta Ponds Bike Path and had seen beavers, and he wanted to see some more.

I brought along my camera, not realizing that it would be fairly dark by the time we got to the waterways.  As we were walking toward a car dealership from the Valley River Center, Mark showed me the gnawed roots of a tree where he'd seen a beaver the previous night.  A few steps later, he spotted a wake in the water.  He pointed out where a very large, log-shaped shadow swam in a pond-like side channel of the Willamette. We must have gotten too close, because there was an explosion of water as the beaver dove.

We spent about a half hour or so, creeping along the sides of the bike path, looking at shadowy forms of ducks, nutria, and geese.  We stopped at a spillway.  Water surged from the Willamette in to the Delta Ponds wetlands, which was surprising, because usually the water flows the other way.

We turned back, and around here, Mark noticed a lump by a tree.  "Is that an animal or a stump?"

I looked.  "I think it's a stump."

It was a beaver.

A really big beaver.  Chewing on a very small log.

 Mark turned on his cell phone light, and I hunched down about eight feet away from the beaver and attempted to take its picture. 

It gnawed on the bark, then looked at me and took a few steps toward me.  In my mind, John Cleese as Tim the Enchanter was saying, "It's got teeth like a... it can jump like... Look at the bones, man!" 

The beaver took a few more slow, lumbering steps toward me.  It looked like it weighed forty pounds.

"I'll just move reeeeally slowly."  I stood and took a few side steps back to the bike path. 

The beaver waddled over to where I had been, and continued to a path along the riverbank to the water.