Just like home

The past month has seen far colder conditions than the residents of Knapdale are normally used to. I recorded -16°C on more than one night over the Christmas period and have had a lot of calls enquiring about how the beavers coped with the low temperatures and thick ice on the lochs.
The answer is that as far as the beavers are concerned, these conditions are not unusual. Where they lived in Norway they would have seen even harder winters, with sub zero temperatures lasting far longer than they have done here.
Beavers make caches of food which they can feed on easily when times are tough. Although some lucky beaver watchers reported having watched the animals walking out on the ice close to their lodges, a fact confirmed by footprints and tail drag marks in the thin snow covering the frozen surface, for the most part they have been very inactive, not carrying out much work at all during the very coldest weather.
It has given the field workers collecting data on their activity new puzzles to solve. Usually we can tell an older stump from a newly felled one by the small mould spots that grow on them. But the cold means that the freshly cut wood is preserved for longer.
This tree appears to have been newly felled looking at the surface, but closer inspection reveals that the woodchips are under the layer of snow which fell 3 weeks earlier but stayed frozen on the ground.

Now that the thaw has set in we can see that the beavers are stirring and getting out and about much more, which is just as well since we will be catching up the Coille Bharr beavers over the coming weeks in order to health check and give new radio tags.

Frank the Beaver

Continuing our trapping success, Roisin and I caught Frid's mate Frank this morning.
Frank is named after our Norwegian friend, colleague, and beaver expert Frank Rosell who captured and quarantined the beavers in Norway for us and is one of the major advisors on this project.This is Frank in his native habitat tracking Beavers on a river in Telemark. We have the pleasure of Frank's company later this week when he will be coming to see how the beavers are getting on and help us to develop trapping methods for the Knapdale terrain.

Back to this morning, we again attached radio and ear tags and collected samples in the same way as with Frid. Frank is in good body condition; lighter than his mate but this is not unusual as females are often bigger. Roisin held Frank safely in a sac while the special glue, sticking his tag in place, set. Roisin looked especially smart and ready to drive to Edinburgh for a meeting straight after tagging Frank. Wrangling beavers was something that she didn't really expect to be doing during the early hours of this morning: we surely couldn't be lucky enough to catch a second beaver so quickly! To complement Frid's green tag ensamble, we gave frank orange tags! Here he is in the video below returning to his home. He was glad to get out of the sac but settled down quickly and dived back into the lodge.


Now we just have the juveile, "Biffa" to catch on this loch!

Beaver in the Bag!

At 7.30 this morning, Roisin Campbell-Palmer and I met under a still dark and rain laden sky. Roisin is the Beaver Team Leader for RZSS (Royal Zoological Society of Scotland) and is currently staying in Kilmartin in order to head up the beaver catch ups.

We currently have two catch ups in progress: one of all of the Trial's beavers so that they can be health checked and have new radio tags attached; and one to retrieve the animal/s currently residing on the River Add. They may be one or possibly both of our missing females from the Creag Mhor family on the Add; so far only one at a time has been seen by our staff but we have had a couple of very positive sounding sightings of two together.

Since the monumental rainfall of two weeks ago washed out their burrows (shown above), the animal/s has/have moved on so we are busily looking for field signs again. Until we find another foraging trail it is impossible to know where to place the traps.

Meanwhile, the routine catch up of Trial area animals has got off to a much more encouraging start. We set the traps, that we lugged out into the field the other day, for the first time last night but didn't for a moment expect that we would have caught one as we braved the cold and wet first thing this morning.

When I rounded a corner and called back to Roisin that the trap was sprung, she hardly believed me and we both suspected that the strong winds overnight may have just triggered it. On peering inside however, we could see the glossy brown fur of quite a large beaver and we both grinned excitedly. Now all we had to do was get it out of the trap and into a sack!

Roisin and I have both worked with animals for many years: in the wild, in zoos and with domestic livestock. Roisin has been spending a lot of time out in Norway working with beavers and it was good to put all of that knowledge to the test today.

Without too much trouble the beaver was soon safely contained in a sack and we went about collecting samples of faeces, hair, anal gland secretion, attaching a new radio tag and ear tags and recording her weight.

Once we were able to sex the beaver, we knew that we had Frid, the adult female of the family, but we were able to confirm this from her microchip number.

We were pleased that we managed all of this quickly and efficiently and it wasn't long before we were able to release Frid and watch her make her way back to water. Out of the sack we were able to get a proper look at her. She looked in very good condition and not unlike a small bear as she trundled back to the water. From the weight measurement we can see that she has put on nearly two kilos since her release into the wilds of Knapdale.

She paused to give us rather a filthy look from the safety of the water before disappearing off toward her lodge and family. The new tags are certainly colourful and will help us immensely in identifying her at a distance. Now we have to attempt to catch her mate and son.

The Big Beaver Catch Up

As part of our on-going monitoring of the Trial we will periodically be catching the beavers up in order to assess their body condition and general health, screen for any diseases that they may have picked up in the wild, collect samples which will contribute to studies of beaver behaviour, ecology and social structure and also attach new radio and satellite tags in order to help us to keep tabs on their movements.

Radio-tracking has proved a real challenge in the rocky, tree covered landscape of Knapdale and so we are trialling a new type of tag this time which is only very slightly heavier (we still use tags only half the weight of some of those used in other beaver studies elsewhere) than the originals but two or three times more powerful.

In order to catch the beavers we will be using a variety of methods borrowed from countries such as Norway and Bavaria. Other the course of the Trial we hope to develop methods to suit the environment that we are working in but to begin with we will be trialling traps designed in Bavaria.

These are rather big and very heavy things and so we enlisted some help in order to get them into position on one of the loch sides.

It was a rather damp day...

and tiring work!

But everyone was happy to see the traps in position.

The traps will now be left closed in oder for the beavers to get used to them being there and for any lingering human scent to wash away (shouldn't take long considering the recent weather conditions!).

Trapping is expected to continue over the next few months. It will be interesting to see how the beavers will react to these traps both initially and after the first animal has been caught in one; we are assured by our German advisors that they work well. Traps will be checked morning and night and any beavers trapped will only be handled by trained staff members.

Soon we will be visited by some beaver trapping experts from Norway who will be providing some very welcome advice to back up the training that we have already received from them in Telemark.

Busy Season for Beavers

It's around 8 weeks since I've been able to get about in the field following my accident. Today Roisin Campbell-Palmer, Charlie Self, Chris Wilde and I managed to get out to the very spot that I fell foul of a slippery branch, and my how busy those beavers have been since I last visited!

We followed some of their foraging trails and found that they are making a real difference to the woodland structure.

It's the busy season for all wild animals as they prepare for a long cold winter. As far as our Norwegian born beavers are concerned, it should soon be extremely cold out there and they will likely be expecting ice to thickly cover the water's surface.

To get them through these cold times, they stash food in the same way that squirrels do and build themselves sturdy winter homes. Our families of beavers on Linne and Coille Bharr have now constructed lodges to live in and they are impressive structures.

The Linne lodge can be seen in this photo, I haven't been able to get very close to it yet but am looking forward to carrying out field sign surveys next week and getting a proper look.

Picture Perfect!

Wildlife Watch is the junior branch of The Wildlife Trusts and the UK’s leading environmental action club for kids.

There was a competition in the Summer edition of the Wildlife Watch Magazine "WildWatch", to draw a picture of a beaver. We had 2 winners who sent in these beautiful pictures... 

 

Ella Harrison age 6

and Annie Forbes, age 14

both of our winners are from Edinburgh.

The prize was adoption of a beaver for a year, plus having their artwork proudly displayed on the beaver blog.

Very well done to both of you!

Hazards of the job!

I'm afraid that this blog may be a little on the quiet side for a while because I have gone and done myself an injury. It's amazing how easily these things can happen. A simple slip while recording an exciting new piece of beaver activity and the result is several weeks in plaster and likely a long recovery period before I can walk about in the forest again. It's a good job that volunteer Mike MacIntyre was there to help me back to the canoe!