Beaver Lodges

A beaver lodge turns the world we know on its head. It shuts the light out and opens to an underwater realm. Understand a beaver lodge and you will understand why beavers are so level headed, so unlike humans who aspire to the heavens. When beavers awake they open their eyes in darkness and then ease themselves into the surrounding water. Any light above is defused throughout their water world, and when they are thriving the surrounding water is made opaque by the fine grains of suspended dirt from the mud they constantly dig to find roots and plants for food.

The beaver is a builder, an earth shaper second only to humankind, but there is not a hint of sun worship in its religion. Beavers build pyramids but their alignment signifies no fear of the Zodiac. They build lodges convenient to trees they can cut and surrounded by bottom they can dredge. Stick your head straight down in the water outside a beaver lodge and you will often see a forest of logs. Look underwater in the fall and you see the beavers' winter food, sunk in the mud. Look in the spring and you see their leftovers.

When we build we begin with a map and a plan. We look down and try to envision the rise of our future comfort. A beaver begins on the level, floating in a stream that, to a beaver nose sniffing just above the surface, is redolent with the smell of surrounding willow, aspens, poplars, birch, and maple. And if when extended just below the level, a beaver's paw can feel mud then a lodge can be built that will soon be surrounded by the rising water stilled behind the dam the beaver will also build,

and that is a photo easier to take when the surrounding pond has frozen over enough to support your curious weight.

Inside the beavers fashion two levels: drying platforms just up from the water of their entrances into the lodge and a large space where they will spend many hours. I have knelt around many a beaver lodge left high and dry, and never found one that could accommodate me. But I did send my son, his friends, a thin teacher, and some of his fourth graders into an abandoned lodge, not all at the same time. Here is a photo taken inside the lodge showing the hole coming up from the entrance to the lodge and opening into the platform.

Here is a photo of Ottoleo and Marty Cain relaxing inside the lodge.

That thin teacher fit inside the lodge with two students. Of course, when all these people climbed into the lodge, the mud pack that the beavers once had on the outside had washed away, and coyotes had dug a hole it from the top.

There was plenty of light inside the lodge, even without the camera flash and a flashlight. When beavers use the lodge all is perfect darkness save for one or two small vent holes in the roof that let out steam in the winter but don't let in much light, if any. When Ottoleo climbed into the lodge, he held the camcorder switched onto "Nightshot." Maybe the video clip below gives a better idea of how a beaver sees the inside of the lodge than flash photos do: