Wildlife news as the river goes down, comes up
A week a and a half ago, May 5, nature writer and naturalist Ed Kanze was in the middle of the Saranac River. His house was high and dry on a knoll off Moose Pond Road in Bloomingdale, but the oxbows of the river there had risen so, he’d kept his kids home from school, rather than kayaking across the temporary moat as they’d been doing.
I called him to get an idea of the consequences the flooding might have for wildlife. (he wondered about more mosquitoes, for one thing.) And I asked him to get back to me after the waters had receded.
Friday, he wrote that mail delivery, the school bus and the newspaper delivery were back on schedule:
I carried the last load of flood-era groceries home in a big Adirondack packbasket, wading through foot deep water and a stiff current while also carrying a pizza in my arms. It was a defining moment. Wish someone had taken a photograph.
Yesterday we had a least sandpiper, a typical seashore bird, hanging around. Looked and smelled a lot like the seashore around here, and I guess the sandpiper thought so, too.
But not so fast. I asked him how things were this morning…yes, yes, he wrote, the waters are back up. Six inches over the road and rising:
We’ve just driven our two cars over to the other side, where we can wade to them, and from them. With luck the river won’t get much deeper and we’ll be able to get through with rubber boots and by hitching rides in neighbors’ pickup trucks.
Excuse me while I have a hissy fit, he wrote. But in true nature-geek fashion, he brought good news, too. Ed and his family have a life-project of identifying all the species of wildlife on their patch of the Adirondacks. And the flood seems to have brought someone new:
The only good news in all this is that the night before last, the kids and I marched out in the rain and found a new salamander for our biological survey. It’s the two-lined salamander, a common amphibian of streams but not one we’ve ever found here along the big river. In eleven years of searching, this was the first to turn up. We brought it home to show Debbie, who was working late at Will Rogers. She turned up at midnight with a second two-lined salamander to show us. Amazing that a
fter eleven years two should turn up, each in about the same spot. I should add that this is a tiny beast, only the length of a foregfinger and very, very slender. A dark line down each side of the back and yellow-orange on the underside of the tail identifies it. Yippee! Some people get excited about the strangest things.
He’s not the only one. We’re hearing a bittern out in the middle of a soggy farm field on the next road over…
Tags: environment
I’ve never seen a beaver killed on a road before, but I’ve seen at least three this year. Wondering if the high water is wiping out lodges and pushing them into the path of danger.
oa, I actually saw a video once where a guy was attacked by a beaver that he had hit with his pickup truck! It got pinned under the truck and then attacked him when he tried to get it un-stuck. That is the kind of thing that wouldn’t surprise me this spring. I have a camp on the St. Regis. It gets turned into an island each spring (and sometimes in the summer and fall). It has one of the largest populations of snakes that I have ever seen anywhere. They are still there this year I saw a few last week.
Good question on what this does to the beavers. At this same camp the beaver lodge across the river was completely submerged. I have to admit that I may be happy. Those guys are turning the “island” into a treeless “island”!
It is amazing that they were pretty close to extinct at one time. I’m glad they’re prolific enough to be known as “nuisance beavers” these days. Though I’m sorry about your trees. Time to bring back fashionable hats?
Thirty years ago, the beavers flooded a low part of my woods. I fought with them for most of the summer, trying to save the trees from drowning, but in the end, they won. We cut all the sawlogs and firewood off the pond that winter, which made me feel a bit better about the loss.
Since then, I’ve grown quite happy with the new pond…there are always new things to see there…fish and frogs, herons and ducks, and eventually after the brush fell down, geese. There is a wide panoramic view with a clear reflection of the nearby hills, and some new hideouts for the deer. In winter the pond is a favorite destination on snowshoes, just for the wide open flatness of it.
If ya can’t beat ’em, join ’em.
And in another 80 years, it’s likely to be a nice meadow. Succession!