Leave it to beaver

From what I've been hearing it seems like today might've been our last sunny one for a while—yup, that means the rain will be here just in time for the weekend. Lucky us.

Anyway. To the photos....

I spotted this hawk as I drove in to work this morning. Not a great photo, but since the bird kept flying further away just about every time I moved I feel lucky to have gotten it at all:



After I got out of work I drove over to Nemesis Pond to see what might be around. Initially I only spotted a few Canada geese, so I wandered around in the woods for a bit. With this one, I liked the way the afternoon sun illuminated the side of the tree:



I don't have the faintest idea what would cause something like this to form on the side of a tree, but it was about as big as my torso:



I walked back over and scanned around the pond one more time, and just as I was about to leave something sticking out of the water's surface caught my eye—something that my brain was telling me hadn't been there before. The water level has started to drop a bit, which meant it could be a part of a plant. But I decided to watch for a moment anyway, and several seconds later the thing I was looking at dipped into the water without a sound. Which meant it was exactly what I suspected: a beaver's nose.

So I ended up standing by the pond for over an hour, trying to get a decent shot of what turned out to be at least two beavers living there. No such luck, I'm afraid. But I did get a photo of what it looks like when the nose is visible—if you look closely to the right of it, you can see the outline of the beaver's body:



The beavers circled around the edge of the pond near where I stood for quite a while, but the only parts of them I ever saw out of the water were either their nose or their back:



No, it naturally saved surfacing from the water until it was well at the edge of my lens's range:



When I heard a rustling in the dead reeds in front of me, I initially assumed it was a blackbird moving about. Then a bit of movement caught my eye, and I spotted this little dude trying to get himself into the water:



I finally gave up when I hadn't seen any sign of either beaver surfacing, which coincidentally happened to be when the mosquitoes began using me as an all-you-can-eat buffet. But it's nice to know they're still there and still active; hopefully I'll have the chance to get a better picture in the coming weeks.