I decided this week to gather samples from an area that had been giving me headaches while mapping them from Google Earth. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been doing a lot of reading on beaver ecology. Soil, foliage, wildlife, it’s all there. But none of the literature or photographs do reality justice. In one of the first areas I explored, I was 2-3m above the stream and about 10m away and still sinking past my ankles. The soil is intermittent here, going from dry pine forest in one area, then a few feet away is a black muck like I haven’t seen outside of the southern swamps.
It only got worse as I left the more mountainous area and attempted to traverse the marshes created when the streams begin to level off in the valley. Between the muck, hummingbird-sized mosquitos, sawgrass, and willows I might as well have been in the Everglades. It was difficult to wrap my head around this, as it was nothing like anything else I’d seen in Colorado. The trees were so dense that I could not force my way through without cutting a path. I spent the first 2 hours of my day exploring a swamp and was unable to physically reach a beaver dam the entire time.
Eventually, I gave up on that area and went to focus on the more mountainous and easily accessible dams and ponds. While I only collected a dozen unique samples by the end of the day, I came away with a greater understanding of the degree of impact the beaver has on our stream and river systems.
