Timmmberrrr!

[Lucky Buckeye]

Had to take the wife 35 Miles east  of here for a post surgery Dr's appointment later in the day so we decided to stay in a motel there. Traffic in the evenings over in Pensacola can get fairly thick.  Good thing too as the weather that night got a little rough. Had a nice dinner and an easy paced evening. The next day was an easy drive home for a quiet weekend.  A few days later my rear neighbor gives me a call and starts in on me about "shoulda got permission to be cutting down a tree and leaving the heavy part of it for him to clean up". I explained to him that I hadn't even been around for the last day or so and certainly hadn't been cutting any trees.  Looked out the back window and sure enough an 8" willow was laying in his yard with the limbs stripped off.  WTF? I told him that maybe some of the neighborhood boys were playing lumberjack and I wouls ask around. I went outside to get a closer look. The cut ends and trunk of that tree had a vaguely familiar look from somewhere in my past. There was a faint debrie trail going off in a diagonal toward the back corner of his lot so I followed it to a culvert  that ran through the area to drain the local elementary school's parking lot. There in the middle of the ditch was a nice little Beaver dam with plenty of fresh cut willow limbs.  Ordinarily this wouldn't be much of a deal but considering I live on a barrier Island and about 200 feet from the ocean this was a little unusual. That ditch is
only about 6 feet across and the closest FW lake is over in the state park area 5 miles west. Those beavers had to cross a few roads and cut through several neighborhoods to reach that ditch. Now that's some determination if I ever saw it. Somewhere those beavers had to cross the (saltwater) intracoastal canal to get on the Island. I had no idea they would cross saltwater to get to such a small area of freshwater.

[Hawken50]

   As per Iron Belly....... There are Beaver there,,,, As many as stars in the sky.    Sorry couldnt help myself.