Beaver Fever!

We're visiting the Midwest again for our "mid-holiday visit".  Compared to travel during Thanksgiving or Christmas, or even our standard, random times of the year, the period between the holidays is pretty slow and quite pleasant with empty seats on the plane.  So we're enjoying the Christmas lights around town and spending time with family for a few days.  For a little excitement and a gift for "Auntie Maj", we brought along our cat Annie, who spent her first few years living in our Illinois house.  Once we caught her (a real adventure!), the rest of the trip was uneventful, and she enjoys being the only cat in the household with unlimited attention from us, but rarely expresses much interest in the world outside the window or the birds and squirrels there.

I took a walk down along the river this afternoon and didn't expect to see much in the way of nature, and sure enough, lots of browns and greys, but without the accent of any white snow yet, although sister Kathy reports they got a dusting 3 hours to the west of us.  A friend we shared dinner with last night - an organic farmer, stated that after today we're setting a new record for consecutive days without snow at 280 days!  Perhaps a sign of global warming, since the record being broken is only 8 years old!

But something caught my eye - about 400 meters upriver, it looks like we've got a localized beaver infestation!  I've blogged before about seeing some signs of beaver, in fact, it was exactly 3 years ago.  But today there was a good-sized sapling about 6" diameter that was felled across the trail, and about 10 smaller saplings that had been cut and removed.  I didn't see where they had been moved to, a few trees that small wouldn't have had much effect on the Fox River, nearly 150 meters across at that location.  A Google search for "beavers in Kane county" only brought up pest-removal companies (no adult sites like Melinda's dirty mind concocted!), so they must be proliferating, which I'm all in favor of...  At left is a mini-panorama of the new clearing they are making, with a close-up at right with fresh shavings.  Below is a cross-eyed 3D view - cross your eyes slightly to fuse the stereo images...  Would be cool to see real-live beavers - will keep an eye out for our remaining days here!