Traffic jam in Indian Creek

Last summer the beavers built a dam on Indian Creek, right under the bridge where it flows under Concession Road 20. That’s right where the snappers will crawl out of the creek and lay their eggs in the gravel shoulders of the road come May and early June. There’s typically a couple dozen turtle nests each season, and the racoons generally have them cleaned out within 24 hours. I walk along there every day, and in almost twenty years I’ve encountered a total of one baby snapper. Infant mortality among the snapping turtle population is horrendous, but somehow the species has survived since dinosaurs roamed the earth. There’s also river otters in that stretch of creek. We’ve had a couple sightings just in the past week, one adult and one adolescent, scampering through the snow on the creek bank. I assume if the beavers hadn’t blocked the creek under the bridge, they’d just swim down the creek. Instead, they now have to exit the creek, run along the bank up to the road, cross the road, and then get back in the creek on the other side of the bridge. We’re gonna have river otter road-kill one of these days. Today there was a muskrat sitting on the ice just on the south side of the bridge, on the edge of open water. It was a fairly young one judging by its size. I stood there eyeballing it for a solid two minutes before it noticed me and plunged into the icy water. An adult would have noticed me and disappeared long before I ever saw it. It’s mighty busy in our little stretch of Indian Creek. Somehow all these different species manage to coexist peacefully on the same small patch of real estate. We humans could learn a lot from them.