The beaver and the bear

The beaver pulled itself out of the water beneath me and started chewing on a stick. Well, at least for a few seconds. I was standing on the bank above it, and I had the camera on a monopod resting on my shoulder and tried to ease it down slowly and get a picture of the beaver eating dinner, but no dice.

The beaver saw me, jumped into the Middle Fork and ba-bam! Slammed its tail on the water and was gone. Such is life.

Then the beaver re-surfaced and swam around the corner up McDonald Creek. It was just about dark and I was thinking about going home. But I'm not that smart.

Once in awhile people will ask me, "How did you get that picture?" And the answer invariably boils down to being:

a) Too dumb to come out of the rain.

b) Too dumb to come out of the snow.

c) Too dumb to go home.

Or a combination of all three. At any rate, I happened to catch a glimpse of a white-crowned sparrow in the bushes around the corner, so I went to investigate. White-crowned sparrows are a dime a dozen in Glacier Park in the summertime, but this was my first sighting of the spring.

The birds were shy and flew away. But by now the beaver had moved about 50 yards upstream and was swimming around in circles over and over again, whacking its tail on the water.

I knew I had interrupted its supper, but why it kept going around in circles whacking the water was beyond me. I wasn't even close anymore. At least not close enough to bother it.

But I still thought it might make an interesting video clip. The new DSLR camera I have, a Nikon D7000, will also shoot high-definition video. Thing is, you can shoot video in low light and it will still look pretty good. So I set up the camera on a tripod and a video head, and then the answer to the beaver's bad attitude emerged.

There was a black bear standing on its lodge across the creek.

The bear may have thought once or twice about digging into the lodge. Beaver lodges are built like tanks, and it would take a lot of digging to get inside, only to find out that what was inside had left. The bear seemed to know this, and it left the lodge alone and sauntered down the creek.

The bear made for about five minutes of fairly interesting video as it wandered through the brush, digging here, smelling there, chewing on grasses and other stuff along the way. I've edited down a clip you can view at the newspaper Web site. Just click on the "featured videos" link.

And the beaver? Once the bear was off its lodge, it quieted back down and went for a swim, no worse for the wear.

I walked back to the truck in the dark. It's something I'm used to by now. Blame it on the beaver. Or the bear.