My two cents: In search of the elusive Rose Creek beaver

It isn’t every day I can escape the office to chase down rumors of a renegade beaver outside Albion.

Or get paid to wander through one of the remaining patches of natural Palouse prairie.

The beaver has felled many trees.

But last Thursday, April 15, news of this derelict beaver lured this reporter out of the office for an afternoon of poking around the nature preserve Rose Creek.

Rose Creek is a little-known 12-acre nature preserve with a trail, located about four miles outside Albion.

It is owned by the Palouse Clearwater Environmental Institute (PCEI), a non-profit conservation organization on the Palouse.

I had called PCEI on another matter, and their watershed project manager, Sara Cucksey, just happened to mention Rose Creek had a beaver on the loose. Apparently, the little sucker was chomping down trees willy nilly out there.

She just wanted to make one thing clear:

“We aren’t mad at the beaver,” she told me.

Now I’m not a nature lover- don’t regularly pack up and strike off into the woods (usually too cold and boring). However, the promise of the spring sun was thrilling.

Anything to get me out in that. I grabbed my camera, came up with directions, and then I was off.

PCEI touts the reserve as growing black hawthorn, cow parsnip, and aspen. While these species aren’t rare, it is rare that they have been growing undisturbed on untouched Palouse soil for hundreds of years.

Just outside the reserve, at the trailhead, a sign lists reserve rules.

One rule cautioned hikers to tread lightly on the land. I giggled at this as I set off down the trail. What does that mean, tread lightly? Is that like, tiptoe?

I continued on. The land was alive. Vivid green leaves, thousands of them, tender in their youth, shot from the muddy ground, a soft waving carpet.

The distinct call of a pheasant echoed through the reserve. Tiny orange moths flitted about my knees.

I rounded the first corner, ducking under low-hanging branches. Most of the reserve is directly on the banks of Rose Creek. Tall aspens and pine make the canopy of this forest. Elderberry and red, entangled dogwood bushes formed much of the undergrowth. I reached the creek, which the trail follows.

That day, the creek was slow, lazy and blue, crawling a cold, quiet distance through the good earth. I stopped for a second to watch it. The surface was winking in places. I looked closer. Water skippers scampered about, doing water skipper things.

I kept going. The trail has fun turns that round the bushes in neat, tight patterns. It makes the next corner look like a secret, the way the brush hides what is around the next bend. I imagine children go nuts here.

I’d been walking for a ways when I realized I’d all but been ignoring a raucous clatter several trees away.

A family of woodpeckers was yucking it up in the trees. One would fly down and harass the other one, who would scream back at his (or her) relative. Then another would join in, flying in the face of the two, screaming at both of them.

I felt as if I’d walked in on some intensely intimate squabble. I tiptoed by.

And then I met the beaver.

Actually, I didn’t meet the beaver, I met the trail of destruction left behind by the beaver. Where the forest had been high and shadowed until this point, I suddenly found myself in a sun-lit clearing.

Trees thicker than a man’s waist were felled all around me. Later, when I followed the trail to a hill high above the whole reserve, I would get a birds-eye view of this busy beaver’s work. Trees were down everywhere- an estimated 70 or so felled trees.

“He was really trying to impress a female or he didn’t have good aim or he was nervous or something,” Cucksey told me. She suspected this beaver is a young male who recently left home to scratch out his own territory.

I poked around the creek edge for a time, searching for the beaver’s dam. The dam was blocking the stream above 50 feet upstream from the Rose Creek trail bridge.

The beaver’s lodge was half-hidden, a bristling mass of mud and sticks at the bank. Both the lodge and dam were hewn from fallen sticks and chewed up logs.

Satisfied, I took many photos. I finished the trail, which wanders up a grassy bluff and loops back down to cross the creek on the same bridge.

On my way back, the woodpeckers were still arguing.