About 20 DCR biologists and volunteers stomped to shake off the cold Sunday morning, standing in a ring outside a small shack on the Prescott Peninsula as Dan Clark set the plan for the annual beaver survey.
SHUTESBURY - The first rule of the beaver survey: Don't burn the meatballs.
Aquatic biologist Paula Packard warned Dan Clark, director of Natural Resources with the Department of Conservation and Recreation Division of Water Supply Protection, before she jumped into the driver's seat of a DCR minivan to hunt for beaver habitat. Don't burn those meatballs.
About 20 DCR biologists and volunteers stomped to shake off the cold Sunday morning, standing in a ring outside a small shack on the Prescott Peninsula as Clark set the plan for the annual beaver survey. Teams would split off, tramp through the woods to follow their respective streams, take down data on any active beaver lodges, then return to the shack for lunch. Today: meatballs.
"The real goal is to get back here in time for lunch," Clark joked.
The Prescott Peninsula juts out into the Quabbin Reservoir, and is off-limits to people due to its proximity to the watershed. After decades of relatively little human management, the peninsula is wild and covered in heavy forest -- perfect for research.
Beavers were non-existent in Massachusetts for more than a century due to hunting and trapping, plus elimination of habitat. After the valley was flooded in the late 1930s, the beavers returned.
Beaver habitat is a marvel of engineering. Besides humans, no other animal does so much to change its surroundings, to set up its own backyard.
Nancy Huntington of DCR looks out over a beaver pond during the beaver survey Sunday, Nov. 16, on the Prescott Peninsula at Quabbin Reservoir.Dan Warner | dawarner@masslive.com
Just as humans did to create the reservoir surrounding this peninsula, beavers find flat land, then dam streams nearby to flood the plain. The dams are long, earth-covered mounds, propped up by sticks, so the pond level is a couple of feet above the surrounding land. The ponds are multi-level, sectioned off with easy channels for access.
The land around the pond becomes like a marsh, deep mud and standing water. But the dams don't leak. DCR wildlife biologist Jill Whitney said beavers hate the sound of leaking water. It drives them crazy, and they go out and plug the leak quickly.
The first Prescott survey was held in 1952. The survey has been annual since the early 1970s, and some of Sunday's searchers have returned every year for 30-40 years. Now, it feels more like a family picnic than a research project, complete with goofy uncles and teenagers hanging out by a nearby pickup.
The researchers split up streams, marked maps and got out GPS devices before driving to their assigned areas. The peninsula is long and covered in small streams, so it takes some organization to cover all of the ground.
Whitney crunched through a crust of snow on the dirt road, eyes on the map, before setting off into the unmarked woods toward the first pond. She had a pretty good idea where there would be active sites, which ones would be abandoned, but everything needs to be checked.
A beaver lodge sat on the far side of the pond, a jumble of limbs and earth rising a few feet above the thin, warped ice coating the surface. The beavers were gone, the site inactive. By November, the lodge would be coated in fresh, dark mud, a food cache of poplar and berries sitting nearby. This one was light gray, the mud and wood dry, abandoned for some time.
Whitney crouched in the snow to take notes, then tramped off through the grass, following the trickle of stream cutting through the woods away from the pond. The water disappeared underground at points and wound through nearly impenetrable thickets of Japanese barberry, leaves now stripped, bright red berries sparkling against the snow.
She stooped to examine something rusted, half buried in leaves and dirt. All around it, old jugs stuck out of the hard ground, the metal rusted to a brittle shell. She picked up an item and held it out. It was a shoehorn.
The town of Prescott was incorporated in 1822. Before the area was flooded in 1939, the town was virtually abandoned.
Seventy-five years later, its ruins are scattered through the forest. Lichen- and moss-coated stone walls line streams and set long-forgotten, now arbitrary boundaries between the trees and thick underbrush. What were once important symbols of property and landownership are now just stones in the woods, the land returned to forest.
Driving through a grassy field on the way to her assigned stream, Nancy Huntington, of DCR's Quabbin Visitors Center, pointed to the spot where the Five College Radio Astronomical Observatory stood until 2011. It's also the former site of the Prescott town commons. An old grinding wheel propped up on the ground is all that stands.
Whitney ducked branches and shuffled through brush to reach the next pond, but there was only a sudden clearing in the trees, covered in high grass. This is what happens after the beavers leave, she said. The former dam now is just a mound under the dirt, the pond completely drained, just thick mud left behind.
On the drive back toward the shack, Whitney hit the brakes to watch a black bear walking down the road, 50 yards ahead. It froze, turned and stared down the minivan for a minute.
"I'm glad I'm not walking," Whitney said, driving on after the bear loped off into the trees.
Whitney stopped to take a look at an active beaver site, squinting through the haze of young white pine that cut off sight just a few dozen feet ahead. She and Huntington clambered over a wall, through thickets, multiflora rose thorns snagging on clothing and refusing to let go. They waded through mud, trying to step on clumps of grass to avoid sinking in over the ankle.
Finally, they reached the edge of the dam, the dark, mud-coated lodge just fifty feet away over the pond. Lodges are like fortresses. Their only access point is from underwater. In the middle of the pond, the lodge basically is surrounded by a moat.
If the pond isn't the right depth, however, the lodge can be a death trap. The pond might freeze through, trapping the beavers inside without access to their food cache.
The rodents are elusive. None came out of the lodge or made any sound Sunday, though Whitney said they sometimes will come out when you get close, slapping their tails on the water as a warning to leave them alone.
Beavers on this peninsula, however, have little to fear. Clark said they have virtually no predators in the area. That, coupled with the lack of human management, makes them an interesting case study.
Clark said that after the beavers came to the reservoir, the population followed a pattern typical of reintroduction -- explosive growth, followed by a crash as the habitat is oversaturated, then a steady leveling off.
Now, there are around 20 active beaver sites on the peninsula, with 2-8 beavers at each site, and the count has remained relatively steady for years, suggesting it has found equilibrium for how many beavers this habitat can support.
While the data collectors were out, Clark started up the wood stove in the newly refurbished shack. Chili, meatballs, corn bread and lemon squares awaited the researchers after a morning of hard hiking in the cold. The wind was picking up, so the researchers ate quickly before heading to their cars.
Everyone complimented the meatballs.
