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What in the Woods Is That?

Play our biweekly guessing game!

Whatever draws us into the forest—be it birdwatching or logging, hiking or hunting—all of us are unified by the sense of wonder we feel in the outdoors. The forests, fields, and streams of our region are full of mystery, and if you stop and look closely, you’ll see all sorts of oddities.

Below find a picture of one such woodlands curio. Guess what it is and you’ll be eligible to win a Northern Woodlands woodpecker magnet designed by artist Liz Wahid. A prize winner will be drawn at random from all the correct entries. The correct answer, and the winner’s name, will appear when the next column is posted and in our newsletter (sign up here!).

Baffling Beavers

We’re flipping the script a little this time. If you’ve ever spent time in a beaver flowage, you’ve probably seen unexplained (maybe unexplainable) beaver chewing like this. For some reason, some beavers chew trees into blocks, similar to how a log would be bucked into firewood. Many of these logs are already on the ground as the beavers work, so it’s not a case of felling a hung-up tree piece by piece. Why would a beaver devote time and energy to this seemingly pointless task? We’ll award the prize to whoever has the best theory, or at least spins the best story.

Answer

Our question brought in more than 30 replies - pretty impressive, given the fact that we admitted there is no definitive way to know for sure. We got reasoned replies (“...the beavers eat the cambium under the bark for food. If they leave a tree at length they sacrifice all of the available food on the underside of the tree they have felled. By cutting the stem into pieces they can roll the smaller pieces so they can eat all of the available food…”) physiologically-based theories (“beavers’ incisors grow continuously so they need to chew all the time to file the teeth down”); humorous anecdotes (“sheer boredom…between sports seasons when UMaine Farmington Battling Beavers are idle, there is little to watch inside the lodge so beavers take to the woods to gnaw big sticks into little ones”); and some that were just surreal (“...beaver “lodges” are made to confuse and distract their many predators; these pre-cut logs become beaver log cabins, where beaver families go to enjoy fireside chats with cheese and wine waiting for the coming spring”). We picked a winner at random this time; thanks to all who guessed.

This week’s contest winner was Stephen Moses of Genesee, PA