Not my first time but I remember it more than all the rest.

Before I was a solo tripper 4 of us were camped on an island. Full moon and one of the guys had to relieve himself, so he walks down to flat rock on the edge of the water and starts doing his business.

He's in his underwear and half asleep. Apparently he was peeing where a beaver was cruising and we heard two splashing sounds?

The first one was the pissed off beaver, next was him falling into the water. 

  He never did that again. Swore the beaver "attacked" him but we all knew better including him.

Back in the mid-90's, I was camped with my wife & two young boys right next to the portage from Quetico Lake into Conk Lake.  It was "0 dark-hundred" and I was fast asleep... but not my wife & kids.  They were terrified of the bear that was stomping around in the water right next to our camp.  Ultimately, they woke me up and forced me to "go outside & scare him off."

I hadn't heard a thing but would get no further rest until I investigated. So, out I went, stumbling around our site with a flashlight.  All was good until I was startled by an explosion of water right beside me. We all know the rest of the story.  When daylight broke out a few hours later, I looked around and we were clearly camped right on the access trail for the army (navy?) of beavers who were harvesting trees just on the other side of camp.  There were quite a number of them and they were not happy about our site selection.

Not sure that my family (well... my wife, at least) believed me, though, when I first went back in & told them it wasn't a bear.  They insisted upon "moving along" to a different camp.

Jimbo   

Back in my youth I was trout fishing one evening on the Pine River in central WI waiting for a mayfly hatch to occur.  I was standing still in mid stream just as it was getting dusk and I noticed a ripple in the water right next to me.  When I looked down a big beaver did a KA PLUNK with it's tail.   I was out of that river in about two seconds flat.  Scared the living crap out of me.  I had never seen a beaver in the wild prior to that.

Fast forward fifty years and on a pleasant note.  I was standing in the woods along the shore of Red Lake and a bunch of beavers were hauling branches back and forth fairly close to shore.   I stood perfectly still and as they passed I could hear them making  "mumuring" sounds of some sort.  I watched and listened to them for about an hour.  I never looked it up but I'm assuming they were communicating with each other.  That was a neat experience.

One of my very early trips in the late 70’s was to Crawford Lake that lays between Carp and Knife on the Canadian side.  My wife and I had just set camp up and it was starting to get dark, when we spotted a bear on the opposite side of the lake.  He appeared to be pawing for fish or something.  So we hooped and yelled until he finally wandered off into the brush.   

Then in the wee hours of the night, the Ker-Plunk sound started on the side of the lake we were camped on, and entirely too close for comfort.
 
The Ker-plunking slowly moved down the lake, then the sound of something loudly pushing through the brush.

The next morning was too windy for Newbie’s to be on the water, so we decided to explore the hill behind camp.   We walked within 30 yards of an enormous bull moose that was bedded down and when it stood up and pushed it’s rack through the brush it scared and delighted both of us.

Based on the tracks we found at waters edge and up a small drainage, that was the Ker-Plunking we had been afraid of all night.

MB

Old Salt wrote on Oct 23^rd, 2019 at 8:56pm:


That's MY kind of fishing!!!   

Spartan2 that's a great pic.  "Nice BEA-ver" in my best Leslie Nielson voice. 

TomT wrote on Oct 23^rd, 2019 at 10:31pm:


Thank you!  I wish I had had a really good camera back then, and I could have done better.  But still. . .it is a favorite.

Westwood wrote on Oct 24^th, 2019 at 2:45am:


Yeah I've experienced this up close. On a very small island site on Sarah Lake I heard a pair of beavers dragging limbs through my site to the water.  They knew I was there and I shined a light on them but they had a job to do and just carried on so to speak.

So, my first solo with my dog Bernice she got the biggest kick out of watching the beavers. She never payed attention at home to them, but in canoe country she seemed good just to sit and watch them. After two nights on Gebeonaquet (not sure I spelled it right) which because of blisters on my feet I called it gee Ben outta quit. We headed up the creek and just turned onto Pocket Creek when a beaver came flying out of the weeds at us. Bernie on reflex almost took off after her and in catching herself looked at me like, I can’t believe I almost jumped. Oops!
I didn’t realize a beaver could be so aggressive.