We were taken aback a few days ago while making our way through the ravine, in approaching the creek to discover that a number of poplar saplings had been 'beaverized'. Not surprising in a sense, since we've got beavers just downstream of the area we were traversing.

It's obvious that the beavers, just like the squirrels that abound everywhere now, are busy gathering food for winter storage. Most of the trees in the ravine, but for the evergreens, have now lost their leaves, and we scatter a colourful confetti of leaves as we progress on the trails, heaped with the leaves, some of them still beautifully red, orange, yellow, and those underneath become brown and crisp in their decay.

We saw quite a number of immature poplar that had been taken down completely, their thin branches obviously collected and placed within the beaver lodge. Others had been neatly 'wedged', the trunk still there, awaiting the coup de grace and final abduction. We thought we'd take a trail offshoot that led to that part of the creek they had co-opted and dammed and ambled along over there. As we approached we could see signs of a lot more young trees that had been appropriated by the beaver in their nocturnal forays.

And we saw also a garter snake, soaking up the late fall sun in a bit of a clearing by the side of the forest, unperturbed seemingly at our close passage to where it lay. It stayed there, unwilling to budge from its comfortable perch; the only sign it was aware of our presence, its flickering tongue, gauging us and our intentions.