Beaver at Huntley Meadows Park
This past Saturday I introduced you to one of the local beavers in a posting entitled Beaver at dusk. The photos of the beaver were shot at a very high ISO and were pretty grainy. Yesterday, I was fortunate enough to photograph the beaver in better light, when he came out of his lodge an hour or so before sunset. I’m still going through my photos and may work up a few more, but wanted to post one immediately.
He is a beautiful specimen of a North American Beaver (Castor canadensis). From what I’ve read, it is almost impossible to tell a male and female beaver apart, except when the female is nursing a kit (baby beavers are called kits), so I may be wrong in using male pronouns with this particular beaver.
© Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved.
Mike Powell 
The extra light sure makes a better photo – thought that’s hardly profound.
Nice shot Mike, indeed that extra bit of light has meant so much more detail can now be seen, I’ll look forward to seeing the rest from this set.
Thanks. There will probably be another couple of photos. Many of the shots I took were variations on the one I posted. However, I have a few shots in which one of the two beavers (they were both present) appears to be helping the other with grooming.
Well I’ll certainly look forward to future posts in regards to your Beaver project, given time opportunities and encounters will become more often as you start to learn and understand your subject better and like you mentioned in your first post “Beaver at dusk” those aspirational shots of what you want to achieve in the future will become a reality due to your gained knowledge of this wonderful animal, keep clicking Mike and the shots will eventually come to fruition.
Meant to say …
*the shots you are after will eventually come to fruition 🙂
That’s amazing. Those beavers must be used to seeing humans.
Lucky twice! You’ll have a nice spot to go back to time after time and check up on these guys. I don’t think the adults go far from their winter den and they use it over several years. Darn nice photo.
Thanks. They have done a good job of plastering the lodge with lots of mud and have built up the mud walls surrounding the little pond. I think there are three beavers, a male, a female, and a young beaver. I have seen the two adults together, but have yet to see the little one. I’ll be checking in on them regularly, for sure.
I’ve noticed you seem to like Canadian Animals…. the geese, the beavers…
And don’t get frustrated by light… do you shoot in RAW or in jpg? I ask because sometimes you can sharpen and remove noise in RAW more than jpg- it doesn’t fix all high ISO shots, and actually sometimes can muddy them a bit, but it’s worth trying. Still your first shots were really good, and we all have to accept nature’s lighting sometimes…
I shot in RAW mostly and process them with Photoshop Elements at the moment. For convenience I have been doing most of my processing on my MacBook, but I really should get an external monitor (and calibrate it) to get more consistency in the way things look. The other thing I need (as do all of us) is more time to play with the images. One of the nice things about the RAW files is that I can return to them and do a whole different series of adjustments (which I may end up doing when the weather gets bad in the winter and I have no new shots).
[…] Beavers (Castor canadensis) at my local marshland and showed you one image in a posting called Beaver at dusk—the sequel. A brief overseas trip and other distractions have kept me from posting additional photos (as I […]