Beavers in the corn
My father-in-law showed me his bird feeders the other day. Both were metal, of good quality, and bent so they were laying flat on the ground. Neither of us had seen this before. "What could do that?" he asked. We've both seen squirrels, chipmunks, deer, lots of raccoons; but never have either of us seen such damage. "Maybe a raccoon could do that, but that's a big raccoon!"
Yesterday we solved the mystery. All around the property we encountered the remains of trees, gnawed off by a beaver over the past several days. After some further investigation we found where he's tunneled into a bank--a small forest of Poplars and assorted other limbs floating just below the surface of the water.
Did you know that beavers eat corn? I did not. When my father-in-law started putting corn in his feeders, the beaver started frequenting it. And since it was too high for him to reach, he just pulled the whole thing down so he could snack at ground level.
So yeah, that's my first "beaver at the feeder." But I don't have a good way to record this in my Peterson.