Busy as a beaver. Quiet as a mouse. Name your favorite animal analogy —they all dovetail during an adventurous Beaver Watch on Ohio’s Lake Hope.
The body of water is the centerpiece of Lake Hope State Park in rural Vinton County, surrounded by the oak and hickory trees of Zaleski State Forest. Those towering trees prove awfully attractive to industrious beavers, who use their giant incisors to gnaw and drag them down the banks to a good spot for a dam and lodge.
Earth-Wind-Rock: Outdoor Adventures of Athens, leads a gaggle of kayakers in search of the beaver’s broad-tailed trail. During one of their recent excursions, the kayakers pushed off from shore about 7:30 p.m. — the beavers usually start hitting the water about 8:30 p.m. or so —paddling into an arm of the 120-acre lake. The sky deepened into slate nearly as dark as the water itself. An Eastern towhee sang somewhere up in the sycamores. Soon, a whippoorwill picked up its own rhythm in the gathering dusk.
Although you’re looking for the largest rodent in North America, the beaver’s head, when it does pop up at a distance, looks about the size of a dark tennis ball cutting through the water.
Keeping paddles still and voices low, the paddlers soon started to pick up beavers fore and aft, head and tail. Kayakers clocked about five or six different beavers, before eventually zigzagging back to the gravel launch — freezing for a moment to admire a hummingbird flittering on an oak leaf.
It’s a gentle adventure, a quiet night on the water, slowing down enough to hear birdcalls, touch lily pads and spot little chestnut-colored heads slicing through the waves, busy at work.