254 University of California Publications in Zoology. \Vou.5 
oven built out-of-doors and plastered over. All that one can 
see from the outside is a big pile of sticks and poles about ten or 
twelve feet in diameter at the base and from three to five feet 
high. The beavers always have the entrance under water so it 
is hard to see them leave or enter their houses. Some of the 
houses looked as though some one had taken a shovel and thrown 
a lot of mud and rocks on them, but none were what I would call 
plastered. The number of beavers in one house seemed to vary 
from two to four. 
“*The main food supply of the beavers was spruce bark. They 
preferred willow, but that grew only in a few favored localities. 
If no willow or spruce was to be had they would feed on erab- 
apple or hueckleberry. We saw where considerable alder had been 
cut, but I am satisfied that they used this in building their dams, 
as it was easy to cut, grew nearby and lasted pretty well in the 
water. Only once did I see where they had nibbled the bark off 
of an alder stick; so they certainly could not have been fond of it. 
‘“We spent considerable time sneaking around in the canoe 
studying the habits of the beavers and trying to get some pho- 
tographs of them in their home life. We succeeded in getting 
up to within twenty feet of one in the canoe one evening. He 
grew suspicious, however, and turned back toward the nest. 
In shifting the camera I made a slight movement and the 
beaver ‘popped’ his tail and disappeared like a flash. At an- 
other time a beaver was seen swimming across the lake. Two 
of the party got into the canoe and followed him cautiously 
while the third member kept an eye on the beaver with the 
field glasses. The beaver swam along the shore until he came 
to an old log that was partially submerged but stuck out of the 
water about fifteen feet from the shore. Here he crawled out 
on the log and then hunched himself up, took a small spruce 
stick in his fore paws and started to nibble the bark off of it. 
The men in the canoe were not more than fifty feet away and 
watched the performance with a great deal of interest. The 
beaver kept twirling the stick over and over in his paws as he 
chewed the bark off and the way he was sitting up made him 
look like a little old man eating a roasting-ear.’’ 
At Mole Harbor Stephens reported beavers as recently ex- 
terminated in the meadows four miles south of the harbor. 
