[music playing] Hi, I'm Alex.

Welcome back to A Season at Shaver's Creek.

Spring is a time of emergence in the natural world, and we've been seeing some pretty cool activity around the center.

Let's take a look.

Here, we see one of our resident beavers using its specialized grooming claw on its hind foot to clean its fur.

And they also use it to spread a specialized oil called castoreum all over themselves to give them a good waterproof coating.

Just like beavers, waterproofing is really important to birds.

And they spend quite a bit of time adjusting their feathers.

It's called preening.

And as we see with this mallard, you can see it using its beak to make sure every feather is in the perfect place.

And it reaches back collecting an oil from its little preening gland as well to spread across its feathers, to give it a nice waterproof coating.

Here, we have a pair of common mergansers following these mallards up the beaver dam.

Being diving ducks, mergansers legs are positioned really far back on their body toward the tail, which makes them really good at swimming underwater, but not so great at walking on land.

Unlike mallards, they also need a much longer space to take off.

And so you'll often see them almost running across the surface of water, building up speed for takeoff.

And here, we can see that long runway in action as these mergansers are flying across the screen.

Now, here, we get a look at a male and a female wood duck.

And as dabbling ducks, you can see how much easier it is for these guys to take off.

They can really just hop right off the ground, unlike our mergansers that need that long water runway.

Throughout the spring, our deer herds are continuing to use the beaver dam as a creek crossing point.

And you can see in the background, another trail camera getting tripped illuminating a larger portion of the herd.

The muskrats around often use this little tunnel through the beaver dam to climb down into the water, and then, when they want to, back up over the dam.

As this raccoon duo is crossing the dam, you'll tell that they start to hear something.

You'll see their little ears moving as they're listening into the sounds that they're hearing.

Keep an eye on that muskrat tunnel that we just saw.

And you'll get to see what they're listening to.

We got our first turtle sightings this spring, which was pretty exciting.

Reptiles are ectotherms.

Ecto means outside and therme meaning heat.

So they take their body heat from outside their body, from their surroundings.

And that's why you often see reptiles basking in the sun.

It's a big source of their energy.

And so they really spend a lot of time out there just soaking it in.

It was pretty neat to see our bobcat in a different location this spring.

A little bit soggy from traversing the wetland.

It chose this downed log as a dry crossing of Shaver's Creek.

Now, this is the largest North American woodpecker, the pileated woodpecker, which made an appearance just down the hill from the center.

You can recognize a hole in a tree that the pileated has made by its unique rectangular shape.

These cavities are pretty cool because they can provide a lot of shelter for animals like squirrels and screech owls.

They really do a lot for a lot of the other animals in that same habitat.

This was the first time that we were seeing red squirrels around the center.

There are about half the size of gray squirrels.

And while gray squirrels, they tend to cache their nuts singly, one by one, red squirrels will build big caches of nuts, usually in hollowed out logs or other cavities.

Finally, in a true sign of spring, we saw this mother goose and her little goslings swimming down Shaver's Creek.

It's always such a treat to see these little just hatched baby birds exploring their new environment.

Thanks for joining us for this episode of A Season at Shaver's Creek.

Check out our website for information about our upcoming summer programming.

And until next time, never stop discovering.