Salmon River

I put in at the bottom of Salmon Cove.  It is a beautiful day, one of the best of the summer.  The sky is a clear and stark blue.  The temperature is about70F as I start and there is a pleasant breeze out of the north. What surprises me is the level of the water.  It seems to be about 2 feet higher than I what I expected it would be.  Some of the pond lilies and pickerel weed leaves are submerged.

The vegetation is particularly lush this summer.  We haven't had any mid-summer floods this year and the marsh plants seem to be loving it.  Pickerel weed is still in bloom as are many of the other plants that I don't know the names of... lots of reds and purples today. The wild rice is not ripe, but it seems to be doing well. The wild grapes are long gone - In case you are wondering, they taste okay but there seems to be only a day between when they are hard and bitter to when they go soft and flavorless... not worth any effort to collect. 

Pickerel weed with bees

The water is high enough to cross the beaver dam below Dibble Creek, but there is a solid wall of cattails that object and I can't get within 15 feet of the dam.

The view looking skyward past the overhanging trees is remarkable with the sky such a clear and brilliant blue. 

There are quite a few Great Blue Herons and Great Egrets.  I'll spot 10 or 12 of each during the trip. 

I head up the river to the Leesville Dam, leaving the main channel to go around the backside of a couple of the islands.  There is almost no current until just below the dam and ALL of the boulders that are in the river channel are well under water. I find wapato in bloom among the cattails in the smaller channels.

I return using the culvert route.  

I head into Pine Brook.  There was a large patch of wild rice in here that was wiped out by mid-summer flooding two years ago.  The water was high enough to submerge the rice plants and they did not go to seed.  Last year, there was almost no wild rice.  Today, about a fifth of the original patch has wild rice growing on it, which I think is pretty good considering the limited seed source. 

Pine Brook - the light green water plant is wild rice. 
Where the canoe is in this photo will eventually be all wild rice.

Just before the top of the cove, an adolescent Bald Eagle overflies me.

I cut across the top of the cove and head up the Moodus.  Just past the submerged beaver dam, I spot concentric waves coming from the bank.  Something that I did not see dove.  A few second later and a large beaver about 15 yards up slaps its tail and dives.  I pull up and wait to see if the beaver will come back up.  With bad eyesight, beaver often resurface and swim slowly at a distance while trying to catch a scent and figure out what disturbed them.  It doesn't come back up, so I continue up to the blocking deadfall a couple hundred feet below the mill pond dam.

On the way back, I spot a second smaller beaver.  This one stays on the surface for awhile, and with the wind in its favor, it surely caught a snootful of my scent. 

Wapato

As I head down the river left side of the cove, a mature Bald Eagle takes off from an overhead tree and crosses the cove.  A single down feather is shed mid air and I watch it for awhile before deciding that it is going to take all afternoon for it to settle to the water.