December 10, 2020 Easton: Beaver Brook to Wheaton Farm

December 10, 2020

Welcome to Susan's Bay Circuit Diary! This blog follows my adventures with my dog Sulu hiking the Bay Circuit Trail. To get new posts in your inbox, please subscribe (see the little "subscribe" oval above). The rest of the past posts can be found using the little menu on the left. If you are curious how this all started, go here.

Between the two red asterisks

First piece of news: For the first time, Google Maps directed me to Route 24 for my starting point. I’m continuing to process counter-clockwise around Boston. It took a little time to find the parking spot at the Beaver Brook Woods conservation area. The trail directions did not give the house number beside where this little lot is tucked away (for the record, the closest marked mailbox is 99 Poquanticut Avenue). I was able to use AllTrails to locate the end point of my last walk to find the entrance to the tiny parking area.

After last time’s phone battery crisis, I resolved that I would not rely on my phone for navigation at all and would be very conservative with phone use. I brought paper trail maps and a print out of the trail directions.

In preparing for today’s trip I noticed that hunting is allowed in the properties that will be visiting and it is not only deer season but shotgun season so Sulu and I are both wearing orange - he a jacket and I a knit hat. This is a detail I should have attended to before but now I am on it.

The trip started off with road walking. Easton appears to have a low commitment to sidewalks.

Easton decorates for Christmas

We passed this cute mini horse on our road walking

We passed through the Old Pond Management Area (off leash time for Sulu) and I missed the historical feature of a berm used to test cannonballs back in the day, both coming and going.

Sulu is getting more comfortable with these peculiar poses

The dam at the Old Pond in Furnace Village

Easton is also “cemetery city”. According to Find-a-Grave (which sounds a bit macabre but is actually a great geneaology resource) there are 35 cemeteries in Easton. Does that sound like a lot to you for a town with a population of 25,000? In addition to the cemetery I passed on my drive in, Sulu and I walked by the “New Cemetery”, the Furnace Village cemetery established in 1849, and then we passed what looks like an older cemetery, the Dr. Edward Dean cemetery established in1816.

Dr. Edward Dean cemetery

Victorian ironwork in Furnace Village

The Wheaton Farm conservation area is posted pets on leash and I thought I would comply. That became obvious as a good idea when I saw across the field a woman walking a handsome horse on leash (too dark to photograph, alas).

Wheaton Farm

From the field we progressed into some woods, where I heard what I believed to be pair of calling owls. At first I thought they were barred owls. I decided to look them up in the iBird app since I’m almost to the halfway point and have 82% left on my phone.

From the app I think they could have been great horned owls since the call seems deeper than the barred owl - almost foghorn-like. How exciting!

The trail through the Wheaton Woods was pleasant and well-marked, with a few walkers and dogs. I smiled to see quite a bit of princess pine carpeting the forest floor.

There are a few examples of rock constructions on the trail, I hesitate to call them art, but they will be useful hopefully in helping me find my turnaround point next time or at least not overshoot it too far. We turned around around after an hour and a half of walking, 3.4 miles.

My turnaround point - easy to recognize

I felt well prepared with our bright orange accessorizing. I did hear distant shotgun blasts.

On the way back to the car I became very aware of the presence of water in the landscape. We crossed and re-crossed the same brooks. On the Old Pond Trail there were areas where it looked as if someone had been raking the path, or the leaves were removed and piled up. This puzzled me but on the way back I concluded that it was actually runoff from a recent rain storm pushing the leaves out of its way.

Throughout my BCT journey I’ve been traveling through land and water shaped by beavers, and quite a few “Beaver Brooks”, etc. I got curious and did a little research. Turns out that (as I suspected), beavers were exterminated in Massachusetts by the 1750s. They only reappeared in the 1920s in Western Mass, and Mass Audubon imported three more from New York. Now they are almost everywhere! So are the "Beaver" place names from the Colonial era or the 20th century?

This is some kind of human fitness trainer we found on the curb, but it's
like a more stable form of an agility training tippy board. Sulu rocked it!

My most exciting nature sighting of the day was unfortunately road kill. On the way back to the Old Pond trail, I saw a dead mink by the side of the road. I have never seen a wild mink dead or alive. I did not know that they have a white chin! Minks are also almost everywhere in Massachusetts, but they are furtive, so rarely seen.