Beaver Stream and Rusty

As always our dog sitting time is also improving fitness time. Having Rusty here means at least two good walks every day, often three. I'm already up to 10,000 steps and there is still his late night walk to go.
Right now the rain is beating against the windows but we'll be out there for 10 minutes or so even so. If Rusty wasn't here there's no way I'd be going out!
Today's picture was taken from our morning walk. Down across the fields to the beaver stream. The beavers have built a dam right across the stream just to the left of the picture (you can see the top logs in the vegetation covered dam) but it's not been maintained and is leaking. That, combined with the very dry summer means the river is very low anyway.  Rusty was very alert here and I guess there were a lot of interesting scents around the stream.  100 metres upstream is another dam and that one is much better maintained with a thick coat of mud on the upstream side and there is still a substantial pool above it.
In general the fields are fairly parched after this long, hot, dry summer but around the beaver stream pools, as seen here, there is a riot of thick, healthy-loooking vegetation. It's a very good sign that beavers really do give a huge boost to the natural ecology of the areas they live in.