The Week After Release Is When You Find Out
You trapped the beavers from a conflict site, held them through the handling and health check, transported them to the release location in the Foss sub-watershed, and watched them disappear into the bank. That is the part the photos show. The next three months of site visits, each one possibly showing you nothing, possibly showing you a dam under construction, possibly showing you a carcass sixty meters downstream — that is the actual work, and it produces the data that tells you whether the relocation protocol is sound.
Beaver relocation in the Skykomish system is not a drop-and-leave operation. The North Fork, South Fork, Beckler, Foss, Sultan, and Wallace sub-watersheds each have different hydrological characteristics, riparian vegetation profiles, and existing beaver territory pressures. A relocated family that gets established in one sub-watershed is a success. The same family that gets pushed off a stretch of the North Fork by a resident colony is a mortality event waiting to happen. You only know which scenario is unfolding if you are visiting sites on a regular schedule and recording what you find with enough granularity to see patterns.
What a Visit Record Actually Captures
The Beaver sign field is the first decision point of every site visit: is there evidence that the relocated animal is still present and active? The hint text on Sign comments — "how fresh?" — is the entire analytical question in three words. Fresh sign means recent activity, which means the animal is alive and local. Old sign means nothing has happened since the last visit. No sign means the site is vacant.
Fresh sign takes forms that require eyes trained to read a specific landscape: gnaw marks with white wood still showing and no weathering at the cut edge; mud wallows where the bank clay is still wet and shiny from foot traffic the previous night; tracks in the soft silt at the water margin that haven't had a rain event collapse them. A field log entry that says "beaver sign: Yes / Sign comments: fresh — new gnaw on 18-inch diameter cottonwood at upper bank, mud trail visible, no rain since Tuesday" tells the next observer exactly what baseline they are walking into.
The New structures field and its GPS location pair are the documentation layer for construction activity. A relocated beaver that begins building within the first two weeks of release is establishing territory. A dam or lodge under construction at a GPS-logged location creates a spatial record that you can compare to aerial imagery, previous visit records, and the original release point to understand how far the animal has ranged. New structures location as a separate GPS point from the site center is important when the animal has started building somewhere unexpected — a side channel, a tributary mouth, a pond outlet significantly downstream from where you expected them to settle.
Camera Stations and the Evidence They Hold
The Check camera field — Yes or No — tracks whether a trail camera deployed at the site was accessed during the visit. Camera checks are not always possible on every visit: access conditions, time constraints, and battery status all affect whether you pull the card. Having the field in the record means you know, looking back through six weeks of entries, that Site 4 cameras haven't been checked in three visits even though the site has been visited. That is a data gap you can see and schedule to close.
Camera evidence resolves ambiguity that sign evidence cannot. You can infer from fresh gnaw marks that a beaver was at the site in the last 48 hours. Camera footage tells you if it is a single animal or a pair, what time of night they are most active, and whether there has been a second, unknown animal visiting the site — which would indicate territory pressure from a wild resident colony that is not showing up in your sign data.
Mortality and Its Location
Mortality as a text field paired with a GPS location is the hardest record to create and the most important one to get right. A beaver found dead downstream of the release site tells a different story depending on where exactly it was found, what the carcass condition suggests about time of death, and what the observer can determine about cause. An animal that died at the release site within 72 hours of release failed due to handling or capture stress. An animal that was alive for six weeks, built a dam, and was then found dead 800 meters downstream may have been pushed out by a resident colony. The GPS coordinate does not tell you why, but it provides the spatial context that makes interpretation possible.
The Observers field ties every record to the specific people present, which matters when the quality of sign interpretation varies between team members and you need to weight observations accordingly.