Hi, I'm Chris Morgan. You're listening to The Wild on KUW. I'm a wildlife ecologist and host of The Wild. I hope you're having a great weekend so far and maybe getting out in nature.

Last week we asked you all to send me some of your wildlife encounter stories. Thanks if you wrote in.

Here's a couple of them I wanted to share. We got an email from Barb in Seattle. She said she had an encounter years ago.

She was a bridge tender, a person who operates and maintains bridges in Florida at the time and she's still doing that now.

She's on the bridge checking out the navigation lights when she hears the sound of a blue heron.

She's heard that sound loads of times but then a third round of squawking happened. Barb was then struck with a jet stream of water.

Turns out it wasn't a heron, it was a dolphin. Barb did some digging and learned a real gem of information.

Doffens are renowned vocal mimics. This one had learned how to sound like a heron. Amazing. Thanks Barb for sharing that one.

Here's another email. Rhino writes that he was camping with his wife and two dogs in the Canadian Rockies and one morning their two dogs start going off.

They're trampling and barking at something right outside the tent and he says, my wife says, look outside, see what's there.

Oh, very brave. See what's outside the tent. So he pops his head out of the tent.

Camera and bear spray, he says to his wife, as a massive black bear next to the tent. He doesn't get the prettiest pictures.

But if he had, he might have realized that he was really taking a picture of a 700 pound grizzly bear.

A couple of park rangers filled him in later on that day on a grizzly bear that loves to rummage through the bushes around the campsite for berries.

That grizzly visited them almost every day of their camping trip. Took a seat, took a few sniffs and then wandered off.

I love this, Rhino. Thank you for sharing it because all we ever seem to hear are the headlines about bear attacks and negative encounters.

We never really hear headlines about peaceful interactions with people just there to feed on Huckleberries. This grizzly bear was.

So keep them coming folks. It's great to hear your stories. You can email them to us at the wild at kaw.org.

Okay, let's talk about today. We're heading to the water twice this hour and first up beavers.

I've got to say brace yourselves for a string of surprising facts and stories about these unlikely heroes.

This is one of our most popular episodes of the wild and it's timely too, you know what we like to be topical about now in the fall beavers caching food for the winter.

They jam branches into the mud under the water to eat over the winter even when the pond is frozen solid like a lovely winter ladder.

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