Daddy beaver wears a suit for his important job and mommy beaver wears work out clothes so she’s always ready for the gym. Anyone else see the problem? Brother beaver is constantly flipping people off because you know how boys are.
And they all have huge inaccurate teeth because why actually educate children about beavers with you can simply patronize them instead?
Funny thing is – this is still more accurate.
Good lord that was a bruising night. I feel like America is the kid whose mother just lost a prolonged custody battle with an alcoholic father. Now the law has decided we have to go live with him for 4 years, and all we can do is hope he will let us see our friends, get us to our activities and not kill us by in a drunken rage during that time. Amazing we expect our kids to go thru this regularly. At least we’re somewhat better equipped to cope.
The thin silver thread of good cheer from yesterday came to me from regular reader Lavelle Suilin who teaches philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. Apparently the nearby town of Dunkeld has an annual parade and wheelbarrow decorating contest with prizes for the best entry. If you doubt whether this is the unabashedly quaintest tradition in the history of the entire country read the rules for entry below.
Here are the Simple Rules:
1. Your wheelbarrow must be a normal one-wheeled garden wheelbarrow.
2. The wheelbarrow can be decorated with any theme you want. Extensions can be added to enhance your display but they must not touch the ground.
3. The wheelbarrow must be able to be wheeled by one person. You are allowed a driver and a team of up to 4 attendants (who can cake turns if the ‘driver’ gets tired). All can be dressed to enhance your theme!
4. On arrival at the judging ring in Stanley Hill the driver must take over and perform a figure of 8 in front of the judges.
5. Judging will be based on the look and originality of the wheelbarrow decoration, the turnout of the wheelbarrow team and the handling of the barrow in front of the judges.
This year there was a very special surprise honoring the beavers at the nearby Loch of Lowes. YES! And because we are beaver central we have rare footage.
Now as fate would have it, it’s our 31 anniversary. In its honor, I had hoped to be presented with my first ever female president. But it looks like I will have to wait for that particular gift.
On a morning like today, there is really only one question on our minds: How would beavers vote? I’m sure you’ve all s
een the bracelets and the keychains with the initials of this handy moral yardstick. Obviously beavers would vote to keep the national parks in tact, to save clean water and to preserve bioDiversity.
That being said, I woke up this morning thinking about the fact that our house was built 22 years before women had the right to vote. One of the early residents we heard tale of was a daughter/flapper who had the remarkable fortune to drive a flivver. She would reward our old neighbor when he was a boy for the service of washing her car by taking him for a drive which was a big thrill because very few people in Martinez had them then. I thought about her this morning. Her first vote was probably cast for Harding. I imagine she’d be pretty excited about this election.
I have two thoughts about this article. First, the realist in me recognizes that duck hunters are responsible for creating wetland habitat across the nation. And that their efforts are responsible for restoring the range of species that might have been extinct years ago. I afford them more respect than any other class of hunter for this reason.
The second thought is, “Isn’t it adorable when they try to dress up in their father’s clothes?”
It started as a spontaneous joke. My duck hunting partner and I had experienced a weekend of misadventure, including decoy-shy ducks, an outboard motor that had let us down, and poor shooting when we actually did have opportunities. Our tally of ducks harvested was small by any standard. As my partner and I were engaging in exploratory driving on duck country backroads, I made the suggestion that perhaps “We should reinvent ourselves. We should tell people that we’re naturalists, but occasionally we like to harvest a duck or two!”
We both got a laugh out of it. But the more I thought about it, and reflected on the way we spend our time when we go off for a weekend of “duck hunting,” the more truth I saw in the concept. Some people associate “hunter” only with consumer or killer. Some people think a “naturalist” is someone who is interested in the workings of Nature, but from an academic or observer’s standpoint, not as a consumer. To them, they are not one and the same.
But our interests and appetites on these so-called duck hunting trips go beyond simply wanting to do a better job at the tasks of the hunt. For example, we are just as fascinated with the habits and majesty of the trumpeter swans common to the national wildlife refuge where we hunt, birds that cannot be hunted, but are symbolic of wildness, the mysteries of migration, and a great conservation success story. After a morning’s hunt, Jim and I routinely spend part of the day driving around this massive refuge’s lakes and flowages, and are as likely to train our binoculars on these swans as we are to look for concentrations of ducks that we could potentially hunt. While hunting, when a family group of these B-52-sized waterfowl passes near our blind, our attention automatically shifts to them instead of the ducks we hope will visit the plastic decoys bobbing on the water before us.
On these mid-day explorations after the morning hunt we make note of where beavers have made new cuttings as they refurbish a dam, or in gathering woody foodstuffs to meet their survival needs during the coming winter. We ponder the uniformly gray coats of squirrels here, whereas just two hours to the southeast where I live, gray squirrel genetics are now often expressed in all-black individuals of the subspecies. These things, too, matter to us.
Okay. You win. You get the right to call yourselves naturalists. If I get to call the oil well digger a minerologist, the child molester a man who loves children and the bank robber an appreciator of rare coins.
Obviously burglars love the things they steal. (Or at least love what they can do with them.) Otherwise what would be the point? I’m glad you enjoy nature while you’re outside shooting at it. I’d rather you appreciated its splendor than solely enjoyed its destruction. An art collector can appreciate art, and a slave trader can appreciate beauty.
Sometimes what you believe to be a lull is actually a standstill, and we had reached such an impasse in our beaver research. No articles have been written about their benefits in nearly a week. We have no visible beavers of our own to observe at the moment. And in all the echoing halls of academia no one appears to be publishing new research. In the absence of new intelligence we have really pushed the limits of understanding as far as we could in our effort to move forward.
We had to face it. We needed outside expert advice. Our meager skills had taken us as far as we could go. Last night we bought in the top recommended consultant to re-examine the beaver evidence we had thus far accumulated.
She took a while to compile her findings. Jotting down her many notes and theories on the [cool] woodstove isinglass by furiously tapping over and over. Then, after hours of painstaking study she was ready to announce her conclusions. She rightly figured Jon would be the easier student to hear the news. And motioned for him to follow her for private conference in her office.
You can see he was fascinated and just a little amused.
