Well, we didn’t find any beavers last night. It was beautiful weather but low tide and not the best time to see a wayward beaver. We did learn a few things, though. Like the fact that beavers might have used tunnels through the mud to get to the water at low tide. Night Herons wake up when the sun goes down. And wow, sitting at the Granger’s wharf bridge is a lot prettier than sitting at the footbridge. With no trains, homeless or traffic.
We’ll be back.
In the meantime, a reporter contacted me about doing a beaver retrospective 10 years after the story broke, and we have that arranged for Monday, so it’s like old times. And there’s another fine read about Henry Morgan:
Flat tails, beaver ponds and trout streams cited
There’s an old trout pond in Marquette County said to have years back held one monster fish, a true pole bender, a devilish delight caught just after sundown on a fluffy makeshift fly cast from a canoe.
At times, the culvert is clogged with sticks and other materials put there by working beaver intent on blocking the shallow, cold creek from flowing — from singing as it tumbles downstream over the black rocks.
These beavers continue their stick, log and mud works a good deal more than a century after the death of Lewis Henry Morgan, the namesake of the creek, the pond, the land around them and a nearby residential location.
His work sought evidence that all humankind descended from a single source, determined that family and social institutional structures develop following specific patterns and viewed kinship relationships as a foundation of society.
Morgan suggested matrilineal clans, rather than families headed by a patriarch, were the earliest human domestic foundations.
Well, duh. Just look at the beavers.
In pursuit of Michigan’s beautiful brook trout, Morgan became interested in the activities of beavers. He studied them intently for several years before producing his captivating 1868 natural history volume, “The American Beaver and His Works,” a book still available in reprint.
Irene Cheng, in a 2006 piece in Cabinet Magazine, said compared to Charles Darwin’s precise bees, with their mathematically perfect hives, Morgan’s beavers appeared “downright brute-like and their dams primitive.”
“Yet what Morgan admired about the beavers’ works was not the final form so much as the process of reasoning that allowed the animal architect to adapt its constructions intelligently,” Cheng wrote. “Unlike the bees, Morgan’s mutes built not out of base need, or driven by a ‘struggle for existence,’ but to further their own well-being and happiness. He believed that the beaver had a fundamental awareness of its own creation.”
Morgan wrote, “When a beaver stands for a moment and looks upon his work, evidently to see whether it is right, and whether anything else is needed, he shows himself capable of holding his thoughts before his beaver mind; in other words, he is conscious of his own mental processes.”
Well, I have watched enough beavers building a dam over years to know, like Enos Mills said himself, that not EVERY beaver thinks about his creation. Just like with people, there’s wit, and there’s half-wit. Some just place sticks or mud any old where and some never seem to learn from their mistakes. But SOME have a vision of how it should look. Like our father beaver who would patiently move sticks to better homes after the children put them in silly places. Or our tule artist Reed who refused to place logs on his dam at all and moved them OFF even when the patriarch put them on, preferring instead to weave his fortune with cattails.
Some beavers are listening to an inner beaver voice, and some are just dancing in the moonlight.
But there is one common native of the American wilderness that was never listed in their memoirs because, by the time the pioneers arrived in the early 1800s, this critter had already been hunted out of these lands.
The best hats were made from beaver fur because these warm blooded animals evolved in chilly ponds so their skins are naturally designed to keep water out and heat in. If a hat was to shed rain it was well to be manufactured from the soft, dense under fur of a beaver.
Since the beaver disappeared 200 years ago Richland County has transformed: dried out, plowed and planted, and paved so dramatically the animals could hardly be expected to recognize the place. Yet, interestingly enough, when they made their way back here 20-30 years ago, one of the places they gravitated toward is a wetland that they may well have created themselves hundreds of years ago.
There’s a parade and a beauty contest, games and contests of all sorts. A highlight of the day is when a plane flies overhead and drops candy and ping pong balls which the many children gather. (I’m not sure what the appeal is of ping pong balls, since there doesn’t appear to be tournament – but I guess since they’re white on the white snow it presents a challenge to find them?) Think of it like a kind of an Easter egg hunt from the sky.
And plus its REALLY cold (13 today) and quite honestly, unless you’re a walrus, there’s not much else to do.
The pair has since created the “Sunlight Series,” a collection of children’s books written about different environmental topics from the point of view of the sun. The latest in the series, “Rivers of Sunlight: How the Sun Moves Water around the Earth,” explains the global water cycle.
