Lately I’ve been browsing through some very old files trying to find what I can of my original beaver footage on the newish computer. I first filmed father beaver in January of 2007 when I accidentally got lucky enough to stumble upon him at the bridge. I could not believe what I’d seen and wanted desperately to share it. Just around the time I bought a new mac and thought it would be a great idea to store my beaver footage there. Eventually I used that footage in my very first video about the beavers, but sadly the original footage got corrupted and I have no actual record of seeing the beavers until May of that year.
It wasn’t without some labor that I managed to make a short video and stick it on youtube. I knew NOTHING about these things back then, In fact You Tube itself was barely two years old which should blow your mind. It was so little used that during the first year I actually received a couple ‘most watched animal video‘ notices, which thinking about in today’s standards was a complete impossibility.
Here was the maiden voyage.
Things happen, I realize that computers come with hazards, but I was especially sad to lose that original footage. In those days I was filming with a very very old camera so those movies were stored on .avi files which my windows 10 PC now is not friends with. I thought the best moment I ever shot was lost to the wind and only available on a squished youtube upload.
Yesterday I found out that wasn’t true
Please enjoy this footage taken June 15 2007. It will still be squished by Vimeo but not as much. Pay special attention to the narrators dialogue which indicates how very little Jon and I knew at the time about these foreign beavers who were just starting to introduce us to their lives. In those days I thought the kits might be born at different times. Like chickens apparently?
I guess I can sort of understand the confusion. One kit was filmed by itself a week earlier (also lost) and seemed to be fatter than the others. In hindsight I would say he just happened to be the most pushy. But the point is that we were completely smitten. And we that turned out to be a very good thing.
Hopefully I will turn down some dark corner one day and find the missing footage that I remember as vividly as my first day of school. For now I’m pretty grateful for this much.
And a special shout out to the man whose been my partner in beavering for more years than I even spent in college including graduate school and who’s voice you hear in the discovery. Happy birthday to the partner in all things beaver and otherwise.
