Well it happened. We knew it would.
Recently the odometer turned over to mark a cool 5000 times I have written on this website about beavers. More times than I have written about anything else except for maybe that dreamy Mark Hamil when once of us was 13. That’s every single day for 13 years. That’s longer than the lifespan of most beavers and certainly longer than I thought I’d have this gig. You would think there was nothing left to say. That every beaver mystery had unraveled itself long ago.
Just think, if had been making paper cranes instead of blogging every morning I could have 5 wishes granted from the gods by now. And still I can’t even get beavers protected in one part of one state. Maybe I’m going about this all wrong.
But it makes it as good a time as any to ponder an important question in beaverology. There are in the world two known species of this valuable animal. And yet there are vast discrepancies in appearances, with some black and some golden and some with red highlights in their fur like they just came from the salon.
Why?
And why are the Martinez beavers so much prettier than most beavers I have ever seen? Is it prejudice? Am I like the parent of a third grader who thinks their child’s singing voice is the best in the choir? Or am I right, and our northern California beavers more attractive?
See for yourself.
The beaver on the left is our mom beaver photographed by Cheryl Reynolds in 2008. The beaver on the right is a recent photo by Mike Digout in Saskatchewan. Is it just me or is mom a thousand times prettier?
I mean a variety of beavers look very differently and their fur is different shades. Remember the very unique pied beaver from Winters. Of course there’s variation, think about people – some have eyes set too close together or big noses and some are just more attractive to look at. Maybe that’s true beaver beavers too?
This is our second mom photographed by Suzy Eszterhas. See the red highlights? Even if we were going to say it was just about coloring, and brown hair is irrationally pretty for beavers, there are other differences, the shape of the nose, the size of the eye. Or the shape of the ear. Check out this wombat looking beaver from Utah shared in the recent ASWM webinar I attended.
That’s not an unattractive creature, it looks kind of cuddly even and would make a great mascot or stuffed toy. But it doesn’t look like our beavers. Maybe its not an accident that ours were the most photographed and talked about beavers on the planet. Compare wombat to Cheryl’s fine photo of this yearling. Or this handsome image of our father beaver.
Not to be specist or bragging or whatever, but our beavers are just more lovely to look out. Don’t you think? I mean sure I looked at them for a very very long time so I’m biased and my opinion doesn’t really count, but I’ve probably looked more closely at more photos of more beavers than anyone on the planet and those are some good looking beavers.
Of course there’s the law of averages, Think about it, Out of all the millions of photos you’ve seen of yourself there are probably only a handful that you really like. Maybe having beavers so close by means we took more photos and there are naturally more beautiful moments captured on film. And maybe the fact that our beavers knew US means they were less anxious and their eyes were wider and they just looked more relaxed.
But still. Still. They’re just cuter. There is zero chance of denying it. As adults, or as beautiful youngsters, they were the Hollywood glam-beavers and in retrospect they deserved to be. Look at this photo I took in 2007. It was taken the morning the paper reported the city council decided they were going to be killed. It looks like it was staged by Cecil B. DeMille.
Well 5000 posts and even more beautiful images later, I can say we were lucky to have our beavers. In the big random wheel that is fate they could have been unappealing, porcine, or camera shy. We got lucky.
And so did they.
