Somedays I straggle to the computer half awake and blearily look at the beaver headlines and feel so glum about the future. And some days are glorious beyond my imagining. This is a GLORIOUS day, Get ready to be gloried.

Can beavers help build a better Chesapeake Bay?

Scott McGill was standing beside a stream that, to many people, wouldn’t look like a stream at all. But if an explorer had been plopped down here four centuries ago, in what is now Baltimore County, MD, this is the way a stream might have looked, he said.

This section of Long Green Creek is a sprawling ponded area of 7 or 8 acres, surrounded by shrubs and trees and flanked by marshy soil that sank with each step. Muddy, vegetated mounds occasionally pierced the surface.

Wildlife, especially waterfowl, like it that way. “We have flocks of black ducks and woodies,” said McGill, who heads Ecotone, an ecological restoration company that has been working on this stretch of stream for years. “We’ve even had pintails, which typically aren’t common around here.” (more…)