The french cartographer and founder of Quebec, Samuel de Champlain, once wrote that beavers in the new world in 1600 occupied “Every River. Brook and Rill.”
I was thinking in particular about this sentence about the word “Rill” which isn’t used much today in conversation today but does still have a specific geomorphological meaning. Wikipedia defines a rill as “a shallow channel (no more than a few inches deep) cut into soil by the erosive action of flowing surface water. “
It occurs to me that when you’re a child making an ambitious sand castle at the beach and you and your cousin scoop a long trench from the waves to your creation in the hopes of bringing water to your moat that this is a kind of manmade “rill”.
And more importantly when beavers dig canals out from a pond to extend their territory to reach more trees and have an easy way to haul them back that is also a RILL. In fact a rill might be described as a path where water will go when the right conditions arise. What we today would refer to as an “Ephemeral stream“.
I am thinking that Ephemeral just means “without beavers“.
