The Water Guardians / Aqua Squad

‘The availability of [potable] water, more than any other environmental factor, wll determine where we live and what we do.”[i]

Water is essential for all life; be it human, animal, plant or insect. Yet less than one percent of all water on earth is fresh and available for use. Given its critical importance, any animal that saves and improves that water has to be of similar value. We are just beginning now to understand how lucky we are to share our waterways with beavers who instinctively tend this resource in such a way that it benefits their own lives and others. Beaver dams improve water quality by reducing toxins and nitrogen, as well as assisting with sediment removal, nutrient cycling, erosion control and water clarity. The deeper water of beaver ponds recharges groundwater and these benefits increase as temperatures warm from climate change.[ii]

Learning about the finite nature and critical importance of water is part of how children come to understand resource scarcity and the impacts of their actions and choices on others. It prepares them for stewardship and introduces them to environmental science. Understanding the water cycle and its effect on survival is a key lesson in how the world works, and it is a mistake to tell this story without including the role of the beaver.

The Water Guardians is an activity designed to highlight the beaver’s key role in that critical cycle. It shows their stewardship of water and how their work preserves and filters it, reducing sediment and removing toxins, slowing it down in its course and pushing it underground where it becomes cooler. Compared to a stream without beavers a waterway with beavers is deeper, cooler, cleaner and slower, Children will learn this as they collect the four stickers that describe these qualities then place them on a water attributes card that features them all. Complete cards can be presented to earn a tiny symbolic vial of water with a beaver on a cord that they can wear, so that children can more easily remember the important connection between the two.

[i] Aysu B, Aral N, Aydoğdu F and Gürsoy F (2025) Children’s attitudes towards water: a scale development study. Front. Educ. 10:1552082. doi: 10.3389/feduc.2025.1552082

[ii] Dewey, C., Fox, P.M., Bouskill, N.J. et al. Beaver dams overshadow climate extremes in controlling riparian hydrology and water quality. Nat Commun 13, 6509 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-34022-0

A BEAVER PHOTO IS WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS

heidi08 Beavers July 14, 2025

Rusty finally got lucky with the elusive new Pearl Street beavers in Napa. Which means we all get lucky. Don’t you just love the camera angle in these photos?

Gosh. Give that beaver a bundle of willow or a pile of stones because that would be a remarkable angle to capture some dam building with.

ALABAMA OUT DOES ITSELF

heidi08 Beavers July 13, 2025

NEW STATE FOSSIL OF MINNESOTA

heidi08 Beavers July 12, 2025

The first time I beheld a Castorides skull we were doing an exhibit with the curator of the Oakland Museum. it was so long ago I believe we had only held 1 beaver festival. I was LOVE STRUCK immediately.

Right away when I saw it I imagined attending the city council meeting with it on my lap. I could not get the image out of my head.

Well guess what is the new State Fossil of Minnesota?

Bear-Sized Giant Beavers Once Roamed North America, and They’re Now the Official State Fossil of Minnesota

It’s official: Minnesota’s state fossil is the giant beaver, an extinct creature the size of a small bear that roamed around the Twin Cities more than 10,000 years ago.

Lawmakers had approved the new state fossil earlier this year as part of a broader omnibus bill, which Governor Tim Walz signed into law in May. The bill—which included a short provision about the gargantuan Ice Age rodent—officially took effect July 1, report Dana Ferguson, Peter Cox and Clay Masters for MPR News. (Minnesota now has a state constellation, too: Ursa Minor, also known as the Little Dipper.)

I saw months ago that Emily Fairfax was on the dream team to make this happen and figured she would make it happen. I think a beer company had made a Castoroides brew.

“Minnesota has a deep connection to beavers—from our modern ecosystems to our prehistoric past,” Alex Hastings, a paleontologist at the Science Museum of Minnesota, said in a May statement. “The giant beaver fossil specimens in our collection have long captivated visitors of all ages, making this massive Ice Age mammal the perfect symbol of our state’s ancient natural history.”

The giant beaver’s journey to becoming Minnesota’s state fossil has been a long and winding one. The saga dates back to at least 1988, when a group of third graders first proposed making the massive mammal the official state fossil, according to Minnesota Star Tribune columnist Jennifer Brooks. Since then, the proposal has come up again and again. Each time, lawmakers have said no—but that changed this year.

I was so happy with the Skull copy I bought from the Bone room on Solano that I gave one to Mike Callahan who was helping our strategies at the time.

Fossil hunters have discovered nearly complete remains of the species in Minneapolis and Saint Paul and uncovered fossils in Freeborn County, which is located in the southern part of the state near the border with Iowa. The creature is known as “Ċapa” in Dakota and “Amik” in Ojibwe, the languages of two Indigenous tribes that have long lived in what is now Minnesota.

“What’s really fun about the giant beaver is that it would have actually been around when the first people were settling into Minnesota,” Hastings told MPR News’ Dana Ferguson in February. “So, the first inhabitants in this land would have been encountering the giant beaver.”

In 2021, the Science Museum of Minnesota made another push for the designation of an official state fossil when it asked residents to vote for their favorite contender. Other options included the scimitar-toothed cat, an extinct species of bison and a large, squid-like creature called Endoceras. But in the end, it was the giant beaver that won over the hearts and minds of Minnesotans.

To this day my favorite thing to say about the skull at exhibits is to point to it and say “This is the size of the problems the city thought the beavers were going to cause.”

And then point to our little castor candensis skull and say “But this is the size of the problems they actually caused.”

Lawmakers were finally convinced. While debating other important issues, like the state budget and fraud mitigation, they agreed to make the giant beaver the state fossil.

“It’s still a good time to remember our history and what we think is important to the state,” Jim Abeler, a state senator from Anoka, Minnesota, said at the proceedings, as reported by the Minnesota Star Tribune. “If you were going to have a state fossil, you’d want to have something as cool as the giant beaver.”

I gotta agree with you there.