My Mother said, I never should Play with the gypsies in the wood. If I did, she would say; ‘Naughty girl to disobey!
Your hair shan’t curl and your shoes shan’t shine, You gypsy girl, you shan’t be mine! And my father said that if I did, He’d rap my head with the teapot lid.
My mother said that I never should Play with the gypsies in the wood. The wood was dark, the grass was green; By came Sally with a tambourine.
I went to sea – no ship to get across; I paid ten shillings for a blind white horse. I upped on his back and was off in a crack, Sally tell my mother I shall never come back.
With the sad passing of Jane Goodall there has been a lot of discussion about her remarkable life and how it began with her discovery with the chimps when she so impressed her mentor with the observation that they used twigs to reach ants in deep hollow branches. His excited telegram about tool use made me think of beavers.
If beavers don’t use tools what exactly are they doing? Putting a piece of wood that you felled and chopped, mud you gathered or a stone you dragged across the landscape in exactly the right place to stop water so that eventually your home will be underwater seems pretty dam toolish to me.
And way more second order thinking than reaching into a rotted log for ants you want to eat right then or cracking a sea urchin open on a rock. In fact when beavers are killed and their teeth ripped out to be used by man those teeth are considered tools.
And when hundreds of animals cross over the dam or fish from the dam or lead their offspring over the dam, and when otters try to move into their cozy lodges to have their pups or a wood duck moves into a flooded trunk to make a nest in the cavity, there is an endless stream of other animals using what they have madee for their own purposes.
I would argue that beavers not only use tools but they MAKE them for other animals to use.
Call them the lending library of the animal kingdom.
When a beaver leaves a scent mound it’s more complicated than just leaving your purse on a the chair next to you to indicate “This seat is taken“. It tells other beavers both who’s already there but also their gender and whether they are looking for a mate. It’s like leaving a magic purse that says “I’m married, I’m still of childbearing age, But I’m not interested in a new mate, and I’m happily married so go away.”{
Which always shamed me because in 10 years of watching and filming beavers in our creek I never ever saw one scent mound ever. I brought in beaver experts from around the world and they never saw one either. Which always made me feel like a failure, or that our beavers weren’t doing their job. Or maybe that they weren’t real beavers.
Well yesterday I had a wonderful chat with Pam from the beaver detective movie and SHE said that the for the first two years she was watching beavers on Longfellow creek she never saw one EITHER.
For the first two years I didn’t even find a scent mound. Then after a death of an adult female, there was an exodus and lots of scent mounds in the most downstream reach –
So do you know what this means?
It’s likely I didn’t see scent mounds in Martinez because our beavers didn’t NEED them because no other beaver was trying to move into our creek ! Because in 2007 the beaver population was still so decimated that there was zero competition. It means Martinez really did change the beaver population of the bay area.
I have been thinking hard about that, And you should too.
