How was your father’s day? i had such mixed emotions about this article. I read it like a kid at a scary move, rapt with attention but holding hands up in front of my face ready to block out the view at any moment but fingers splayed so as not to miss anything. Mary is a science writer in Alabama do we’re grading on a curve, and maybe you can help me know what to make of it.
Let the rodents do the work
With Father’s Day nearly here, this seems as good a time as any to celebrate one of my favorite animals, Castor canadensis, the North American Beaver.
Male beavers are notably excellent dads. Along with their lifelong, monogamous mates, beaver dads are hands-on parents, acting as role models for, as well as defenders of, their young. As a result, beavers have one of the soundest family structures among mammals.
Okay, So far so good. Beavers make great Dad’s. I can’t disagree. This is where it started to get uncomfortable.
When I was a youngster, our dog Ziggy disrupted a family of beavers. With a head full of maternal urges having recently weaned a litter of pups, Ziggy stole two baby beavers from a beaver lodge and adopted them as her own. Ziggy made the local news with her interspecies care, nursing the baby beavers as if they were her puppies.
Soon the kits graduated to bottles. Rating a 10 on the adorableness scale, a baby beaver drinking from a bottle is unspeakably cute. Beavers are adept with their front paws, and these little beavers clasped the bottles just as human infants would and gazed into our eyes as we fed them.
We passed one of the babies on to a friend and devoted our attention to the remaining kit who we named Beave, who grew quickly. To ensure his feet developed properly, we took him swimming frequently. My brother, Robert, and I would swim apart in the lake, and Beave would swim back and forth between us, taking a rest on our shoulders, nuzzling our necks between laps.
I’m so confused. Your dog attacked a family a and stole two beaver kits. And you think beaver Dads are so important to a beaver’s education that you decided to kidnap the kits and not let them learn from their dad? And them separate the siblings so they couldn’t even learn from each other?
We eventually released Beave into the wild. My dad, the infamous snake-man Bob Mount, would visit him often, bringing honey buns from the Zippy Mart. These visits ceased one fateful afternoon when my dad showed up empty-handed and Beave attacked him.
A beaver’s teeth are covered in iron-rich enamel, giving them their trademark orange color, as well as the ability to chomp down a small tree in just minutes. My father was not willing to have a round with those teeth, no matter how adorable Beave was.
Let me get this straight, you’re saying that because the yearling never had a dad to teach it what foods to eat in the wild it was totally dependent on human food. And when your Daddy showed up without it on day he bit him? And your Dad didn’t like that so he, what exactly, i guess shot him?
Is that like what other parents in other states describe to their children as “taking him to live on a farm?”
Despite the near cult-like enthusiasm of our new Buc-ee’s, some consider beavers a pest. Environmentalists and other scientists disagree.
Beavers are a keystone species, necessary to prevent the collapse of their ecosystem. The near extinction of beavers in our nation’s history has left a scar. We may never experience the streams and ponds in the deserts our beavers once created.
Between the fur traders of the 1600s and the following colonization of North America for farms, our beaver population plummeted from 400 million to about 100,000. This brutal assault resulted in the loss of an estimated 195,000 to 260,00 acres of wetlands. While beavers are no longer considered endangered, the same cannot be said of our wetlands.
As ecosystem engineers, beavers alter their landscape by building dams, an innate behavior triggered by the sound of running water. These dams create ponds and swamps, which provide both food and shelter for beavers. Within the ponds, beavers build lodges and canals, creating intricate wetland environments which are home to wood ducks, turtles, fish, migratory waterfowl and countless other critters.
These wetlands are capable of mitigating climate change by soaking the water table which in turn helps prevent drought, creating firebreaks in areas threatened by wildfires, and replenishing waters in areas of drastic snowmelt. The ponds also act as carbon sinks, trapping and holding onto excess carbon from the atmosphere.
Well I’m guessing you really enjoyed Ben’s book, although I’m not sure what he’d think of your story.
Additionally, beaver dams improve the quality of the water downstream, filtering agricultural contaminants and other pollutants by up to 46 percent.
Armed with an appreciation and understanding of the beneficial effects of beavers on our environment, efforts have been made in the last hundred years to reintroduce beavers to the landscape.
My favorite of these was the Idaho Fish and Game’s relocation strategy in 1948. Rather than exterminate these large rodents who’d become pests in agricultural areas, they dropped them by parachute, having a stash left over from the recent World War, into a heavily forested area. Contained in crates designed to open on impact, all but one of the 76 beavers relocated by parachute survived. In flyover studies conducted the following year, scientists were pleased to see new wetlands and canals, evidence of the beavers’ hard work.
As well as gaining recognition for their important contributions to our environment, beaver engineering has proven to be a cost-effective, efficient method of restoring wetlands and managing flooding. “Let the rodent do the work,” as those in beaver restoration say.
Happy Father’s Day out there to all the dads who, like the talented beaver, get so many important jobs done!
You see why I’m confused. She ends with some strong defense of beaver benefits and quotes a couple of our favorite people. She definitely believes in beavers. But her childhood story doesn’t even give her a twinge of regret. What happened to the other kit you pawned off on a friend?
i can only imagine.
