What a very pleasant day yesterday was! Such good feeling for the beavers and such appreciation of wildlife in general! Honestly I couldn’t find three people to dislike in the whole place, and the general response to the new venue was eager. For the first time we had the new 2×3 poster I made of Cheryl’s photos across the table top, and it looked marvelous!
Jean came in the afternoon to relieve us and did such a nice job promoting that the Ladybug man asked to exhibit at the festival, which would bring us to a nice round FIFTY exhibits we’re expecting this year. On the way back we swung by the park to see what the sun did later in the day and were happy with the shady places we expected to see. I think our constantly evolving map is finally complete!
Then I came home to find quite a secret treasure in my email box. It turns out I’m not actually Tantaulus after all. The article we weren’t allowed to read was partly a review of Ben’s book, so I got a sneak peek and thought I’d share the very best excerpt.
When the arrest comes just tell them in my defense that I did it for beavers, won’t you?
These reflections are based on reading the galleys of a new book that will be published this month under the excellent title Eager, by Ben Goldfarb. It is the account of the impact, past and perhaps future, of this remarkable rodent.…here he goes on to describe having his basement flooded by the little darlings and the devastation of the furtrade…..
This vanity cost the continent dearly—because beavers are the greatest hydraulic engineers on earth. The dams that they build serve many purposes. One is parochial—they raise the water level high enough that the entrance to the beaver’s lodge is safely underwater. But all the rest are pure public service. To wit:
- Their ponds are havens for every kind of wildlife—in the arid west the great sanctuaries of biodiversity
- Their dams hold back rampaging floods, creating a watery maze that prevents massive damage downstream
- The water thus impounded seeps into the ground, recharging depleted aquifers
These are not small blessings. In a continent increasingly beset by climate-caused drought and flood, they couldn’t be more important. And their effects are not minor: Goldfarb marshals one study after another to prove that they could be decisive in rewatering the arid West—which indeed was far greener back before beavers were trapped out.
Bill McKibben
Isn’t that wonderful? Doesn’t it make your fingers positively itch to turn the pages of his book? Honestly, if there were a better time to have a beaver festival and appear in Ranger Rick and see the launch of a stunning new book AND have an amazing artist at the festival drawing the beauty of a beaver pond – I truly can’t imagine what it is.
We are all so damned er dammed lucky this year.
