The conference was such a gathering of wonderful creativity and determination that I’ve been waiting for it to settle in like turbid waters that aren’t ready to drink. Contacts were made, paths were crossed, and stories were shared and understood. It seemed like there were more like minds gathered in one place than I have ever seen on the topic of beavers. More than the last conference, when ODFW was still in the formative stages of understanding why beavers were good news. The word is definitely out.
Take, for example, Paul Henson’s stunning recommendation that beavers become one of the nationally recognized “Surrogate Species” which is being submitted for public comment here. We’ll talk more about this idea and what you can do to help, but it is a country wide policy change that would make an unmistakable and breath-taking difference in every possible way.
Leonard Houston started the conference right away with brilliant observations about beavers being the only recovery tool that made a difference in disasters from Mt. Saint Helen’s to Chernobyl. His comments were made with such simple elegance that I asked to post them here, and this is how the conference began.
Within this strangely pastoral setting the animals go about their business, sometimes finding uses for what we’ve left behind. The wolves rise up on their hind legs to peer through the windows of houses, looking for routes to the rooftops, which they use as observation posts for hunting. Eagles build nests in fire towers. Deer, elk, bison and wild horses flourish in abandoned farm fields.
As to the beavers, they have shown an amazing resiliency to some of the worlds most cataclysmic events, in large surpassing sciences understanding of what we call sustainable habitat. Beavers, forced out decades ago when the landscape was engineered for collective agriculture, have already undone much of man’s work converting polluted swamps to free flowing rivers and restoring one of central Europe’s great marshlands.
Did you feel it? That prickling chill of gooseflesh telling you that things are changing – indeed HAVE changed? And that for those poor folks that don’t yet recognize that beavers are the saviors that will champion their waterways, restore their salmon, protect them from drought, and shield the worst effects of climate change — the day is fast approaching when just about everyone will be worried about beavers.
We are on the right side of history in this and if humans live long enough to notice, it will only be because we understood that beavers everywhere are worth a dam.
