The first day of any beaver conference I attended I always just hummed all over with a sense of comfort and well-being  to be surrounded by smarter people than I who knew why beavers mattered and could carry the message forward. On the morning of the second day I would feel a little like I had just joined a really important ‘club’ and together we were going to make a difference.

But by the afternoon of the second day I was invariably getting frustrated by people who looked at beavers as a “Means to an End“. These biologists and hydrologists valued the service of beavers – not the animals themselves. They surely hadn’t spent 100 mornings alone with them over a decade and learned how they explored, talked, argued and played.

There are few actors in this drama that understand that aspect of how I came to care about beavers. So I was delighted to come across this photo yesterday, which I think tells the beaver drama story better than any data ever could.

I know we all think anthropormorphism is a thing to be avoided, but you truly cannot avoid attributing the feeling of PROUD to that amiably hard-working beaver who emerged from the dark frozen world by skill of his claws and teeth. For days and months he has sat alone in the dark with his family, nothing to do but groom and nothing to eat but old gnawed twigs. And now he’s FREE!

This photo was inexplicably the second prize winner of the recent Chesapeake Bay Foundation contest for 2018. The first prize went to a paddle boarder shot which I guess is explained by the fact that they are  more interested in humans using their waters than beavers.

But I love this photo as I have loved no others. I feel that it explains in a single wordless image what the hell I have been doing with my life since 2007. Beavers are mellow even when they do amazingly difficult things. Even when they face challenges like busting through the ice ceiling or living in an urban creek. They work cheerfully to get what they need and they don’t give up until it’s clearly time, and then they just move on to some other effort.

Beavers are cool.

Which brings us to this second photo today posted in the humbly-named periodical “Vancouver is Awesome”.

Disoriented beaver gets washed up onto B.C. bridge deck amidst flooding

Road superintendent Jay Shumaker sees a lot of interesting stuff on the job for VSA Highway Maintenance, and he shared a story with us from yesterday over the phone.

It happened last night around 7:30 while he and his crew were monitoring a bridge about 10 kilometres west of Merritt, where you’ve likely heard there’s been flooding.

Out of nowhere, a large beaver got “tossed up onto the bridge deck” after floating from somewhere upstream.

The creature looked disoriented and began walking around in circles, trying to figure out what had just happened to it.Eventually it found its way over a berm the crew had put into place and back to the edge of the creek, where it jumped into the water and continued to get hauled downstream.

While people are being asked to evacuate by the government as water levels rise, the beavers also seem to be getting displaced – albeit a little more aggressively – by Mother Nature.

Why did the beaver cross the bridge?

To get to the other side, of course.. Because even when it’s flooding and you get thrown onto the cement you just keep going. That’s just what beavers do.