It’s rare enough in the beaver biz to come across the good beaver article. I’ve done this every day for a decade so I know how rare. Even rarer to get a great one. When those happen they are usually written be someone we know and love OR they are made palatable to the editor with a luke-warm headline.

This is because the author of the article usually isn’t who writes the headline. That’s the job for some underling whose work is more about selling stories than saving beavers, So when the perfect beaver article also has a PERFECT HEADLINE that is very, very rare indeed.

Unicorn rare.

To engineer is human; doing it right might require beavers

Duck behind a seniors’ apartment complex and enter lush expanses of ponds, wetlands and forested creek bottoms that sponsor natural diversity, slow stormwater runoff so it can soak into underground aquifers, allow natural processes time to cleanse and clarify the discharge, and reduce downstream flooding.

One side of the road represents the worst of human engineering, maximizing one thing, water removal, to the ruin of all else. The other maximizes nothing, except life in all of its buzzy, croaky, splashy, winged wonder — water as resource. The latter represents a most hopeful collaboration between humans and beavers, the animals that once engineered the Chesapeake watershed with a thoroughness unmatched even by today’s 18 million people.

Guess who made it? Who am I kidding. You know who made it.

Beavers are coming back, even to the inimical conurbation that is most of northern Anne Arundel County. Michelsen, acting deputy director of the county’s Bureau of Watershed Protection and Restoration, is my guide to what is no less than a demonstration project, with beavers themselves doing much of the construction.

For Michelsen, it was good news around 2015 when beavers started showing up on the county restoration project that enhanced the north branch of Cypress Creek here. It drains to the Magothy River and then the Chesapeake Bay. What humans began, the beavers enhanced, impounding the whole stream with a series of dams and ponds.

Until recently, the beavers would not have been embraced for their ecosystem contributions. They’d have been removed, meaning trapped and killed. That’s still too common around much of the Bay watershed.

Beavers are compelled to chew, to control their marvelous, self-sharpening teeth that never stop growing; compelled also to dam, annoyed by the sound of flowing water.

The beaver dams here were raising water levels, with a potential to flood Ritchie Highway. The county responded by installing a simple, low-tech device called a pond leveler. A sturdy metal cage toward the lower end of the pond protects one end of an 18-inch diameter plastic drainpipe.

Be still my heart. This article has the perfect content, the perfect headline AND it mentions a successful flow device? Is such a thing even possible. I need to sit down. I’m feeling faint.

Michelsen estimates there are hundreds of beavers now in Anne Arundel County.

Complaints about beavers typically run about “50/50, flooding and chewing down peoples’ trees,” said Peter Bendel, with the Wildlife and Heritage division of the state Department of Natural Resources.

“So now it’s a matter of education, teaching co-existence, offering solutions, explaining beavers’ benefits,” Michelsen said.

More fainting! Teaching coexistence and emphasizing education! Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness.

The shift toward an ecological beaver ethic remains slow and uneven across the watershed. Tools like pond levelers, abrasive paint and other techniques to protect trees are available, notably from Mike Callahan’s Beaver Solutions in Massachusetts. Callahan’s companion Beaver Institute provides both hands-on and do-it-yourself training for organizations or individuals working for a peaceful coexistence with the beavers.

We’ve scarcely begun to plumb the potential of beavers to restore water’s rightful way throughout Bay landscapes. But Michelsen has high hopes. “I am convinced that, even in a highly urban watershed, they can do wonders,” he said, “if we just allow them to work.”

Erik Michelsen is the acting deputy director of the county’s Bureau of Watershed Protection and Restoration and my new favorite human. Just imagine if such a thing existed in every county; In every watershed.

I’m getting faint again.