If this is a gift from the gods I’m just going to take it. Let’s all pretend that the last five days never happened. I spent yesterday trying to restore to a good place and things got steadily worse from there. Maybe this is the eye of the storm. Whatever it is I’m talking it.
Ben and Beavers were on Slate yesterday. And what a glorious article it was.
The Beaver Should Be America’s National Mammal
I’m here to convince you that the beaver should be America’s national mammal.
Yet despite the lighthearted chapter titles—“California Streaming,” “Realm of the Dammed”—Goldfarb’s book is more than a peaceful meditation on the aqua-hobbit folksiness of beavers. Goldfarb wants to show us what beavers did for us once and what they could do for us now. Indeed, his case for the beaver’s importance to America’s past, present, and future is so strong that his book’s publication is the perfect opportunity for America’s beaver lovers to stand up and let their call echo from pond to shining pond: The humble beaver should be our national mammal.
Beavers and their dams altered not just our continent, but the lives and the evolutionary paths of a veritable Noah’s Ark of North America’s creatures. Indeed, the beaver is perhaps the best example of a keystone species—that is, one on which so many others depend. Songbirds, snow geese, otters, herons, pelicans, snakes, mink, raccoon, northern leopard frogs, sawflies, and trumpeter swans, to start. Even salmon, perhaps the last species you’d expect to benefit from nature’s most famous dam builders, owe a debt to beavers (Goldfarb quoted a bumper sticker: “Beavers taught salmon to jump”). Long before Goldfarb describes the beaver’s teeth as “evolution’s most consequential dental sculptors,” he should have you convinced.
Go read the whole thing. It’s wonderful. And it’s wonderful to be back even if its temporary. A bagpipe just started playing in front of my house and I’m going to take it as a sign of good things to come. You might want to update your bookmark for this site because things keep evolving.
Of course you have it bookmarked. Right?
Classic beaver behavior, which every third grader can identify, 
This interview aired on tuesday and somehow slipped by me, but I might like it the best of all of them since they get to places others never touch. If you aren’t sure whether these discussions are worth your time, this one from 
You would think this was validation week. My kit-working-with-parents video on facebook has 6k views and 220 shares at the moment. And this arrived in the mail yesterday from the winner of our “After quiz” drawing at the beaver festival. Since I’m usually trying to convince kids to take the post-test, (which helps us with our grant requirements,) I lure them with the promise that the correct answer I draw at random wins a Folkmanis beaver kit puppet.
Which would make this Dad shown on the bridge in the Ranger Rick Issue. I can’t believe the random winner turned out to be such a great representative of our whole mission! Apparently the entire family are believers.
include bas-relief beavers gnawing on terra-cotta tree trunks. (John Jacob Astor made his financial killing on beaver furs.) And a few short blocks north of our current offices, you can stroll down Beaver Street. Or flee down it, depending on the situation. What I didn’t know until I read Goldfarb’s book was that when the Dutch bought Manhattan from the Lenape in 1626, the island “was little more than a pot-sweetener: The real prizes were the 7,246 beaver skins that sailed to Europe.” I now choose to think that self-portraits by the hatted Vermeer and Rembrandt include New York City beavers on the masters’ heads.
Covering 900 acres north of Warrenton, The Clifton Institute focuses on environmental education, ecological research and restoration for native plants and animals.
“There’s incredible diversity in our own backyards and people don’t realize. Just by showing people what we have here, I think they are going to want to have a lighter hand.
As an environmental journalist covering wildlife management and conservation biology, Ben Goldfarb has written extensively about birds, bears, fish, and more for periodicals such as Mother Jones, Science and Orion, but it was beavers, of all critters, that inspired him to write a book. 
And what a book it is! While fantastically well researched, “Eager” rarely — if ever — gets bogged down by its own comprehensive heft. This is a function of Goldfarb’s genuine enthusiasm for his subject, his healthy appreciation for the humor inherent in smelly, buck-toothed rodents, and his entertaining way with words. 
unturned in his investigation, visiting 12 US states and the UK to interview and “go into the field,” i.e., wade into the pond, with everyone from wildlife management biologists to civilian enthusiasts of various stripes, the whole range of “Beaver Believers.” The takeaway — that, contrary to popular opinion, beavers and humans can live harmoniously — is practically a foregone conclusion; it’s the getting there in Goldfarb’s company that makes it entirely worth your time.
