On the Refusal to mourn the death, by fire, of a child in London
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other.
Dylan Thomas
Yesterday a neighbor sent the sad news that there was a dead beaver in the creek near Starbucks. Jon went down and found it was truly horribly our newest kit, first filmed in late June, whose dam had been destroyed by someone impatient with the water. Jon retrieved the little body and checked it out for injuries but there was no obvious sign of trauma. There is no way to know whether this death was the result of the water loss leading to an exposed home,, some disease unique to him or whatever affected our 2015 kits. But we have a few things we can rule out, It wasn’t salt water because of how far upstream they were. It wasn’t human feeding or poison because so few people knew about it. And we had one kit survive since then and grow up fine, so I assume its unrelated.
I have to guess for now there was some illness in the kit. I did think it a little odd that Moses filmed it with its parent so late in the year. Usually by late June our kits were swimming on their own and had the run of the creek. Maybe this one was weaker or need more care? We will never know. We can only observe and do our best to understand.
I know, its not enough.
But however dangerous our creek is to beavers, we have to remind ourselves that it is much, much safer than most creeks where most beavers find themselves. Rest now, little one.
There’s good news too, because life is like that – terrible and joyful mixed together. Ben’s book was reviewed in Audubon magazine yesterday and beaver benefits extolled for the world to see. Let’s hope everyone takes a moment to realize that beavers help birds.
A World Without Beavers Is a World Without Wildlife We Love
Leave it to beavers . . . to fix the environment for us.
For millennia, Castor canadensis have shaped landscapes with their dams, turning scrub into meadows and flood waters into wetlands. But the rodent’s role has long gone unappreciated. So unappreciated that in the late 1800s, beavers nearly went extinct in the United States and Canada due to decades of fur trapping and extermination. The European species faced a similar plight, dropping to just 1,200 individuals around the same time.
As one of the fastest-declining habitats, wetlands everywhere could use this kind of a boost.
And then there are the beaver-loving birds. Trumpeter Swans, which have faced their own up and downs across North America, like to stack their 11-foot nests on top of the rodents’ fortresses. Farther west, Greater Sage-Grouse sip at beaver meadows, and Yellow-billed Cuckoos seek shade in cottonwoods, watered by their fat-tailed friends. In total, beavers are credited for enhancing bird diversity on three different continents. Without them, the forests would be less musical, and birding would be way more frustrating.
Appreciation is the key to keeping beavers—and everything they’ve built—around in the landscape. When we don’t understand our most common creatures, our world becomes smaller; we lose sight of nature’s complexity and all that’s irreplaceable. “While organisms have evolved to fill niches provided by nature, neither beavers nor people are content to leave it as that,” Goldfarb writes. “Instead we’re proactive, relentlessly driven to rearrange our environments to maximize its provision of food and shelter. We aren’t just the evolutionary products of our habitat: We are its producers.” These are the words of a beaver believer.
What an excellent review from Purbita Saha, I’m always so happy when Audubon picks up the beaver baton. They have a lot of voices all across our nation and know how to pack a room. As a rule they are more friendly than feisty but if we can convince them that ripping out a beaver dam means kill a host of bird species as well, that should help.
I’ll remember to bring this up when I present to our own Audubon chapter this March. Reminding folks to be good to beavers is a great way to help all kinds of wildlife.
I tell this story now because it is a common one that, I have just learned, could have ended differently. That story is told in the publication this month of “Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter.” Environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb relates: “In researching “Eager,” I traveled just about everywhere that beavers can be found, from the slickrock deserts of Utah to the hardwood forests of Vermont to a highwayside canal in Napa, California. I met beavers on farms and beavers in forests, beavers in raging rivers and beavers in irrigation ditches, beavers in wilderness areas and beavers in Walmart parking lots.” Mr. Goldfarb also travels through the history of the formative years of our country and introduces us to problem-solving farmers, scientists, naturalists and conservationists past and present. “Most of all,” he writes, “ ‘E
Got an environmental problem? Beavers could be the solution
