You remember that beaver documentary on PBS in 2014?  It was on PBS titled “Leave it to beavers”. Well it originally aired in Canada as part of a series with David Suzuki under the title “The beaver whispers.”  You can’t watch it in America but I was allowed to preview the finished project on my computer the morning my father died in 2013. We were waiting for the things you wait for when your father dies and I remember thinking how strange it was because I knew the director’s father had died while making the documentary and her producer’s father had died also. So we were all in a country of mourning.

With Beavers.

David Suzuki: For healthy habitats, leave it to the beavers and other animal engineers

Beavers have long been considered nuisances. They knock down trees and block waterways, often flooding areas where humans live and gather. But recent moves to leave the beavers alone show they can enhance and restore natural environments.

Like other animals that create, modify, and maintain their environments, beavers are referred to as “ecosystem engineers”. In one study, scientists determined busy beavers improve ecosystem health, “increasing species richness at the landscape scale”.

They found that in New York state’s central Adirondacks, “ecosystem engineering by beaver leads to the formation of extensive wetland habitat capable of supporting herbaceous plant species not found elsewhere in the riparian zone”.

In Europe, many towns and municipalities are reintroducing beavers where they were previously wiped out. In Scotland, beavers were released into a 44-square-kilometre area in 2009 after a 400-year absence. The five-year trial’s success convinced the government to allow beavers to remain.

According to Wildlife Trusts, an organization instrumental in European rewildling efforts, beavers and the landscapes they generate benefit people and wildlife by helping to reduce downstream flooding—“the channels, dams, and wetland habitats that beavers create hold back water and release it more slowly after heavy rain”. They also reduce siltation, and the wetlands sequester carbon, an essential process for fighting the climate crisis.

Apparently Jari Osborne’s lesson stayed with David because he is still thinking and talking about the good things beavers can do.

In Vancouver, where I live, beavers in Stanley Park have created new wetland habitat and reduced invasive species like water lilies. (Some human intervention has been necessary, such as protecting a number of trees with wire mesh, and taking measures to ensure water levels are maintained.)

Beavers aren’t the only animals that engineer the worlds around them, often making them more viable for other creatures. Many do, which has led to efforts worldwide to reintroduce species to fulfil the roles they’ve historically played in maintaining healthy ecosystems.

In fact, one could argue that all animals play an active role in shaping the places in which they live, to varying degrees. Some, such as invasive zebra mussels, can negatively reshape ecosystems. (The human animal, of course, has engineered some of the worst impacts!)

Well sure spiders build webs and sea otters eat urchins that eat kelp but beavers are the BEST. Let’s be honest.

Engineering can take many different forms. The most obvious is structural engineering, in which creatures create or modify elements of their habitat. But, as Berke notes, engineers also modify chemical environments and even the levels of light entering a land or seascape. “In modifying light, plankton and filter feeders are analogous to those terrestrial organisms that cast shade, most if not all of which are structural engineers. In terrestrial systems, then, light engineering entirely overlaps with structural engineering, while in marine systems light is largely controlled by organisms that do not create structure.”

Ultimately, when we lose wildlife populations, we don’t only lose the animals themselves; we also lose the version of the world that was shaped, in part, by their agency. The result, like so many of our impacts, is less healthy, more monocultured ecosystems that reflect back only human enterprise.

Okay David. All ecoystem engineers are important and we should make way for them. But they aren’t all as important as this one.