There were no news stories this morning about beaver so I went surfing the internet(s). I found a very inviting looking blog called “Natural Wild Life” and thought I’d settle in for a nice read about beavers with this lead photo. Wow, was I in for a surprise! The photos and content get even more surprising farther down the page.

Natural Wild Life | Beaver | The beaver (genus Castor) is a primarily nocturnal, large, semi-aquatic rodent. Beavers are most well known for their distinctive home-building that can be seen in rivers and streams. The beavers dam is built from twigs, sticks, leaves and mud and are surprisingly strong. Here the beavers can catch their fish and swim in the water.

I’ll grant that there are plenty of people taking up space on the planet that learned from some cartoon that beavers live in the dam. But how many will say aloud that they catch fish? Or write about  it on a nature website which they have maintained for 3 years? I wonder if all the other articles are as interesting. This a good opportunity to revisit an old post on beaver myths. There are several posts on the subject – but this has to be my favorite. It’s from July 2008, (which reminds us all that I have been doing this for a dam long time).

Beaver myths throughout the ages

Quia cum vena torem se insequentem conovit, morsu testiculos sibi abscidit, et in faciem vena toris eos proicit et sic fugiens evadit

Turns out that complete misunderstanding of beaver behavior is nothing new. In fact the poor beaver has been miserably misunderstood since the middle ages and beyond. The above auspicious slander is taken from the Aberdeen Bestiary, which is a work documenting real and fictional creatures and their moral significance.The Bestiary goes back as far as the fourth century, although the addition of European animals like the beaver were added later.

To be fair, the bestiary was never intended as a “National Geographic of the Middle Ages”. It was a religious rather than a zoological text. But its pernicious misrepresentation of beavers lasted woefully to the Victorian era. Read for yourself:

Of the beaver There is an animal called the beaver, which is extremely gentle; its testicles are are highly suitable for medicine. Physiologus says of it that, when it knows that a hunter is pursuing it, it bites off its testicles and throws them in the hunter’s face and, taking flight, escapes.

So the story goes that the beaver is hunted for its castorum and decides to bite off its own testicles and throw them to the hunter rather than be killed. Check out the illustration of the same: (Yes that longlegged dog-looking thing is supposed to be a beaver)

This all comes about from mistaken entomology in which it is assumed that the beavers latin name (castor) is related to the root of castrate, and whimsy just takes over from there. The misconnection is untangled here.

Now I don’t know much about bestiaries and the middle ages, but I can only assume that every male of every species that has ever existed is partial to his own testicles and therefore unlikely to sacrifice them in favor of a protected aquatic life. I can’t fathom that anyone ever believed this, and can’t believe that it is quoted all the way up to 2008. Still the story served a particular need of a society that wanted to benefit from castoreum and fur and didn’t much care about accuracy. People were able to ignore their own perceptions and experience of the world in order to see the impossible story that fit their needs.

I sure am glad that doesn’t happen any more.

Oh and the blog post also says the Canadian beaver is the “most common” which makes me very curious indeed. What other beavers might there be in his neighborhood? As far as I know there are three species of beavers in the entire world, one basically extinct in Mongolia, castor Fiber in Europe and Castor Canadensis in North America.  I’d love to hear about the other ones the author is familiar with.