Young beaver mother & kit. Photo by Sarah Summerville Unexpected Wildlife Refuge
Our good friend Sarah sends these photos of the newest beavers in the refuge she maintains. Its a young mom who just produced her first ever kit. Sarah is the Director of the Unexpected Wildlife Refuge started by Cavit & Hope Buyukmihci shown here. Their original 85 acres has grown to 737 set aside for wildlife with trails. Visitors and school children are guided through in small groups. In 2001 Hope passed directorship to Sarah who has been lovingly maintaining the refuge since that time.
I’ll let Sarah speak for herself as her website describes what the personal value is of beavers:
Provide Human Beings with Unparalleled Opportunity for Study and Companionship
The beavers have a gift of unique intelligence, are gentle and trusting, and to watch their family life is one of human beings’ most enthralling experiences. I speak not only from personal observation, but from exchanges with others in this country and Canada who have had the privilege of living near beavers and becoming acquainted with them.
While we bemoan the high cost of education, put out money to buy flood and drought insurance, and are sometimes bored with life, the few beavers left in New Jersey are being ousted from their homes by developers or are considered a nuisance if they cut down a tree or create minor flooding. Moving of beavers creates untold hardships. Like human homesteaders, beavers choose a place they find suitable, work hard to make it livable, then resent being force to move.
Although beavers are presently protected from leghold traps in the state of New Jersey, their siblings in other states are not so lucky. Trapping is a crime which should not be allowed to continue for a moment longer in this enlightened age. Beavers mate for life. Beavers love their families, and mourn their dead. Beavers suffer agonies, both mental and physical, if caught in traps to struggle and drown. If they cannot escape by gnawing off a foot, or fail to drown, their fate is to be beaten to death.
Beavers maintain the floodplain, which protects us all. They are as much a part of waterways as the water itself. We humans are created with a sense of thirst because our bodies need water. It’s the same with other animals, but, in addition, beavers are born with a hydrological engineering ability because they need water for safety. The streams, in turn, need their care.
For centuries, beavers stood between the birthplace of the streams in the mountains and the oceans to which the water by its nature flows. Beavers managed the water all along the way, providing for themselves while contributing to the welfare of their total environment and its inhabitants. Was it only by chance that their foods grew right in the water, and along the floodplain, and that poplar, their favorite food, springs eternal from its root system? It springs anew also from beaver-cut stumps.
Over sixty years ago, Enos A. Mills, a pioneer naturalist, wrote:
I hope and half believe that before many years every brook that is born on a great watershed will, as it goes swiftly, merrily singing down the slopes toward the sea, pass through and be steadied in a poetic pond that is made and will be maintained by our patient, persistent, faithful friend the beaver.
Let’s help make Mills’ dream come true.
Kit enjoying treat. Photo by Sarah Summerville Unexpected Wildlife Refuge
