Why do I always forget days like yesterday? Where I found out renting a restroom for the beaver festival was going to cost 500 dollars more because of the corporate takeover and three exhibitors asked us if we could loan them tents for the event? I was too stunned to ask “Will they be made of gold or come with celebrity attendants?” Oh and the event insurance was on the wrong form and would have to be reissued for the city. Sometimes I wish Worth A Dam could just be the supply-laden money-bags that people apparently imagine we are – just stocked with tables, tents and insurance forms lying around in the attic. One exhibit asked for fifty dollars to offset their costs of providing information and getting to the events which, I admit, left me kind of open-mouthed. Last year we have 53 exhibits. If they all needed that our cost for that part of the festival would have been 2650 dollars!
It seemed for a moment that everything was going wrong. That this would be the very worst festival EVER and that we would never be able to pull it off. I had a fluttery sense of imminent doom for half the day, and then I remembered this vaguely familiar thing happening last year and every other year since 2008.
Oh, right. It is actually always like this, Before it succeeds it feels like failure and that’s just the way it is throwing a large event like a festival or a wedding.
I remembered just in time to breathe and was rewarded by news that our sound man would help again, the restroom could grandfather us in for a lower price and three of the five bands were confirmed.
Baby steps for babies. Rome wasn’t built in a day.
Meanwhile there were a couple shout-outs worth sharing, first for beavers and secondly for our friend Ben Goldfarb. Lets start with credit for the architect.
Nature’s best architects
We have all heard the phrase “Home sweet home”. It is not only true for human beings, but this phrase applies to animals and birds too as they also have homes.
We love our homes, and we construct and maintain them with great care and pride. Similarly, animals and birds also make their homes. Some of these animals construct their homes with great skill and efforts to make it suitable for their requirements. They may build these amazing and unique homes and structures in groups or in their individual capacity. In other words, these animals are amazing architects due to the manner in which they build and construct structures for living, with specialised and sophisticated features that suit the particular needs of the animal.
Some of the structures are developed as a result of teamwork, such as ants’ communities and beehives, while in other cases individuals take on the solo task to construct a specialised structural design. These structures provide them a safe zone from predators and external factors, and also help them catch prey easily.
I’m sure you can see where this is going. Bees and weaver birds and termite mounds. I can think of one more who deserves mention.
Beavers are very adaptive to the aquatic ecosystem where they dam water by blocking the river flow to live in the pooled water. They are famous for this specialty and are known as one of the best builders in the animal kingdom.
With the help of sharp incisors, they destroy trees and gather branches to stake them up as a barrier in a flowing river where water pools and they build their lodge to live there.
By blocking the river flow with twigs, branches, grasses and leaves interwoven in mud and stones, they make sure the dam is strong enough not to be washed away easily by the pressure of the water. Their cleverness can be judged from the fact that in slow moving water, they build straight dams while in fast moving water the dam is curved in shape.
Well now I don’t know if I would use the word DESTROY but I’m not a hundred percent sure English was the first language of this article’s author. Or even his second. Let’s say the word “alter” instead because beavers change things: that’s just what they do. And leave it at that.
It is kind of interesting to think for a moment about other home building species and how their architecture is geared towards feeding them (spiders) or child-rearing (birds) and how building a dam represents really neither of those things. Beavers build homes sure, but they are fairly unique in building entire neighborhoods and subdivisions I believe.
Finally some praise for author Ben Goldfarb who brought High Country News some fame with his recent Pen award. As they say, failure is an orphan but success has many parents. The article writes about some of the events changing the editorial staff and ends with:
A bittersweet goodbye
frequent contributor Ben Goldfarb scored the prestigious E.O. Wilson Prize for Literary Science Writing from PEN America. Ben won for his book Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter, which was excerpted in HCN.
It’s nice to see Ben getting so much recognition for his herculean efforts in writing what is sure to be a game-changer, if not THE game changer. Congratulations Ben and beavers everywhere.
