A friend presented me with a copy of Elisha Cooper’s adorable ‘Beaver is Lost‘ picture book yesterday. It illustrates the bustling adventures of a lost little beaver who finds his way back through the city to locate his family. Along the way he is chased by a dog, climbs through a culvert and appears fairly urban. This is a lovely work published in 2010 and you should really buy one for yourself and maybe the Martinez Library. Come to think of it, maybe Mr. Cooper wants to come to Martinez and spend a little time watching beavers up close for his next book: What happens to a city that loses its beavers?
Speaking of artwork, Caddo has turned up where we all knew he would. Remember the orphaned beaver in Shreveport Louisiana who was being hand reared by the woman who had him ‘painting’ pictures that she was using for fundraising? Well now he is fundraising at the Gannett zoo.
Michael Beran, who runs a wildlife-control business in the Shreveport area, first discovered little Caddo when he was trapping a group of beavers causing tree damage in a Shreveport neighborhood
Ahh the heroes journey! So Mr. Beran killed his mom and dad and siblings and decided, on a whim, to let him live by dropping him off at a neighbor’s house with a rodent-feeding bottle. That’s nice. And now he wins a trip to the zoo where they can work him fast before he gets to big.
Beran said that while Caddo is a pseudo-celebrity in Shreveport, he’s relatively unknown in Central Louisiana. Beran is hoping the zoo can capitalize on the animal’s fame, thereby selling paintings and attracting people to come visit the painting beaver at the zoo.
“With these sorts of things, notoriety doesn’t last long,” Beran said. “It kind of goes in spurts. Caddo’s getting big. Beavers get big pretty quick, so there’s going to get a point where he’s too big to handle to do the art. The time is coming soon where he’s going to lose his edge and be too big to handle, so we want to try to maximize his publicity if we can for the zoo. The zoo’s always hurting for money.”
With your line of work Mr Beran this could be a whole sub-career for you, get called to do a trapping, make some more orphans, farm them off to some L’O’L for watercolor lessons and then haul them off the the zoo. Coyotes? Raccoons? Alligators? It could all happen!
In the meanwhile poor Caddo will sit in a cage and occasionally play in splashes of color. I guess that’s probably a nicer fate than lots of beavers meet in Louisiana.
