Ooh Santa came an extra time this year, and lovingly scanned “The Builders” chapter for my reading pleasure. Turns out he needn’t have gone through the trouble because the entire book, including its charming illustrations in the margins, is online and searchable here.
The author was a minister in Connecticut in the last 1800’s who would journey every winter to the “Wilds of Maine” and report on his findings. His chapter on beavers is appropriately called “The Builders”.
Of course I’m interested in the subject, but I’m even more intrigued by any man who stops what he’s doing and actually watches beavers work over time. I love his descriptions of family members, dams selected, and especially work gone astray. Read this.
The notion that beavers make mistakes and LEARN from those mistakes is entirely supported by our observations in Martinez. We’ve seen badly executed dams become intelligent dams over time and over night. And it’s certainly true what they say, no one is born an expert.
I’m trying to give you enough of a feel for his 
observations that you’ll be tempted to go read them yourself, because its truly worth doing. I especially enjoyed his discussion of the opinions of lodge-building beaver vs bank-dwelling beaver. At the time, the native belief was that the bank dwelling beaver was lazy and driven out by his family for never doing any work. The white theory more charitably ascribed his oddities to the fact that he hadn’t yet found a mate, and was living like a bachelor. Mr. Long himself had a third theory, that bank burrowing beavers “lacked the normal instincts” of their kind and were examples of the exception proving the rule.
Of course we know they are all wrong. Because the Martinez Beavers DID twice build a lodge. And did three times raise a family without a lodge. And seemed to possess every other instinct a beaver might rightly claim. Dr. Duncan Haley of Norway believes beavers prefer to live in large rivers where dams and lodges can’t exist, and that only an increase in population drives them towards the smaller streams where they have to work for a living.
But I disagree. I think beavers make individual choices and as a rule do only as much work as they need to get by. If they can get by without a lodge, they will. And if they need to build one to keep their family safe, they can. What do you think? I think at the time he wrote this the fur trade had already altered the habits of the few remaining beavers. And he should have visited Martinez.
So with Robin’s valiant labor we have compiled complete records of beaver depredation between for 2013 and 2014. Seeing them in print doesn’t make me any happier. Let’s home 2015 records show some improvements.
