The First of Many!

The strange, compelling artistry of “beaver sculptures”

Some years ago, during a canoe trip down the Dumoine River in Quebec, I saw a piece of wood floating in the water. It had been worked by beavers, and, stripped clean, looked lovely. I picked it up and brought it along — across several portages. This was the beginning of what I call my collection of “beaver sculptures.” It has since grown to include well over 100 pieces.

I never take them off the dams or the lodges, on principle: that is for their construction. (Besides, those have no protruding parts, and so are less interesting.) Some I pluck straight out of the water, which usually means that they have been left there recently, perhaps the previous night. The bark is partly or wholly removed, which renders the wood either clean beige (sometimes close to white) or else interspersed with clusters of bark that can be brown, black, and occasionally red.

Other sculptures I find on the land, and occasionally under water. Some of these have been around for a long time, which has turned them gray, dark brown, even black.

I have a snobby friend who insists that this is not art. “Okay,” I reply, “then it is craft.” That is the difference between beaver sculptures and driftwood: both can be lovely, but only one has been worked by skilled craft, not just by nature and time. It’s amazing how many different shapes can come from these mammals, simply engaged in gathering food and building structures.

I personally believe that some of these sculptures merit display. I check every day for an email from the New York Museum of Modern Art begging me to exhibit them. Otherwise, the exhibit belongs in a museum of nature. In the meantime, 35 of them are displayed in the country house: on the walls, the floor, the fireplace, hanging from the ceiling — wherever.

Ahhh Henry! What a wonderful collection and appreciation you’ve shared with us. I love your curation and wrote this morning to thank him. He already wrote back and said there were more of his specimens to admire here. As the official ‘curator’ of our beavers work at I have seen countless children finger and admire those chew marks at events around the state. One chew we used for display was even stolen because it was so much admired!

In our city we have become expert fans of this art and the backyard looks like a beaver-munched museum. I personally have received gifts of chewed sticks beaver friends have brought me from Oregon, England and Georgia. And I have photos of beaver chews from as far away as the Ukraine. This remains one of my favorites, although Henry says he’s not sure he even believes it’s real.

Here at beaver central we are especially fond of chews-you-can-use. In accordance with our mission we like to showcase how wildlife appreciates and incorporates these pieces as well.

Green heron using beaver chew to fish: Cheryl Reynolds

To say the UK is ‘flirting’ with beaver reintroduction is a vast understatement. The relationship has moved way beyond the blushing sideline gaze phase and now moved to furtive groping under the table. We have an film crew coming from the UK to film beaver stories next week as evidence, and I wanted to share this little bit of excitement as well from New Scientist.

Should the UK bring back beavers to help manage floods?

It seems that beavers’ dams might help prevent flooding, cleanse water as well as help boost fish populations and wetland ecosystems.

The dams regulate the water flow both during heavy rains and droughts. “When it rains, more water gets stored in ponds behind the dams, and when it’s drier, water is gently released to keep rivers flowing,” says Richard Brazier of the University of Exeter, UK, head of the study of half-a-dozen beavers confined to an isolated woodland in Devon.

If reintroduced, they could be of most use in narrow tributaries and headwaters near the sources of major river systems where holding back water could potentially have most impact on preventing floods.

Brazier’s study, due to finish next March, also found that the staircase of dams filtered pollutants washed off farms. “We found that on average each litre coming in contains 150 milligrams of sediment, but only 40 milligrams on the way out,” he says. Likewise, nitrates arrived at average concentrations of 6 milligrams per litre, but left at less than a milligram per litre, and phosphorus levels dipped from 0.16 to 0.02 milligrams per litre.

Well, well, well. So beavers control water, help biodiversity and reduce toxins eh? You don’t say. I always suspected as much, but of course I wanted to be absolutely sure that things didn’t work completely differently in the UK than they do in every other country on the planet. You know, the way chips mean fries or having your landlord ‘knock you up’ in the morning doesn’t mean he impregnated you, – so you’re saying beavers might not destroy the ecosystem there?

Believe me, no one is more surprised to learn that the laws of nature operate the same way across the pond than the chief researcher himself who notes;

His preliminary findings compare brown trout populations from two similar streams that drain into a loch near Inverness, one with reintroduced beavers and one without. “There were more than double the number of trout on the ‘beaver stream’, and they were bigger,” says Kemp. He says that like beavers, trout prefer deep water so they luxuriate in beaver ponds.

Only Elaine can adequately express my shocked response to hearing that the habits of anglican fish parallel the habits of every other fish on the globe. I should send this to NOAA right away, because Michael Pollock is going to be so relieved that his decades of painstaking research haven’t been casually disproven in by a boy scout in Scotland.

Sheesh.

For something truly fresh and surprising, lets finish with this nice article from Illinois on beaver sculpture.

Good Natured: Sculpture in the Park: The Delnor Woods Edition

Sure enough, not far from the front pond at Delnor Woods, a 20-foot-tall elm tree lay by the asphalt path. A helpful visitor had come along and lugged it out of the main thoroughfare, but it still needed a little cutting to be completely out of the way.

As I dragged my trusty bow saw back and forth across the 5-inch diameter trunk, I once again, as I always do, marveled at how beavers can cut down trees using nothing more than their really strong jaw muscles and four sharp incisors.

I was bent, at a somewhat awkward angle, over the tree and saw and thoughts of beavers occupying much of my attention. But I happened to look up, for just a second. And that’s when I saw it. Delnor Woods’ answer to Sculpture in the Park.

Perhaps it was the way the sunlight was hitting it. Or maybe it was the fact that I was somewhat sleep deprived. At any rate, I positively was awestruck by the beauty of the creation before me.

Readers of this website should not be surprised to know that author of this charming speculation, Pam Otto, is not the first person to consider the idea that beaver chews were art. This topic has been much discussed over the years, and our beaver chews are among our most precious items for display. In fact one has even been stolen!

Pam’s right to be impressed, but that’s hardly the best we’ve ever seen. Check out this offering from a friend on the Beaver Management Forum a few years back.

I almost forgot, there are two gifts from friends that I wanted to share this morning, the first is chckle is from Napa’s Rusty Cohn: