One of my favorite things about this weird pursuit of all-things-beaver is the way that it seems to lead to a hundred other things. Take the word “Crannog‘ for instance. Paul Ramsay mentioned it casually (as I suppose any Scotsman might) on the Save the Tay beavers facebook page yesterday and I had never seen it before. I went searching for the definition, which wikipedia tells me is “An artificial island, usually built in lakes, and most often used as an island settlement or dwelling place in prehistoric or medieval times.”
Interesting. Turns out Ireland and Scotland have a host of these, historically defensible spaces for Robert-the-Bruce types or other suitably heroic figures that might one day inspire a future Mel Gibson film. So underwater archeology is a fairly well-funded pursuit to look for traces of earlier times and show the world the prominence of the early Scots.
Guess what they found in Loch (Lake) Tay in 2008?
{Mind you, one of the arguments against reintroducing beavers in Scotland – besides the oft-repeated ‘they’ll hurt salmon” argument and lesser known “beavers are icky” treatise – is that beavers aren’t really native. The doctrine goes something like “There are no beavers there now [because all the beavers were killed by the 1600’s]. That was a really, really long time ago and how do we know its even true?”)
Well, here’s how you know.
That picture on the right is a beaver chew that has been preserved underwater for 4000 years (which for those of you following along at home is around the time of the Exodus of Moses.) It turns out that the pile of sticks they got all excited about being an old Crannog construction was actulally a beaver lodge. The first carbon testing placed the logs as being nibbled way before the birth of Christ. Later reads have marked parts as much as 8000 years old. (before Socrates, before Gilgamesh, before the pyramids, before bronze, and before the start of the Great Wall in China.)
Let’s just say that beavers belong in Scotland and belong in the Tay and leave it at that.
For the second, closer to home, definition, we turn our attention to the Ventura River, important to our quirky ‘historical beaver range’ pursuit because it was an area beavers were famously said not to have been native.
There is one questionahle record of beavers occurring near the coast of southern California along the Sespe Riwr in Ventura County. This record, a single skull of an adult male said to have been taken in .May, 1906, formcrly ~was in the collection of Dr. ,J oh11 Hornung and now is in the California Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. Because of the arid nature of the country it seems improbable that beayers eyer occurred extensiy in this area within historic time at least.
So Tappe thought the skull found was a ‘fluke’ and the pictograph was a ‘fluke’ and there was no reason to believe that beavers, who lived successfully from Alaska to the Rio grande, could have ever plied their twiggy trade as far south as Ventura.
Meet author Jan Timbrook who is a curator for the Santa Barbara museum of natural history. Her book ‘Chumash Ethnobotany” has some very interesting things to say about beavers:
“A willow stick that had been cut by a beaver was thought to have the power to bring water. The Chumash would treat the stick with ‘ayip ( a ritually powerful sbustance made from alum) and then plant it in the ground to create a permanent spring of water.”
Jan Timbrook, Chumash Ethobotany p. 180
Don’t you just love that sentence? Thanks, Jan. Maybe I’m just an old pagan at heart but doesn’t it just seem possible that planting a beaver chew would make water spring? I went looking for the quote and saw that the reference is already up on the Sespe Creek page at Wikipedia. Go read Rick’s excellent summary so far. I am reminded that a long, long time ago, when we were camping at Lassen National Park and enjoying the Kings Creek Meadow, we saw on the map that the creek started from a spring so not far away and thought we’d explore. We hiked up a hill to where water just seemed to pour out of hole in the ground. Curious, I put my hand in the hole to feel for myself and touched this burst of water coming out of the earth, that pushed past my fingers and rolled down the hill and winded through the meadow and later became the Kings Creek Falls.
Sometimes you can touch very small things that go on to become powerful. Just sayin’
