Yesterday I spent my birthday evening with the beavers who had obviously been out carousing late to the harvest moon and didn’t wake up until 7:00. There was sneaky champagne and baked treats enjoyed with Jon and Cheryl, and Lory texted wistfully from Sedonna. The sky was looming with weather and I felt three drops that might have been classified as rain but it politely waited until the carousing was over. And then the beavers gave me the most generous present I could have imagined and I saw the sweetest thing I have ever seen in 6 years of watching beavers.

But we’ll talk about that later. Let’s talk first about letting children learn about beavers by dressing up as a beaver and making a lodge of pretzels.

Busy beavers bewilder

Julie Bartolone, naturalist for Mill Creek Park, said the program was offered on Smythe Island because it’s one of the places in the park that the beaver calls home.

 “If you ever want to see them, this is the place to come,” said Bartolone.

 Bartolone said that beavers have become one of her favorite animals.  “There’s so many interesting things about them,” said Bartolone. “[I like] the fact that they mate for life, and how they build their lodges, because the entrance is only under water.”

Mind you. This is in Ohio, one of the beaver belt of states that regularly do the wrong thing. It’s a state where I can’t send anyone to an expert who knows better because there are none.  I couldn’t be happier that one of Julie’s favorite animals is the beaver.Wait ’til I write her about the ‘keystone species charm bracelet’ activity!

So Ohio sent me a birthday present. And then there was this lively gift from Ireland of all places!

Would beavers from abroad improve Irish riversides?

Our waterways have become tunnelled with alder and willow, blocking light and reducing bioproductivity, says a reader, who suggests the animals would fell the riparian trees and let in the sun

In the Scottish Beaver Trial, overseen by official and voluntary groups, 11 beavers from Norway were released, unfenced, in a working forest in Argyll in 2009. This followed public consultation, with a mostly favourable response, and the Scottish government will make a final judgment on it next year. Meanwhile, however, unlicensed and unauthorised beavers are living in unknown numbers at more than 40 sites elsewhere in Scotland and at others in Wales and southern England.  Beavers never reached Ireland, so far as archaeology can establish.

 I’m sorry but I have read this “no beavers in Ireland” malarky before and I just don’t buy it. I know you feel all different from Scotland and separately autonomous, but the distance from Northern Ireland to Northern Scotland is less than 40 miles as the beaver swims. We know they have gone longer distances across salt water than that to find a new home, and you’re trying to tell me that some industrious pair of yearlings, when their family members were being hunted to extinction, never did that before? Allow me to be deeply doubtful. Plus there’s this:

Gearóid Mac Niocaill (in his book Ireland Before the Vikings) writes that Bibraige, if its purported derivation from ‘beaver-people’ is correct, “must derive from a remote continental past” because the beaver “is not known in Ireland”.

First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight with you. Then you win. Mark your calendars for when the beaver conversation started in Ireland.

Now back to last nights delight and the sweetest thing. Ever.

When I review the list of the most adorable beaver moments I observed since 2007 my list typically looks like this. The first was the morning in that first fall of 2007  when I came upone 4 kits all chewing willow in the stream. Computer traumas mean I no longer possess the original footage, but it’s still on youtube, and it still makes me smile. Especially the moment when the second kit tries to swim THROUGH the third. The fourth kit is just out of the camera shot, but trust me he was there.

A second runner up for cuteness I never saw, but saw footage of from Moses and involved a yearling beaver playing with a kit by rolling him over in the water. See here:

But up until last night the easily most adorable thing I’ve ever seen was when mom was sick and giving her three kits a good start before she left them forever. One was so happy that she was swimming over to him he raised his tail in anticipation. You’re on you own for this video because I am incapable of watching more than two seconds before I burst into sobs. The tail greet appears around the one minute mark and is as much proof that beavers feel affection for family members as any the world will offer.

But what I saw last night (and sadly have no footage of because it was too dark) rivaled the scene. Our young, attentive  mom was flanked by two pesky kits who were looking for attention while she fixed the dam, and she did one of those wholly understandable parent moments like “leave me alone for a dam-moment will you?” and they swam dejectedly off. But a moment later she had a change of heart, swam over to them and ducked under the water beneath them turning her white belly to the sky like a sea otter, and floated up under them, rolling them both in her arms in a moment of pure beaver love. Cheryl, Jon and I all awwed at exactly the same pitch.

It was, and at this point I consider myself somewhat of a connoisseur, the very sweetest thing. Ever.