Yesterday’s flash flood simulation was unnerving in more ways than one. Seeing the lodge underwater was like seeing a the school library on fire. Or maybe almost on fire, since logic tells me the beavers will be fine. I’m glad a big beaver was seen later that night. I’m going to imagine it was Dad checking out conditions before bringing the rest of the family home. I suppose a yearling or two might decide this is as good a time as any not to stick around, but I would think in times of high instability the impulse to stay close to what’s familiar is pretty powerful. We’ll see who’s left when the waters ebb. Certainly the repairs will require an “all hands on deck” work party for a while.
In the vast array of beaver stories that have passed my way since 2007 I have learned about exactly two cases of beavers drowning. The most recent was the botched “relocation” job in Lincoln Park last year, where the mother beaver was blocked in the water when a live trap was misplaced. The second was a story from Sherri Tippie, expert beaver trapper in Colorado. She told me she had lost only 2 beavers in 21 years of trapping, and those were in a flash flood in New Mexico. Both of these stories require the intervention of man to make conditions dire enough to drown a beaver, and that is reassuring.
Still, I think of the family huddled in the lodge, as the water rises, like the last scenes of the Titanic. They must have squeezed closer and closer together and to the top until it finally became clear they were going to have to “dis-lodge” themselves. It reminds me of an early camping trip I took without rain gear. When the water started to drip through the canvas tent at night it wicked into my sleeping bag from the top and bottom. By crouching smaller and smaller towards the middle I was able to avoid the damp, hoping morning would come before the entire bag was soaked. Eventually I gave up on morning and squished myself awake. I’m sure that’s what happened with the beavers in reverse. I wonder if they all went together and who was the holdout and who was the first. I wonder where they went to wait.
