If this is a gift from the gods I’m just going to take it. Let’s all pretend that the last five days never happened. I spent yesterday trying to restore to a good place and things got steadily worse from there. Maybe this is the eye of the storm. Whatever it is I’m talking it.

Ben and Beavers were on Slate yesterday. And what a glorious article it was.

The Beaver Should Be America’s National Mammal

I’m here to convince you that the beaver should be America’s national mammal.

Yet despite the lighthearted chapter titles—“California Streaming,” “Realm of the Dammed”—Goldfarb’s book is more than a peaceful meditation on the aqua-hobbit folksiness of beavers. Goldfarb wants to show us what beavers did for us once and what they could do for us now. Indeed, his case for the beaver’s importance to America’s past, present, and future is so strong that his book’s publication is the perfect opportunity for America’s beaver lovers to stand up and let their call echo from pond to shining pond: The humble beaver should be our national mammal.

Beavers and their dams altered not just our continent, but the lives and the evolutionary paths of a veritable Noah’s Ark of North America’s creatures. Indeed, the beaver is perhaps the best example of a keystone species—that is, one on which so many others depend. Songbirds, snow geese, otters, herons, pelicans, snakes, mink, raccoon, northern leopard frogs, sawflies, and trumpeter swans, to start. Even salmon, perhaps the last species you’d expect to benefit from nature’s most famous dam builders, owe a debt to beavers (Goldfarb quoted a bumper sticker: “Beavers taught salmon to jump”). Long before Goldfarb describes the beaver’s teeth as “evolution’s most consequential dental sculptors,” he should have you convinced.

Go read the whole thing. It’s wonderful. And it’s wonderful to be back even if its temporary. A bagpipe just started playing in front of my house and I’m going to take it as a sign of good things to come. You might want to update your bookmark for this site because things keep evolving.

Of course you have it bookmarked. Right?