A beaver did not write this post

(but this land is their land)

After learning some amazing facts about beavers, including their remarkable ability to swim a half mile underwater and the clever way they store their food for winter, we decided to see what other people had to say about them. And guess what? Not everyone loves these hardworking, resilient architects!

Although North America was once home to more than sixty million beavers, European colonists nearly trapped them into extinction to make hats and coats. On an eight-month journey along the Missouri River in 1843, John James Audubon didn’t see a single beaver. And you know he was looking!

Now, thanks to animal conservation laws (and the decline of the fur trade), North American beavers have returned to every state and province, with an overall population of more than ten million. But around the country, there are people who make their living “removing” beavers from home sites and suburban developments. They call beavers destructive pests and claim that they cause flooding. In North Carolina, you cannot trap and relocate a beaver, but you can kill them if they’re damaging your property—

Bea (angrily): It’s not your property! It’s nature’s property!

A few years ago, this happened in Briar Chapel, a neighborhood near us in Chatham County. The neighborhood association voted to kill the beavers because they were concerned about flooding along their nature trails. In fact, beaver dams provide all sorts of benefits to humans and the ecosystem. Here are just a few:

-They provide a safe place for other animals to live—lots of other animals, including birds, reptiles, fish, amphibians, and other mammals! Because of the dams they build, beavers are a keystone species. That means they are so important that if something happened to them, other animals could not survive.

-They cut down on erosion by slowing the flow of water.

-They filter the water, reducing pollution that winds up in streams, rivers (and ultimately our drinking water).

-They store water useful in droughts, and recharge ground water systems to help filter water into underground storage.

As Ben Goldfarb explains in this excerpt of Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter, beavers are also an essential part of American history:

Beavers are also at the center of our own story. Practically since humans first dispersed across North America via the Bering Land Bridge—replicating a journey that beavers made repeatedly millions of years prior—the rodents have featured in the religions, cultures, and diets of indigenous peoples from the nations of the Iroquois to the Tlingit of the Pacific Northwest. More recently, and destructively, it was the pursuit of beaver pelts that helped lure white people to the New World and westward across it. The fur trade sustained the Pilgrims, dragged Lewis and Clark up the Missouri, and exposed tens of thousands of Native people to smallpox. The saga of beavers isn’t just the tale of a charismatic mammal—it’s the story of modern civilization, in all its grandeur and folly.

They’re also important to the modern conservation movement, helping to inspire laws that have protected many other animals.

Even though beavers are no longer endangered, Goldfarb argues that we could use many more of them, to do everything from helping slow the spread of wildfires to filtering toxins from our waterways to mitigating the effects of climate change by slowing and storing snowpack melts.

Here is an image of a beaver family from Windows on Nature, a gorgeous book about the dioramas of the American Museum of Natural History (thanks, Cat!):

(Another cool fact: beaver couples stay together for life, and both parents care for the babies for 1-2 years.)

We are convinced that beavers are not just clever, interesting neighbors, but also that they—and their dams—are helpful and necessary. To better appreciate these neighbors, we built our own miniature beaver dams. It’s a great activity for a summer afternoon (better done outside than inside, because it’s messy). Here’s what you do:

1. Get a shallow dish and a large container of water.

2. Gather your dam materials—look around the yard for sticks, bark, grasses, leaves, rocks, and other natural supplies. (Hint from Bea: Beavers use mud in their dams and lodges!)

3. Build your dam across the center of your dish. Try not to leave any holes for water to get through.

4. Test your dam! Pour water into one side. Are you able to keep a “pond” of deeper water on the pouring side? If so, good job!

5. Repair any damaged spots where there’s a lot of water flow—that’s what a beaver would do!

(Bea’s dam held! Harriet’s… did not.)

Some links:

What are you reading? Bea just finished rereading Merci Suárez Changes Gears by Meg Medina, and she can’t stop talking about it! I recently savored Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri and am loving the stories in Deeshaw Philyaw’s The Secret Lives of Church Ladies.

Shorter reads, right up our alley:

“Ash Years,” a beautiful short story featuring trees by our friend Travis Price.

A terrific essay on snails by our friend Beth Browne (we love snails!).

A request—will you share the Frog Trouble Times in honor of our three-month-iversary?

A last note from Bea: Remember, we share the earth!

And here’s our Friday question for you: We know you guys love spiders. Have you made peace with other animals (or plants) that don’t suit your idea of a “picture perfect” landscape? How did you do it?