Furry little critters, beavers are highly industrious, building dams from the Cascade Valley of the Adirondacks to the Cascades of the Northwest. In their industry, they change ecologies by interrupting stream flow. In some instances, they interrupt human flow, also.
Beavers! Can’t Live with Them, Can’t Shoot Them without Permission
You can go to Home Depot, Lowe’s, Walmart, chain and local hardware stores, and garden centers to buy peat for your garden or yard. That peat comes from bogs in previously glaciated areas like northeastern Pennsylvania. A bog owner and peat producer in the region once told me that he might have to close his business because of beavers that kept damming the stream and flooding his peat bog. He used a small tracked vehicle to “mine” the peat, and the flooding made it unusable. As he said, “We just can’t keep up with the beavers. Every time we destroy their dam, they reconstruct it.” Guess “busy as a beaver” isn’t just an expression. Their industry can make them persistent nuisances requiring incessant human work.
As the Pennsylvania Game Commission notes about Castor canadensis, “Beavers can and do become troublesome for some people. Water backed up by their dams floods pastures, crop fields and roads, disrupts public water supplies and kills trees. They also cut down valuable shade trees and excavate unwanted channels. Trapping has proven to be an acceptable and economical method of controlling their numbers.” * Those numbers across America range from 10 to 15 million beavers (down from an estimated pre-Colonial 100 to 200 million).
Before 2023’s deluge in the West, droughty conditions prevailed, and wildfires met no beaver-constructed reservoirs as they burned through wooded areas. It seems that beaver dams do some good. So, California’s Department of Fish and Wildlife has recently funded a program—why not, it’s California, where endless tax dollars fund every environmentalist’s wishlist—to subvert beaver eradication—Save the Beavers! The program aims at foiling North America’s largest rodents’ work in some areas so that it isn’t a call for extermination. Where there is no beaver problem, such as a flooded pasture, forest, or home, Californians will not seek permission to kill a beaver or beaver colony. The funding goes for flow devices in streams that circumvent but do not interrupt dam building or for protective wrapping around tree trunks (even beaver teeth fail on galvanized sheet metal). Of course, there’s a catch-22 in trying to make human habitation compatible with beaver habits. Beaver control adds to the proliferation of California’s bureaucracy; there’s even a “beaver restoration program manager who oversees the beaver population. The rodents’ incessant activity no doubt keeps her busy as a beaver. **
In Washington’s Yakima and Methow valleys, landowners have dealt with beavers by moving them to other locations, where their dams don’t interfere with human activities but can even enhance salmon runs (their slack pond water gives salmon a resting spot). ***
Why Tell You This?
Unless you are plagued by beavers, you might think all the foregoing is irrelevant to your life. You might never have seen a beaver or a beaver dam. But consider the following:
1) In pre-Colonial North America beaver fur was a valuable commodity, so valuable in fact, that trappers risked their lives in confrontations with Native Americans. In their quest for wealth, trappers went up East Coast streams in search of the animals. Where they encountered rapids and falls (like Great Falls on the Potomac) that were unnavigable in canoes, they established trading posts. Some of these trading posts, which began as a single shack, became the sites of towns and cities along the Fall Line (where durable metamorphic rocks were not as easily eroded as the sedimentary rocks found upstream). So, beavers played a role in the historical distribution and urbanization of Americans.
2) Felted beaver fur became highly popular material for coats and hats in Europe during both the 18th and 19th centuries. The demand for beaver fur was a driving force in both the initial colonization and exploration of North America, and it nearly led to beaver extinction before fashion tastes changed and other materials were deemed more comfortable and cheaper. (If you want, however, you can still get a beaver hat) After centuries of culling beavers for their hides, humans began to seek ways to live harmoniously with these large rodents while still not allowing their populations to return to pre-Colonial numbers.
3) As Americans moved across the continent, they inevitably encountered the work of those 100 million-plus beavers. We humans might be part of Nature, but our nature is often destructive in support of our interests. Thus, European frontiersmen and settlers decimated the endemic beaver populations and changed the ecology wrought by them. Farming a field-turned-wetland by beavers is only feasible if your crop is rice. As in #2, our species decided to "save the beavers" by introducing them into places like Finland, from where they have moved into Russia. We're good at solving problems by causing other problems with invasive species. Can anyone say "Pythons are in the Everglades"?
4) The conflict between The Natural and The Artificial is inevitable wherever we decide to settle. The economics of both human needs and desires makes us more enemy than friend at the outset of every human-animal and human-plant encounter. It’s only after we establish our “ownership” that we begin to see that management is often necessary. Want an example: To build a house in a wooded area, people cut down trees. After establishing the house, they plant trees in the yard. When we can’t be “one with Nature,” we make “Nature one with us.” Lake Mead is larger than all beaver ponds combined.
5) There will never be a time when humans do not attempt to control and use natural phenomena and other life forms. And there will inevitably come a time when humans realize that in their attempt to control one aspect of Nature, they destroy what they later realize was useful and necessary. And that’s because nothing is as simple as we want it to be, not our use of place, not our use of plants and animals, and not our shifting desires. Fur might be anathema as a textile today, but if beaver populations burgeon to pre-Colonial numbers, you will probably see people wearing beaver skin hats and coats. Some will see that just killing the rodents will waste an economic opportunity (You can buy beaver fur on Amazon by the way).
6) We can’t live on the planet without conflict of some kind. All conflict leads to attempts to modify or eliminate the perceived source of the conflict. Your current dwelling, be it an apartment building or a house, is the product of conflict of some kind, such as that between the land’s former “natural state” and its artificially altered new state. Unlike beavers that use "local" resources to build their dams and bank lodges, humans can transport materials like marbles from Italy to line the floors of mansions on Long Island and redwood from Oregon to build picnic tables in Indiana. (Note: Although my house sits in a temperate hardwood forest of maples, oaks, hickory, and ash, it is made of nonnative cedar on a structure of southern pine)
7) Unlike many humans, beavers live in close, if temporary, family units. The temporary nature is generational because beaver parents kick the older “kits” out of the bank lodge or dam to make room for the ensuing litter. As anecdotes seem to indicate, that expelling of older beaver kits is not mimicked by post COVID human parents since many “older” kids still live at home. Also unlike humans, beavers, by expelling the kits and forcing them to make their own way in life, do not live in overcrowded units like those big city tenements.
8) Beavers never stop growing, so some can be almost three feet long and weigh as much as 100 pounds. Without exerting the kind of ceaseless calorie-burning efforts of beavers, we human couch potatoes also seem to never stop growing. Maybe if we chewed on cambium instead of potato chips...
9) Unlike so many homeless humans, beavers know how to construct a house from raw materials. And once in that house, they know how to maintain it.
*From the PA Game Commission website.
** Any Taxin, 26 Jul 2023. Huffpost: California Aims To Tap Beavers To Help With Water And Wildfire Issues. Online at https://www.huffpost.com/entry/bc-us-california-embracing-beavers_n_64c1abb8e4b097ee0589c193
***By By Phuong Le. Associated Press 7 Oct 2014. Online under the title: Often pesky beavers put to work restoring streams.
Beavers! Can’t Live with Them, Can’t Shoot Them without Permission
You can go to Home Depot, Lowe’s, Walmart, chain and local hardware stores, and garden centers to buy peat for your garden or yard. That peat comes from bogs in previously glaciated areas like northeastern Pennsylvania. A bog owner and peat producer in the region once told me that he might have to close his business because of beavers that kept damming the stream and flooding his peat bog. He used a small tracked vehicle to “mine” the peat, and the flooding made it unusable. As he said, “We just can’t keep up with the beavers. Every time we destroy their dam, they reconstruct it.” Guess “busy as a beaver” isn’t just an expression. Their industry can make them persistent nuisances requiring incessant human work.
As the Pennsylvania Game Commission notes about Castor canadensis, “Beavers can and do become troublesome for some people. Water backed up by their dams floods pastures, crop fields and roads, disrupts public water supplies and kills trees. They also cut down valuable shade trees and excavate unwanted channels. Trapping has proven to be an acceptable and economical method of controlling their numbers.” * Those numbers across America range from 10 to 15 million beavers (down from an estimated pre-Colonial 100 to 200 million).
Before 2023’s deluge in the West, droughty conditions prevailed, and wildfires met no beaver-constructed reservoirs as they burned through wooded areas. It seems that beaver dams do some good. So, California’s Department of Fish and Wildlife has recently funded a program—why not, it’s California, where endless tax dollars fund every environmentalist’s wishlist—to subvert beaver eradication—Save the Beavers! The program aims at foiling North America’s largest rodents’ work in some areas so that it isn’t a call for extermination. Where there is no beaver problem, such as a flooded pasture, forest, or home, Californians will not seek permission to kill a beaver or beaver colony. The funding goes for flow devices in streams that circumvent but do not interrupt dam building or for protective wrapping around tree trunks (even beaver teeth fail on galvanized sheet metal). Of course, there’s a catch-22 in trying to make human habitation compatible with beaver habits. Beaver control adds to the proliferation of California’s bureaucracy; there’s even a “beaver restoration program manager who oversees the beaver population. The rodents’ incessant activity no doubt keeps her busy as a beaver. **
In Washington’s Yakima and Methow valleys, landowners have dealt with beavers by moving them to other locations, where their dams don’t interfere with human activities but can even enhance salmon runs (their slack pond water gives salmon a resting spot). ***
Why Tell You This?
Unless you are plagued by beavers, you might think all the foregoing is irrelevant to your life. You might never have seen a beaver or a beaver dam. But consider the following:
1) In pre-Colonial North America beaver fur was a valuable commodity, so valuable in fact, that trappers risked their lives in confrontations with Native Americans. In their quest for wealth, trappers went up East Coast streams in search of the animals. Where they encountered rapids and falls (like Great Falls on the Potomac) that were unnavigable in canoes, they established trading posts. Some of these trading posts, which began as a single shack, became the sites of towns and cities along the Fall Line (where durable metamorphic rocks were not as easily eroded as the sedimentary rocks found upstream). So, beavers played a role in the historical distribution and urbanization of Americans.
2) Felted beaver fur became highly popular material for coats and hats in Europe during both the 18th and 19th centuries. The demand for beaver fur was a driving force in both the initial colonization and exploration of North America, and it nearly led to beaver extinction before fashion tastes changed and other materials were deemed more comfortable and cheaper. (If you want, however, you can still get a beaver hat) After centuries of culling beavers for their hides, humans began to seek ways to live harmoniously with these large rodents while still not allowing their populations to return to pre-Colonial numbers.
3) As Americans moved across the continent, they inevitably encountered the work of those 100 million-plus beavers. We humans might be part of Nature, but our nature is often destructive in support of our interests. Thus, European frontiersmen and settlers decimated the endemic beaver populations and changed the ecology wrought by them. Farming a field-turned-wetland by beavers is only feasible if your crop is rice. As in #2, our species decided to "save the beavers" by introducing them into places like Finland, from where they have moved into Russia. We're good at solving problems by causing other problems with invasive species. Can anyone say "Pythons are in the Everglades"?
4) The conflict between The Natural and The Artificial is inevitable wherever we decide to settle. The economics of both human needs and desires makes us more enemy than friend at the outset of every human-animal and human-plant encounter. It’s only after we establish our “ownership” that we begin to see that management is often necessary. Want an example: To build a house in a wooded area, people cut down trees. After establishing the house, they plant trees in the yard. When we can’t be “one with Nature,” we make “Nature one with us.” Lake Mead is larger than all beaver ponds combined.
5) There will never be a time when humans do not attempt to control and use natural phenomena and other life forms. And there will inevitably come a time when humans realize that in their attempt to control one aspect of Nature, they destroy what they later realize was useful and necessary. And that’s because nothing is as simple as we want it to be, not our use of place, not our use of plants and animals, and not our shifting desires. Fur might be anathema as a textile today, but if beaver populations burgeon to pre-Colonial numbers, you will probably see people wearing beaver skin hats and coats. Some will see that just killing the rodents will waste an economic opportunity (You can buy beaver fur on Amazon by the way).
6) We can’t live on the planet without conflict of some kind. All conflict leads to attempts to modify or eliminate the perceived source of the conflict. Your current dwelling, be it an apartment building or a house, is the product of conflict of some kind, such as that between the land’s former “natural state” and its artificially altered new state. Unlike beavers that use "local" resources to build their dams and bank lodges, humans can transport materials like marbles from Italy to line the floors of mansions on Long Island and redwood from Oregon to build picnic tables in Indiana. (Note: Although my house sits in a temperate hardwood forest of maples, oaks, hickory, and ash, it is made of nonnative cedar on a structure of southern pine)
7) Unlike many humans, beavers live in close, if temporary, family units. The temporary nature is generational because beaver parents kick the older “kits” out of the bank lodge or dam to make room for the ensuing litter. As anecdotes seem to indicate, that expelling of older beaver kits is not mimicked by post COVID human parents since many “older” kids still live at home. Also unlike humans, beavers, by expelling the kits and forcing them to make their own way in life, do not live in overcrowded units like those big city tenements.
8) Beavers never stop growing, so some can be almost three feet long and weigh as much as 100 pounds. Without exerting the kind of ceaseless calorie-burning efforts of beavers, we human couch potatoes also seem to never stop growing. Maybe if we chewed on cambium instead of potato chips...
9) Unlike so many homeless humans, beavers know how to construct a house from raw materials. And once in that house, they know how to maintain it.
*From the PA Game Commission website.
** Any Taxin, 26 Jul 2023. Huffpost: California Aims To Tap Beavers To Help With Water And Wildfire Issues. Online at https://www.huffpost.com/entry/bc-us-california-embracing-beavers_n_64c1abb8e4b097ee0589c193
***By By Phuong Le. Associated Press 7 Oct 2014. Online under the title: Often pesky beavers put to work restoring streams.
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