The little people are stealing my trees.
I saw this coming way back in March. My favorite little stand of poplars is becoming building materials for an enterprising family of busy beavers. Night after night they’re out there chomping away and pretty soon not a poplar will be standing. Every day I walk by and another tree has that distinctive wedge about 8 inches up the trunk—the next day it’s down.
The trees goes down and the beaver lodge goes up. Multiple living rooms connected by canals, storage rooms for food caches, canals to external food supplies, secondary ponds and tunnels... a beaver lodge is a prodigious structure, the average colony building above and below the water line for half a mile!
“When we think of the kinds of animal behaviors that suggest conscious thinking, the beaver comes naturally to mind.”
Dr. Donald Griffin, the father of animal cognition
I was sad about my poplars at first but then I learned a little bit about beavers. Native people revered them, calling them “little people”. Next to humans, these sociable, peaceful animals have the engineering skills and the tools to alter their habitat more than any other animal on the planet. Their webbed feet make them expert swimmers, the flat tail is a perfect rudder and their little hand-like front paws provide extraordinary manual dexterity. But the teeth, oh the teeth! Beaver incisor teeth are ever-growing, self-sharpening wonders that enable a single animal to fell an 8-inch circumference tree in minutes.
Even though it means an end to my sweet little poplar grove, beaver dams are really good things for the environment. They create wetland habitat for a gazillion other creatures—mammals, turtles, fish and ducks. These mini reservoirs keep water on the land longer alleviating both regional droughts and floods and allowing time for wetland microorganisms to detoxify pollutants, such as pesticides. Who knew?
So bye, bye poplars, hello little people. You are welcome to all the trees you want.
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