Two weeks ago, wandering my central Colorado town, I stumbled upon a beaver dam. This was both typical — I’ve spent much of the last eight years finding and loitering near beaver ponds — and surprising, insofar as the dam was tucked into a little suburban stream in a little suburban neighborhood, one of those generic out-of-the-box developments that seem to be popping up all over the place here in the Arkansas Valley. It was a reminder that beavers will live just about anywhere that we let them live — that they’re as comfortable in, say, Seattle as in Yellowstone; that, given human tolerance, they can be as urban as squirrels or raccoons.
As I recently reported on LWON, I’ve become obsessed with my trail-cam. So, that evening, I pounded a metal post into the streambed, strapped my camera to it, and immediately recorded the following:
I was, of course, delighted. I’d been camera-trapping at beaver ponds for months, with little success — and now, all of a sudden, I’d found a dam with a very obliging construction worker. (The other beaver complexes had been so expansive that it was hard to know where the rodents were actively logging and building; they always seemed to work on whatever dam I wasn’t filming.) And, my own voyeuristic motives aside, it was thrilling to know that beavers were active in my neighborhood: creating wildlife habitat, filtering pollutants, storing water, sequestering carbon, and just being beavers, not ten minutes from my house.
That delight curdled to disappointment a few days later, when I returned to the dam to find it… gone. The stream now raced freely along its course, with only a few gnawed sticks still clinging to the banks to indicate that it had ever been dammed at all. What happened? We’d been getting monsoon rains for weeks, and the creek looked unusually stained and swollen; perhaps the dam had blown out. (The stream gauge on this creek doesn’t appear to be currently collecting data, so USGS is no help.) Or maybe the adjacent homeowners had felt threatened by the pond, even though it hadn’t yet risen anywhere near their property, and had torn the dam out. Given society’s aversion to these resourceful, meddlesome critters, I suspected the latter. Maybe I should distribute some pro-castor pamphlets.
I’ll continue monitoring the stream in the weeks to come, in hopes that the colony sticks around and attempts to #BuildBackBetter.
What a beautiful, sad little story, Ben. I grew up in Northern Minnesota where beavers were plentiful; how sad it was to learn that so many people did not understand their value in maintaining a healthy ecosystem. Fortunately that’s changing, but we still have plenty far to go in seeing a more wholistic view of this planet.
For some reason, Ben, and I mean this as a compliment, your post made me think of the kind of neighborhood kid that knows where all the animals hide. And it would be easy to imagine that that kid knew all this just because he spent more time outside than others. But what was he doing when no one was watching? Crawling on hands and knees through the opening between two bushes just to see what lived at the base of some unknown tree. Fishing in the rain at a duck pond. Finding pocket after pocket of habitat–and returning again and again to find nests and then broken shells and ducklings!
I have two little boys, and I’m not sure if either of them are going to turn into that kind of kid. But I try like a weird matchmaker to find them friends that are. I seek for them friends with less tame backyards, that stretch far beyond where a lawnmower may never dare go. And I hang out on the porch with a mother who holds a baby, or cajoles a toddler to put on their shoes, while the older boys disappear, drawn by something I cannot see, something that may always remain a mystery to me.