Is that a rodent? - #35
Stick around for parachuting beavers.
I’m a beaver, you’re a beaver, we are beavers all, and when we get together, we do the beaver call. Puts hands up like a rodent, scrunches nose and reveals front teeth, makes rodent sounds.
When my parents sang this song to me as a child, I thought they made it up. As a kid, I was both smaller than everyone else and I had giant buck teeth. My brother called me Munchkanian Beaver Head. Or Beav, for short. I presumed the song was a way to make me feel better about his unfortunately accurate nickname for me. And it did make me feel better. I felt a kinship to the industrious, fort-building, tail-slapping creatures. Sure our teeth didn’t fit in our mouths, but god dammit, we were busy.
It was only when researching this essay that I learned this song was not a Clay and Maggie original. Culture has been collectively identifying as beavers for some time, it turns out. “I’m a beaver” has a lot of internet variations but here’s the closest I could find to what my parents did:
We do the beaver call. Instead of finishing off the song with the “hup, hup, hup” as she does in the video above and as you’ll find in many other versions of the beaver song, our family finished the song with actual beaver vocalizations because my mom is a wildlife biologist. We were not going to blaspheme the beaver by doing their call wrong.
Here’s what beavers (and my family) actually sound like: Beaver vocalizations
Around the :30 second mark, after all the chewing sounds, you’ll hear that beavers just sound like deep-voiced babies trying to vocalize a thought that is lost on their parents. But the easiest way to spot a beaver by sound? Tail slapping.
A tail slap is a warning sign, both to predators and to the beaver’s colony. This valley is littered with beaver dams, the closest only 80 yards away. I’ve been listening on every hike for these tail slaps, pausing at every dam and lodge, and after nine months in beaver country, I finally saw my first beaver.
Spotting wildlife is a lot like dating. When you’re on the apps and going to bars and putting yourself out there, no beavers. When your camera is put away and you’re driving in the car grumbling about something, there goes a beaver. One crested in a roadside pond they’d built themself before diving back in, their tail following them up and back down into the water. Spectacular. Like a small dolphin in a fur coat with a paddle on its butt.
This valley is prime for beavers. But a lot of real estate is prime for beavers. In fact, you can find beavers almost everywhere in North America with the exception of deserts. All a beaver really needs is water and wood. And for people to stop messing with its construction plans, but we’ll get to that.
First, some beaver basics: beavers are nocturnal mammals that can live up to 20 years in captivity, but typically average 10-12 years out in the wild. They are semi-aquatic, can hold their breath for up to 15 minutes, and are the largest rodent in North Amerca. Most delightfully, beavers are big ole chunks. They weigh a whopping 40-70 lbs and can reach up to 4 feet long with tail. That’s like an 8-year-old child. Dwarfing that is the now extinct species of giant beaver which were the size of BEARS and shared the earth with us some 12,000 years ago. #bringbackmegafauna
Those massive, barrel sized beavers died out when their food source dried up. Luckily for our modern day beaver, this isn’t a problem (yet) because beavers eat wood. Actually, bark. And cambium. And water lily tubers, spatterdock, clover, algae, leaves, plus cellulose, which most mammals can’t even digest. They eat almost all plant goods anywhere near them, or rather, within a 150 yard radius. If you want to know where the term “busy beaver” came from, just look around a beaver lodge. One beaver can chew down as many as 200 trees a year. They can topple an 8-foot tree in under five minutes.
Like rats, beavers’ teeth are constantly growing. In fact, their teeth can grow up from their mouth, curl around, and puncture their own skull. But this is rare and typically only occurs if they have our old friend, malocclusion. In a healthy beaver, wood gnawing keeps their teeth the right length and the right sharpness so they can focus on what’s important to be a beaver: raising families and rivers, building their dream homes and healthy ecosystems at the same time.
Let’s get a little into that dream home. I want my home to be nice, but I also want a nice yard and a quiet town. Beavers are the same. Their environments are made of a few components: the lodge, the channels, and the dam. The lodge is their quiet home, the channels are their streets, and the dam is what creates their nice, quiet town.
The easiest thing to notice is obviously the dam. Beavers build a little differently than us. Rather than building perpendicular to the flow, beavers shove their sticks and logs into the mud facing the flow. The pressure of the water pushes the sticker deeper into position. The beaver’s mission is to get enough of these sticks and logs into place that it stops the sound of running water.
And it is truly the sound of running water that gets a beaver to work. Imagine it’s a quiet winter evening and you’ve got a great book and the house to yourself. You settle into your coziest chair, selected beverage by your side, and you crack open that perfect book only to hear something loudly dripping somewhere in the house. But where? You check the kitchen, the bath, the laundry — where is this god damned dripping?
That is the mind of the beaver.
Scientists have even gone so far as to put a radio in the middle of a dry field playing the sound of running water, and beavers show up and build a dam around it. When a beaver gets to work, they really get to work. Building materials aren’t just limited to sticks either. They also use rocks at the base of their dams and muddy grass to patch holes. They’re often stopping a river after all, gotta make a strong wall.
When they’re finished constructing their dam, what they’ve really finished is building a quiet, safe haven to build their lodge in.
This flooded area is “town”. That’s where our friend beaver goes to the gym, plays with her family, gets groceries, and makes frequent trips to the hardware store, otherwise known as trees. The beaver will make use of all the trees and bushes and other plants in the newly flood-built pond, and when they run out of resources in that area, the beaver will start to dig channels that fill with water to explore past their pond. These channels are their “streets”. Beavers are better in the water than they are on land, so they use these channels to transport food and building materials back to their lodges.
A beaver lodge can be built in any freshwater area (streams, rivers, lakes, ponds, etc.) A lodge is essentially a wooden fortress built in the water where they hang out in the winter, raise their young, etc. It’s away from the dam itself because, as we addressed earlier, the sound of running water will not be tolerated. Which is part of why a beaver lodge walls can be around a meter thick. The floor inside the lodge is actually above water level, but all entrances are underwater — the ultimate safe house from predators. Beavers also create a cache underwater of food, like a stocked fridge, to eat all winter. But beavers, like humans, have to learn to build from an older generation. Never trust a new beaver to build your house.
Once a beaver figures out how construction works, they really figure it out. Beavers are even known to use old, abandoned lodges. Say a beaver has a lodge, eats everything in the surrounding area, and moves on. Time has stuff to grow back, the environment is enriched again — that’s when a new beaver moves in to renovate. Logs over a thousand years old have been found in beaver lodges and dams. And beavers will work on dams for decades. One dam, estimated to have started in the 1970s, stretches over 8 football fields long, and was found by satellite imagery. It was built by generations upon generations of beavers.
This brings us to family structure. Beavers mate for life. They’ve even been shown to endure a mourning period when their mate dies before seeking a new one. Female beavers reach sexual maturity at around 2.5 years old and they’ll have one litter per year of up to 8 kits, typically between April and July. The kits hang out in the lodge, nursing, but by late summer, they’re feeding themselves. Kits turn into yearlings and they typically stick around until they reach their own sexual maturity when they head out to final their own lifelong mate.
Until then though, it’s in the lodge and the pond, following around mom and dad, learning to swim and build. Kits will hang on to their mom’s back by biting her fur when they’re learning to swim. And a lot of grooming goes into that fur — it’s what keeps them warm in the freezing alpine waters. They comb oil from a body gland into every part of their fur, helping it better insulate them from the water.
Come fall, our local beavers fatten themselves up with the abundant local aspen trees, chock full of nutrition, before hunkering down for the winter. Beavers don’t hibernate — in fact, they create chimneys for their lodges and if you’re lucky, you’ll see steam rising from them in the winter. It gets hot in there with mom, dad, yearlings, and new kits!
So how do you tell who’s who? Well, you’d need to get a little personal. There’s no way to tell if a beaver is male or female from the outside because their genitalia are inside their bodies. If you’re ambling through a bog and come across a beaver and are curious enough but more importantly stupid enough to need to know their sex, here’s how: express their anal glands. If it smells like motor oil, it’s a male. If it smells like old cheese, it’s a female.
It might just be easier to tell who’s a beaver and who isn’t… because beavers aren’t the only ones taking advantage of the lodges. Beavers have been known to share their lodges with several other species, including voles and muskrats. It’s more animals to sound the alarm of a predator, plus muskrats don’t compete for the beavers’ food. Muskrats will dabble in plants, but they supplement that diet with frogs, crayfish, clams, snails, fish, etc.
And it’s not just voles and muskrats that take advantage of what the beavers have been up to. It’s a lot of species. That’s because beavers are what is known as a keystone species. A keystone species disproportionately holds up the ecosystem. No surprise here, some Native American tribes knew this and called the beaver “the sacred center of the earth” because of their role in creating habitats. And it’s not just in the Alpine environment. Beavers are even helpful to orcas. Their alpine ponds are great breeding grounds for salmon, some of which make it to the sea and into the bellies of orcas. All the ponds act as watering holes for other animals, birds, and plenty of insects. (God knows they love sitting water.)
Beavers are truly the biggest architects of the environment, so it’s no surprise that humans were like, “hey, let’s decimate those.” Welcome to the fur trade. When colonists first came to North America, we had around 400 million beavers on the continent. By 1900, there were only 100,000 left — a devastation to beavers absolutely, but an even worse one to the environment, destroying ecosystems left and right.
But beavers aren’t just in North America. They’re an Eurasian animal as well, but Europe almost extinguished their beaver population (millions of them!) for hats. They got down to twelve hundred beavers and fucked up the ecosystem so bad that people, for once, were like, “maybe we should stop.”
Humans are insane though and just because we stopped wearing beaver hats didn’t mean we wanted beavers “around.” After all, having beavers around meant flooded golf courses and agricultural land, and we know how America reacts to anything that dares to mess with Big Ag or boys in polo shirts.
But one community actually figured it out. Their solution was bonkers, but they did figure it out. In 1948, Idaho was growing, but their growing subdivisions had one pesky problem: beavers. As complaints escalated, Idaho Fish and Game considered their options. One of their employees, Elmo W. Heter, came up with a plan.
He’d been trying to figure out how to transport beavers quickly, safely, and with little costs from the Payette Lake region of Idaho to Chamberlain Basin in the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness. Taking them in trucks stressed out the beavers. Plus they needed to be kept cool, and they were refusing to eat because of the stress. Strapping them to pack animals only terrified the pack animals. So if you couldn’t transport the beavers by wheel or hoof… what about air?
Heter decided to tie boxes of beavers to leftover WWII parachutes, and then toss them out of planes.
Heter created boxes that would open upon impact and in his efforts to parachute 76 beavers into the wilderness, only one beaver died. All in all, each drop cost only seven dollars per beaver, and most of the parachutes were returned by backpackers and ranches for reuse. Only months after being dropped from the sky, the beavers were completing dams and back to marital bliss.
See it for yourself.
Because of conservation efforts (i.e., a big ole human whoopsie), beavers are on the road to recovery. We’re now up to 15,000,000 beavers in North America and 500,000 in Europe, and just in time for the climate crisis. Beavers are making their useful comeback as we lose our snowpack. As we struggle to figure out new strategies to capture water in the high country before it melts too quickly, we are beginning to turn to beavers. As we’ve learned, this massive rodent can create essentially thousands of reservoirs. These reservoirs help to create firebreaks, slowing wildfire, and they are a potential water storage solution not just for all the creatures in woods and valleys, but for us.
After some 14,000 words on beavers, I think it’s clear. It’s time to let the busy beavers be as busy as they like. A keystone species, a remarkable recovery story, and the cutest little tail smackers in the wood.
Recommended Reading: there’s so much more to know about these beloved creatures, and you can learn a lot of it in Ben Goldfarb’s Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter.
This might be the most fun I had researching any essay, but it was also a lot of work. I’ll be doing deep dives on all the local fauna (mountain lions, marmots, bobcats, coyotes, ravens, etc.), but these posts will be for paid subscribers only moving forward. Consider becoming a paid subscriber. It averages to $1.25 per post. And I personally think this essay was worth at least 5 gumballs.
Really well done. You had me at the song which I used to sing at Campfire Girl camp. I've seen beavers on camping trips (canoeing quietly on grassy rivers) but it's been a long time since I've seen one. I'm keeping my eye peeled and my camera ready! Thanks Kelton.
Amazing animal to see in its habitat. Hiking in flooded Land Between the Lakes at dusk crossed a narrow knee deep channel only to be warned loudly with a tail slap from a full grown specimen. It's splash was enough to scare the begezzes out of me and quicken my pace out of the water! Unforgettable.