The Beaver - A Keystone Species
‘To be native to a place we must learn to speak its language’
- Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass
Sketch of a beaver eating a willow - by the author
In my left hand, I held cut daisies and in my right, a plastic container of ripe blackberries pulled from the invasive thorny vines who twine around the edges of the South Fork of the American River. On either side of the river, steep canyon walls rise thick with oak and pine. That evening it was hot, but the sun had passed beyond the westernmost wall so I was left in the early dusk where the warm breeze cooled over the frigid river. I hopped from rock to rock into the river and sat and waited for the beaver with my binoculars held to my eyes. In the meantime, there were acorn woodpeckers chattering and darting across the river with their flap, flap, flap, glide, and then back again over to the other side. High above, a bald eagle searched for prey, and turkey vultures glided in a vortex over by the road, where animals perish every day on that long black streak that winds out of the canyon. Every living being was engaged in work and my work was the watching.
A few years ago, I gleefully inspected the stump of an alder tree that had been felled by a beaver in front of my cabin. Some Americans ask me about the exotic animals of Australia with such childlike passion but they never seem to revere the abundance of mammal life here in this country with the same enthusiasm. When I tell them how much I adore squirrels they always respond with a quizzical expression. Here in California, there is a beaver, an animal who survives by felling trees and gnawing bark with their big yellow enameled teeth. In return for their pithy meals, Beavers slow down streams and make habitats for fish, birds, insects, amphibians, and reptiles. Sometimes other mammals like mink and otters even move into Beaver lodges. So, when I asked excitedly ‘Have you seen the tree the beaver felled?’, I never imagined that the response would be wire. One of my neighbors and some other users of our space, faced with our dwindled riparian habitat, decided to wrap the trees in chicken wire. Years later, the trees are pushing against the wire in protest.
He came from the water, silent and dripping, and sat in front of his mud bank lodge with his big flat leathery tail protruding from between his webbed hind legs. He scratched his belly with his dexterous front hands and preened his wet and whiskered face. After a while, I made a ‘tut tut’ to get his attention and he looked up and peered across the river with his squinted eyes and slipped soundlessly into the water. He swam across with a perfect ferry, his arrowed head lifted out of the mirrored water, on either side of his sleek body a ripple extended out which made the reflection of the trees wobble in the dimming light. When he was within three feet of me he paused, studied me for a moment with a side eye, and then with a snap and slap, he dived down, far far away from me. I waited but he bided his time so well, perhaps knowing that eventually, I would grow tired of the swarm of mosquitos buzzing around my face. I rose, picked up my harvest, and headed back to my cabin.
I like to imagine that the native Maidu-Nisenan people here had a word for the sound beavers make when they chew the bark from a willow branch, the loud ‘tat tat tat’. I heard him before I saw him munching in the eddy by the beach of grey road base rock. I stood at a distance to leave him in peace. Last year there were three of them and this year I have only seen him and I wondered where the other two had gone off to. Beavers are monogamous and territorial so there was really only one answer to the question of this beaver’s loneliness. So I waited, hoping to see a glimpse of the family but they never came.
It is hard living in a world of abundance and simultaneous scarcity. Millions of years ago, possibly more than 10 million years ago, beavers walked to America from Eurasia. Here they stayed until Europeans came and almost hunted them to extinction for their fur and for the oil they secrete from their anal glands which was used in perfume. On the South Fork of the American River in California where I live, the riparian habitat was destroyed by man’s pursuit of gold, and then came the dams which changed the flow of the river and removed any hope of replenished sediments as long as the dams remained. Despite all this, every day I find sticks in the river that are smooth, stripped to the white, and neatly chewed at one end at a perfect 45-degree angle with the unmistakable chisel marks of beaver teeth etched all over. I present the sticks to children and say ‘Look! A beaver gnaw’ and they take the sticks and keep them like the ancient and sacred treasures that they are. That night as the light grew dim and my cabin shone yellow into the darkness, I broke a willow branch from its cluster and tossed it into the eddy as a small and insignificant offering.
