I’ve seen a lot more beaver sign than actual beavers. Flooded areas, dams, lodges, and especially gnawed-off tree trunks: beavers leave a lot of signs. Castor canadensis wrote themselves across most of the continent before the fashion for beaver felt swept over from Europe. There, the native beaver, Castor fiber, had been mostly trapped out.
Unaware how beavers made all the lush bottomlands settler-colonists hungered for, Europeans ravaged the population from here to there. And I do mean here: the importance of beavers to New York City is memorialized in the two beavers on the city’s seal; Manhattan’s Astor Place subway station has mosaic beavers, a nod to local thug J.J. Astor, who made a pile on beavers in the Northwest. Beavers were one of the great attractions of the New World (north) until most of them were killed.
Ben Goldfarb , who calls the American beaver frenzy a furpocalypse, has written a fine book on these creatures. They are one of the great animal landscape-engineers of all time. The clear rushing stream of a trout-fisherman’s dream? Those are the byproduct of the eradication of beavers: our image of the wild is very much an image created by humans.
“Beavers, the animal that doubles as an ecosystem, are ecological and hydrological Swiss Army knives, capable, in the right circumstances, of tackling just about any landscape-scale problem you might confront.” Mitigating floods, improving water quality, storing water for agriculture; dealing with sedimentation, salmon populations, wildfire? There’s a beaver for that.
The one time I heard a beaver tail slap, by the way, I thought a bomb had gone off.