Rachel Poliquin - Beaver

The Beaver itself is not easily seen, being nocturnal and secretive, but it can be spotted in ponds, lakes, or large streams at twilight by a quiet observer.

Castor canadensis, American Beaver, Encyclopedia of Life, www.eol.org

It is hard to see a beaver. For a large animal which boldly makes its presence known with gnawed stumps and massive engineering projects, a beaver is surprisingly difficult to spot. Gliding through the water at dusk with just its eyes, nose and ears above surface, a beaver can see, smell and hear you, but you will likely miss it altogether.

And then, it is difficult to know which beaver to see. There is always more than one. The beavers journey within human cultures has been a journey of beaver pieces and parts. At various historical moments the beaver has been synonymous with its testicles, musk, asceticism, fur, architectural prowess, collectivism, industry, animal instinct, environmental engineering and a few things more besides. When Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary on 27 June 1661, This day Mr Holden sent me a bever, which cost me 4l 5s, he meant Mr Holden sent him a felted beaver hat. When Thomas Carlyle weighed the merits of a beaver intellect in his Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850) he used beaver to describe the unheroic mentality of an honest yet plodding worker. More recently, environmental groups who champion the reintroduction of beavers into American lakes and rivers are self-described as beaver believers. It is not that beaver believers have faith in the animals ability to re-establish themselves in their native habitats. Rather, beaver is shorthand for the ecological transformation beavers accomplish by simply living their lives. Beaver believers believe that beavers, by managing water levels and creating wetland habitats, will mitigate the worst effects of a changing climate. Saying beaver (or rather castor, to use the Latin) to a Renaissance physician would have produced a small vial of musky effluence from a beavers scent organs. Saying beaver in the twenty-first century can prove far more risqu since the word has become sexual slang for female genitalia. Seeing a beaver means seeing the right beaver, and saying beaver always requires an explanation of which beaver is intended.

Evidence a beaver has been hard at work.

More basically, it is exceedingly hard to see a creature that no longer exists. Simply put, the beavers history is a long tale of systematic eradication. For an animal that has become intimately associated with busyness, the beaver has been notorious for its absences.

The bison is perhaps the most iconic of the North American animals almost hunted into oblivion. From the 50 million that once roamed the great plains of North America, only a thousand remained in 1889. But the beaver although smaller, quieter and less romantic for big sky dreamers was the even more significant animal in North Americas early history. Beavers were the motivating cause for North Americas first colonies, and the quest for a steady supply of beaver skins was one of the main drivers of expansion towards the Pacific coast. As eastern forests and wetlands were stripped clean, traders were drawn further and further westwards in the pursuit of the lucrative fur. No one knows how many beavers once populated North America. They likely numbered in the tens of millions and occupied most bodies of water from northern Canada to northern Mexico. But by 1812, Thomas Douglas Selkirk, part owner of the Hudsons Bay Company, the largest fur-trading monopoly the world has ever seen, was forced to admit that Beavers, formerly

But the beaver stands apart from other stories of species endangerment and loss. While there is much to lament in the devastation of millions of beavers, the damage was not without significant ecological benefit: the near eradication of the North American beaver likely saved another beaver on the other side of the Atlantic. There are in fact two beavers the North Americanbeaver (