Leave it to Beavers

IN THE REMARKABLE speech that God delivers beginning in Job 38—God’s longest soliloquy in the Bible, Old Testament or New—we hear of the mountain goat, the raven, the lioness, even the wonderfully silly ostrich, redeemed by her wild speed. But nothing of the beaver! Doubtless this is because Job, confined to the old world, had not come across Castor canadensis, and so God did not want to confuse him (Job was freaked out enough already). But if God had been aiming at a North American audience, there is no doubt the beaver would have starred in the account, because there may be no finer creature under heaven.

These reflections are based on reading the galleys of a new book that will be published this month under the excellent title Eager, by Ben Goldfarb. It is the account of the impact, past and perhaps future, of this remarkable rodent. An inhabitant of the northeast mountains, I’ve lived in their company my whole life (and have had the occasional flooded basement to show for it), but as Goldfarb points out, this is a relatively new development. A hundred years ago, they’d been extirpated from the region, trapped out—indeed, the trapping that decimated their population across the country is painful to read about. In a matter of weeks, whole watersheds could be cleaned out, just because of a fashion for beaver hats.

This vanity cost the continent dearly, because beavers are the greatest hydraulic engineers on earth. The dams they build serve many purposes. One is parochial—they raise the water level high enough that the entrance to the beaver’s lodge is safely underwater. But the rest are pure public service. To wit:

• Their ponds are havens for every kind of wildlife—in the arid West, the great sanctuaries of biodiversity.
• Their dams hold back rampaging floods, creating a watery maze that prevents massive damage downstream.
• The water thus impounded seeps into the ground, recharging depleted aquifers.

These are not small blessings. On a continent increasingly beset by climate-caused drought and flood, beavers couldn’t be more important. And their effects are not minor: Goldfarb marshals one study after another to prove that they could be decisive in rewatering the arid West—which indeed was far greener back before beavers were trapped out.

The evidence is strong enough that even ranchers—for too long reflexive enemies of almost all wildlife—have begun to experiment with reintroducing beavers. The wetlands they create in turn produce ton upon metric ton of delicious grass and keep the spreads green even in the driest years. Though state wildlife officials remain wary (and though too many anglers remember the completely untrue Narnian slander that beavers eat fish), the beaver is quickly becoming a crucial tool of landscape restoration.

They were reintroduced to my region a century ago, and now almost every watercourse that can host a beaver family has one; the slap of tail on water is one of the most familiar and happy sounds I know.

“Does the eagle soar at your command and build its nest on high?” God asks Job, who of course must reply that he has no part in such doings. But we—in recompense for our sins—may someday be able to say that we have at least restored the magnificent beaver to its old range across the country. A happy and productive day that would be!