For I Will Consider the North American Beaver

After “Jubilate Agno” by Christopher Smart


For the beaver is the largest rodent in North America and the second largest on earth.

For the human desecration of the beaver and carrier pigeon ignited the conservation movement.

For the beaver, a keystone creature, creates watersheds that are hubs of flourishing ecosystems.

For first, they are supreme environmentalists who provide hollows in felled trees for the nesting raccoons, squirrels, owls, ducks, and goldeneyes.

For secondly, the beaver is a symbol of industry and the national animal of Canada.

For thirdly, beavers have created verdant soil for the farmland in the valleys of the northern part of North America.

For fourthly, the beaver engineered habitats prevent erosion, reduce risk of flash floods, maintain water in streams throughout the year, and fortify trout.

For fifthly, the weight of the beaver pond bears down into the earth and restores groundwater.

For sixthly, beavers and their ponds, wetlands, and meadows have provided nourishment to the brown creepers, nutcrackers, moose, trumpeter swans, and Coho salmon.

For seventhly, songbirds rest upon coppicing willows, and ducks nest along the edges of their ponds.

For eighthly, by gnawing down trees in dense forests, beavers provide sunlight and photosynthesis to support food webs; pond insects shelter in their lodges and dams.

For ninthly, beavers are balletic and ingenious in water, and their transparent eyelids permit them to see while swimming.

For tenthly, the beaver is monogamous and endowed with familial fidelity.

For the beaver’s young help care for siblings and assist their parents in repairing dams and lodges.

For their second pair of fur-lined lips allow them to close their mouths in water while hauling and gnawing on wood.

For beavers can hold their breath underwater for fifteen minutes.

For the beavers’ four chisel-shaped front teeth perpetually grow to replace that which is ground down from chewing bark, and the outer enamel of their teeth is thick and tinged orange with iron compounds.

For the beaver’s fur is waterproof, soft, and warm with 126,000 hairs in a postage stamp-sized patch.

For beaver pelts were a major part of the North American fur trade beginning in the 1500s that was so rapacious as to come close to driving the beaver to extinction.

For early colonists such as the Pilgrims paid bills from England with beaver pelts.

For Lewis and Clark were astounded by the beavers’ productive work, and Thoreau deemed them righteous creatures.

For the Blackfeet believed the beavers were their most valuable partners and prohibited killing them.

For in Massachusetts today, lizards and turtles proliferate and fish abound near beaver dams.

For in the Western mountains, beavers’ wetlands cover the smallest area, but the greatest biodiversity exists around them.

For in North Carolina, the endangered Saint Francis’ Satyr butterfly finds safe haven only in beaver meadows and wetlands.

For no other animal besides the human is an equal of the beaver in the engineering of the natural world.

For in 1948, when Idaho Fish and Game trapped seventy-six beavers out of Payette Lake in the town of McCall and dropped them by parachute into Idaho’s Chamberlain Basin, all but one survived to create new thriving beaver communities.

For the beavers’ tail contains fat deposits used as energy when needed, as a rudder when swimming, and as a seat when in repose.

For beavers slap the water with their flat tails to warn their family of impending danger.

In 2017 to protect their local wildflower attraction on a man-made island in a man-made lake, a New York environmental organization kill-trapped an entire beaver family.