Leaving it to Beavers: Art, Ecology and History in Pointed Stumps

Over the last couple months the beavers in my neighborhood have been as busy as . . . well . . . beavers.  Darkened pointed tree stumps and partially healed basal areas stripped of bark are testament that these flat tailed rodents have been active in the area for a long time, but the recent burst of activity between the upper and lower Collinsville, Connecticut dams on the Farmington River is beyond anything I’ve seen in nearly three decades of almost daily observation.  Though I’ve often spotted the glossy furred creatures swimming at twilight, I’ve never caught them at more than hauling away a few light branches.  The fresh piles of wood chips, sculpture gardens of bright conical stumps, and freshly gnawed limbs suggest I’ve been missing a good deal under cover of darkness.

Beavers are justifiably renowned for their construction prowess, creating canals and lodges as well as dams that can be hundreds of feet long and more than a house-story high.   They are “engineers and builders unparalleled in the animal kingdom,” according to the Larousse Encyclopedia of Animal Life.  But while they are well known as instinctual contractors they are also inadvertent artists, just like human engineers who design practical canals, buildings, and dams that are also beautiful.

More than beaver architecture, I’m captivated by the rarely noticed beauty of their wood harvesting.  No two stumps are cut quite the same and trees that fall or get hung up in their neighbors are often found in interesting patterns.  Trunks lying on the ground frequently get chewed in several places with varied shapes and at different depths, like horizontal totem poles.  Partially fallen trees may be twisted into poses of remarkable ballet grace that belie their violent end.  For those who look closely, the incisions of beaver teeth working on the grain of various woods can result in stumps and chips with intriguing patterns.  The chiseled, shaved, and scalloped wood catches light and retains moisture in curious, ever changing ways as fresh wounds weather and darken.  Best of all, seeing art rather than engineering in a beaver’s necessity to gnaw breaks a chain of stereotypes freeing me to see more deeply.

Beavers manipulate water levels with dams and canals enabling them to store food and navigate safely, thus sharing with people the uncommon ability to create their own habitat.  An abandoned 300-foot-long, twenty-foot-high concrete dam built to generate electricity about a century ago has obviated the need for my local beavers to impound the river, though they’ve built a large lodge into the bank.  Perhaps such unwitting assistance by humans is compensation for the extirpation of these animals from the state by the early 1840s.  They were killed for their luxuriant fur which made particularly fine felt, especially for Connecticut’s once world famous hat industry.

Reintroduced about the time the concrete dam was built, thousands of beavers now occupy just about all the state’s available habitat.  While they evidence environmental vigor and create ecologically significant wetlands, beavers are reviled in some quarters because they cut valuable ornamental trees, clog road culverts, flood septic systems and basements, and damage wells.

I can’t look at beaver cuttings without admiring their beauty any more than I can keep from thinking of how trappers and fur traders in search of these critters pioneered exploration of North America.   I value beavers for the ponds and meadows they create but recognize their destructive power to flood and to damage cultivated plantings.  If we think ecologically, it’s hard not to see multiple relationships and far ranging contexts in the simplest objects, like beaver chewed stumps, because the deeper we look, the more we find nature and culture inextricably entwined.

Those cone-top stumps are more than trees chewed by a rodent.  That mounded lodge of  peeled, tangled sticks and mud is not just an animal burrow.  They connect humanity with animal life; history with economics, fashion, manufacturing and biology; legend and lore with science; the outdoors with the indoors.  Under cover of night beavers continue gnawing at trees because they must.  Their lives are little noticed.  Changes happen beyond our will and reach.  Beavers do their work and we try to make what sense of it we can, because we must.