by John Kulish
The beaver, averaging thirty-five to forty pounds in weight, are the largest of North American rodents, second only to the South American capybara. (Judging by appearances, the ancestors of both must have shared a saurian swamp.) It was not unusual for me to catch senior citizens weighing up to seventy-five pounds. The largest beaver recorded was a monster trapped in Wisconsin in 1921 that weighed 110 pounds. When the Indian was in charge of America’s game management, hundred-pound-plus beaver were common. No matter how large, these amazing creatures cannot be described as full-grown, for beaver never stop growing.
Like a man who swings a shovel or an axe for a living, the animal’s body is solid, tough, and muscular. Its back is humped, its head big, stately, and Roman-nosed. The distance between a swimming beaver’s ears tells me its size and generation. Age and experience broaden a grandpa’s skull. The jaws are the animal’s powerhouse. Each of them holds two, curved, cutting teeth in front. Portable, self-sharpening sawmills, they can cut down trees as much as four feet in diameter. In the late forties, in Stratton Pond, Vermont, I marveled at the largest beaver-felled tree in my experience. A tremendously large poplar, at the cut-off point, it measured twenty-eight inches in diameter and was over sixty feet in length. Top beaver lumberjacks hail from British Columbia, where they are reported to have dropped an aspen over four feet through and 110 feet tall. The four incisors never stop growing; they just wear away. Segments of a circle, if, by accident, they break off and cannot be used, they curve back, growing into the skull and killing the animal. There are no lazy beaver.
Besides teeth that never wear out, these civil engineers have two pairs of eyelids, one used only for underwater swimming. Like a scuba diver’s goggles, they are transparent and protect the swimmer’s eyes from sticks and floating objects while affording a clear line of vision.
When designing the beaver, nature was in a generous mood. When it submerges, not only do goggles go on, but ear and nose valves close automatically. (The hatches on nuclear-powered submarines still have to be closed by intent.) Moreover, special mouth flaps meet behind the incisors, like the flaps on a tent, making it possible for the animal to chew wood underwater without ingesting either unwanted slivers or pond water. It moves me that the beaver himself does not realize what special gifts he has been given. When he is lumbering on a hillside and spots a hare hopping toward him, he doesn’t drop his axe to shout, “Hey, Peter, come over here. I got something you haven’t got!”
The animal’s front feet are small and shaped like those of a squirrel. Like human hands, they are used for eating, for working, and for carrying. When swimming, empty paws are held up against stalwart chests to lessen water resistance. This doesn’t happen too often, for every beaver is taught by example never to waste effort by entering a lodge or by approaching a dam empty-handed. They dive to the bottom, scoop up mud, roll it into a little football, clutch it like a professional quarterback, and, swimming with their great hind feet, head for the construction area. In order to eat, they use the front feet to hold a piece of wood in the way we do when gnawing an ear of corn, or as a musician does when playing a harmonica, or as I do when devouring a squaretail trout. Sticks and logs are carried with the front feet or with the jaws. Although I have never seen them do it, judging by the size of logs and stones in dams, I am sure they must have to “bulldoze” some of them, using their shoulders and backs as pushers.
Big and webbed, the beaver’s hind feet are stern paddles, propelling it with steady, powerful strokes. Attached to each hind foot is a minor miracle. Let me tell the whole story. In March, 1946, during an eleven-day season, I trapped my first beavers. In 1944, while I was in the South Pacific, the first season had been declared in New Hampshire’s southern counties. I minutely examined each animal I caught, with the knowing eye of one who already understood the wonders of the river otter. I studied the sturdily beautiful, oily-haired, always immaculate creature with growing wonderment. The hind feet particularly intrigued me. I pondered a strange phenomenon. I had never seen anything like it before. No encyclopedias mentioned it. Other trappers shrugged their shoulders. Most of them are interested in “how much?” rather than in “why?” By the end of that first season I had come to a conclusion. Nature rarely adds useless extras to her models. The split toenail on each of the second toes was no mere accessory. It was used every day. I called it a pocket comb, a preening tool, which the beaver uses to clean out cockleburs and to groom itself. The engineers in beaver ponds do not have white-collar jobs. Each morning, when tired and dirty, as they return home from work, one might say to an equally work-worn buddy, “How about holding the mirror for me, Joe? Then afterwards, I’ll hold it for you.” After the cleaning and the preening, comes the grooming. Ejecting a dab of viscid, yellow castoreum hair cream onto a hind foot, the beaver rubs it in all over its body. The special comb can reach every hair of its fur coat. This is why all beaver have a shiny, waterproof coat that smells pleasantly musky. I have never found a flea, a wood tick, or a cocklebur on a winter beaver. I wonder whether in summer, they have as hard a time as I, trying to keep ahead of insects.
The tail of a large beaver averages about a foot in length, and six to eight inches in width. Hairless and lizard-textured, it is oval-shaped, two to three inches thick where it joins the body. It tapers down to almost a double layer of skin at its tip. I am sure the first canoe paddle was fashioned with one glittering black eye on a beaver’s tail, for the American Indian had seen what it could accomplish in water. The tail performs a threefold function. The major one is that of both rudder and diving plane. Swimming is a beaver’s chief occupation. When diving or emerging at a sharp angle as well as when dragging heavy logs or bulky branches, its tail acts as a counterforce. Remember, much of the time the animals must swim against the current. I am convinced it also uses its tail as an auxiliary source of power whenever an extra spurt of speed is needed. Many times, I have watched a king-sized beaver shift into overdrive. The tail begins to undulate through water, producing a forward thrust which is based on the same principle which operates when a fisherman sculls a dory.
The beaver’s tail serves as a defensive warning signal as effective as any man has devised. Many a fisherman, daydreaming while taking advantage of an evening trout rise, has been startled back to reality by the resounding slap of a beaver’s broad tail on water. It is one of the loudest sounds made by a wild animal. I have been jerked from a sound sleep by the crack of O1’ Dad’s tail as it slapped the surface of water a hundred yards from my tent. “Take cover! I smell a cat,” or, “Send the children back into the lodge. A great horned owl just flew over the pond.”
The tail’s third function is that of a steadying “platform” when the animal is felling trees. Like a front-end loading or a ditch-digging machine, a beaver needs a solid surface from which to perform its oftentimes dangerous duties. Many of the beaver I trapped had healed-over holes or notches in their tails. Some of the old-timers had several of each. One whopper had a forked tail; three-quarters of it, a pie-shaped wedge, was missing. How did that happen?
Lumbering is hazardous work. When cutting down a tree a foot or more in diameter, beaver first girdle the trunk, chewing around it in a spoollike fashion, until the trunk resembles an hourglass. Finally, a single bite is all that is holding erect a thousand pounds, or more. If the tree slants to either side, it falls cleanly. If the tree stands straight, but wears a lopsided crown of branches, it falls cleanly. But when the tree is perfect, standing straight and tall, with symmetrical branches perfectly balanced, catastrophe can result. Unless a nocturnal wind is blowing hard enough to produce a side force, such a tree will suddenly let go, slip down along the lower spool of the hourglass formed by the immovable stump, and ricochet. If the tree crashes to the ground, the chopper may still escape with only a bruised ego. But if the tree is hung up by others around it, the thrusting point of the spool nails the awkward, unsuspecting lumberer to the ground, often through its broad tail. Blood spatters over wood chip
s and leaves. The earth is churned up, as the victim, shifting into four-wheel drive, digs deep into humus. Slowly, the tail begins to rip. After a struggle that may last into daylight hours, a large beaver can usually tear itself free. During long winter evenings in a snowbound lodge, he can tell his family about his “moment of truth.” He has the tail to back him up.
Other trappers have told me they have caught beaver with damaged tails. “Boy, John, what a fight it must have had with another beaver!” Beaver do not fight among themselves. Males do not have harems; they are monogamous. Sometimes a pinned beaver cannot break away when speared by a tree. Although I have never found one who had given his life for his colony, I am sure many make the supreme sacrifice. A dead beaver does not lie around long. The meat is relished by cats, bears, foxes, and the great horned owl. Squirrels and mice devour the bones. There are no leftovers in nature’s commissary.
13. Mother Nature’s Corps of Engineers
Every creature on earth has been given a special characteristic with which to protect itself so that it may continue on earth. The same unique trait, directly or indirectly, helps the animal to find its food. The ability to harness and to control water is the gift nature has given the beaver. If it could not escape into deep water, it would not survive for long. No beaver can run; it waddles, dragging its tail like an anchor. As it is, even if its worst enemies enjoyed swimming, they would never catch the Flat Tails. Bears and bobcats don’t know how to submerge. They were designed without conning towers.
Civil engineers do not build dams just anywhere. Neither do beaver. Miles of brooks are surveyed, acres of woodlots cruised, before a site is chosen. Any dam builder worth his poplar bark degree, picks a site as judiciously as any Army Corps engineer. (Beaver have a distinct advantage: they don’t have to keep an anxious eye on the Secretary of the Interior.) The determining factor in making a choice is the food supply. The bark from poplar trees is the most desirable. In descending order are the bark from pin cherries, white, gray, and yellow birches, and alder. In other parts of the country it seems that beaver rarely eat alder. Swamp Yankee beaver do.
In the spring, when a pair of mature beaver emigrate up a brook, the water may be no more than four inches deep at the chosen site. Under these circumstances, how can a fifty-pound animal hide? Where can it go? The ensuing nights of untiring toil are the most dangerous the dam builders experience. Once the dam is high enough to form a pond, they are safe. Enemies approach, but animal enemies don’t hang around hour after hour, night after night, like hired killers. Hunger motivates natural foes. When it finds that its supper is safe in a pond, the cat or bear shrugs its shoulders philosophically, and goes away to look for something else. After a while, the beaver come out to begin logging. They start by cutting close to the water. Not only because the trees are there, but because, until the loggers get the lay of the land, they want to be able to silence their saws and to jump into the water at a moment’s notice. All the while they are learning about their surroundings, they are also getting to know the habits of their enemies. If the next links on nature’s food chain aren’t too persistent, the lumberjack engineers venture farther and farther into the woods away from the pond. I have rarely found them cutting more than 300 feet from water except when they build a lodge in the bank of an island on a pond or a lake, or whenever an island is formed in the pond they have established. Then they seem to feel as secure as a feudal lord in his castle, surrounded by a moat. Here, the beaver picks out trees at random anywhere, and sometimes even cuts off the entire island. The law of averages works for man and animal alike. An occasional overconfident kit is scooped up by a great horned owl or a fox. Sometimes, even a graduate engineer makes a mistake and comes face to face with the business end of a bobcat.
A beaver dam is an engineering marvel. Small wonder our greatest technological university has a busy beaver for its insignia! These construction geniuses understand water currents, water pressures, and their relationship to the bordering land contours. No matter how big the supply of luscious poplars, if the brook flows through a valley too steep-sided to afford the space for a reasonable-size pond, the civil engineers don’t even bother to set up their transits.
We all know that beaver use logs, sticks, mud, and stones to build dams. This is still true of the backwoods provincial, but times are changing. What about the beaver exposed more and more to civilization? Their technology also is becoming increasingly sophisticated.
Most portable sawmills are set up near water, usually a brook. The mill and its operators must have water. The lumberjacks live in nearby tarpaper shacks. When the logging job is finished, the men move out, leaving the flimsy shanties. Varied junk is left behind, scattered over the landscape. While exploring a beaver dam built a few hundred yards below an abandoned log job, I saw that the resident engineer in charge of dam construction had taken advantage of a nearby windfall. In the dam was embedded a rusty bedspring, its steel coils interwoven with sticks and mud. How I wish I could have been there the night they had carried it seventy-five feet down to the water.
Another dam sports an old bicycle frame. It is embedded upright among sticks, stones, and mud. (I wonder what they did with the wheels.) During the last decade, more and more, I find beer cans, discarded by fishermen, stuffed into crevices and packed with mud. Any M.I.T. graduate understands the merits of steel reinforcements. Someday, I’m going to try leaving a bag of cement and a trowel at a construction site.
Most beaver I have observed work on a dam and a lodge concurrently. Lodges are usually built out in the open, completely surrounded by water. The size of a lodge tells me the size of a colony. A tenement block usually houses more people than a trailer. As the size of a family increases, ells are added and ceilings raised, as more loft bedrooms are needed. I have seen several lodges ten to eleven feet high, housing a colony of at least twelve. It usually takes four or five years to produce such a clan. The largest pond I have seen in our area was one on Moose Brook in Hancock, in the fifties. Almost a mile long, with some coves a half-mile wide, it contained four tremendous, super-duplex lodges. It took the inhabitants twelve years to eat up the existing food supply.
Once in a while, a building genius outdoes himself. In the late forties, while scouting for fur, I came upon a lumbering operation, terminated four or five years before. The human lumberjacks had built a shed near a brook. Haphazardly constructed out of old lumber, but with a tarpaper roof, it had been used to house horses and to store harnesses and tools. A few years after the logging was finished, beaver had come to the brook. They built a dam several hundred yards downstream. Soon the entire area was flooded so that water surrounded the old shed.
My first glimpse of the pond was one of amazed disbelief, followed by a shout of delight. Guess who had built a lodge within a lodge, complete with the usual underwater entrance? The cracks between the old boards bulged with sticks and mud. Later that fall, I was guiding a deer hunter, who was also a close friend. Because he was in the federal Fish and Wildlife Service, I went out of my way to show him the “rural redevelopment.” Nonplussed, he stared at the beaver-made lodge inside a man-made shed.
“Why in the world would a beaver want to build its house in there?” he asked.
“That’s easy,” I replied. “Now they can work on their lodge when it’s raining without getting wet.”
Beaver do not hibernate. Suddenly, one frosty night in October, as though a button had been pressed, their activity cycle speeds up. No longer are the nights long enough; they do not wait for dark to begin working, nor do they quit at daybreak. Until the ice comes, every member of a beaver colony works overtime. Icebound during four to five months of New England winter, they must store a winter’s supply of food before the pond freezes. How do they know it will be four months before they see Orion again? Because beaver do not leave their pond during winter, nature warns, “Get that pantry full, or you will die!”
When the first frost nips a man’s fingers, and sends him scurrying for
storm windows, the entire beaver colony begins to spend all night, every night, chopping down trees, cutting them up into manageable sections, and dragging the cordwood to water’s edge. From there, they swim near the lodge with the winter’s victuals. A short distance from the entrance, where the water is deep, they dive to the bottom with their poplar, cherry, and birch, the bark still on them. To keep the wood from floating, one end is stuck into the mud. As the weeks progress, the food pile reaches near to the surface. The beaver realize that any part of the brush reaching above water is wasted. It will be beyond reach when the ice comes. Exactly as a farmer extends the stacked cordwood for his winter fuel supply, the beaver elongates his food pile underwater. The communal effort continues tirelessly until the freeze-up. During this busiest season, the average beaver pond resembles a freeway during rush hours, with too many drivers and not enough rotaries and traffic lights. It surprises me that they have not yet developed a corps of traffic engineers.