The Pilgrims' Beavers

I'm reading a book right now that claims that no one would ever have heard of my Mayflower Pilgrim forebears if it weren't for all the beaver they got. Without all the money they earned from slaughtering most of the beavers and sending their carcasses back to England, their venture would have foundered, and here we'd be with no Thanksgiving. No Thanksgiving, and probably no beaver either, because someone else would have gotten them instead. Beaver pelts were amazingly valuable. They made the very best hats. The English were all about the hats.

I imagined the beaver hat would look a little like the Davy Crockett raccoon hat, only with a flat flap hanging behind like a French Foreign Legion dude, but actually one has to go to a certain amount of trouble to make a good beaver hat.  You don't use the outside guard hairs at all, but the vast interior belly fuzz can be felted into the most durable, softest material ever. If you ever felt beaver, you'll have to agree. Once you've felted your beaver, you can shape it any way you want, and then all that's missing is the satin or silk ribbons and sashes and plumes from, preferably, a fancy bird on the verge of extinction. According to the book I'm reading, England was going through about 23,000 hats a year during the time of the Pilgrims, and each one required two beavers. They'd have used their own beavers, but they'd finished them all off by that time, and they were nearly extinct in Europe, too. All of which made dead American beavers even more valuable.

Naturally, we were scraping the bottom of the beaver barrel in no time, but we still got cash and Thanksgiving out of it, so it wasn't all bad. Unfortunately, beavers have a rather outsized effect on the landscape--not as much as we do, but still. It's a really big deal. They create a series of dams and build lodges that bunches of them share. The dams create a vibrant wetland environment that many other currently dwindling species rely on. And they slow down the water's inevitable rush to the ocean, purify it, deepen the water table, and protect against both drought and flood in ways the Army Corps of Engineers and Concrete can only dream about. Beavers are just about as important a species for keeping everything running smoothly as you can get. We've let them rebound a bit, here and there, where we don't have anything else going on.

Someone with a hankerin' for gold once took ten Canadian beavers to Tierra del Fuego with an eye to a commercial fur venture. It didn't pan out, so he let his beavers go, and they got busy, as is their reputation, and eventually numbered 100,000. Sadly, the tropical forests were destroyed, and no one got any wetlands out of it, either, because tropical forests don't work that way. Oops!

I hear the cod fishery in the Gulf of Maine has tanked also. Presumably it was reported to be in trouble 150 years ago when everyone had gotten all the cod they could snag with hooks and lines, and there were calls for some kind of conservation program, but then the fishermen came up with equipment that could haul up the deeper layers of fish, and the panic was off. Eventually they came up with ships that could basically comb the whole ocean, and you could peel all the cod out of the nets and shake out the other living debris and life was good for the fishermen for a while, but now they have to shut everything down, because the cod is gone.

It may not be too early to conclude that we do not, as a group, make the wisest choices when we focus solely on what we can stash in our pockets for a while. It might make more sense to step back and get a wider view. But we're more inclined to chew on the landscape without building a lodge.

Love Is In The Water

It's the middle of February, which can only mean one thing around here: it's time to jump into a cold swamp up to our nipples and look for evidence of amphibian romance. Yes, Team Brewster is once again gearing up to monitor egg masses of frogs and salamanders for the regional government entity in charge of wetlands. They won't know how good a job they're doing until we come back with some hard data. It's not always comfortable out there, but one neat thing about being immersed in a cold swamp is you barely notice the stiff winter winds.

Sadly, Team Brewster has lost half its members. Elizabeth, who keeps an overcoat on when she visits us, even if we have the heat jacked up to ninety for her, bailed out this year. Even after I offered helpful suggestions. "Quit falling in," I told her, but she was unmoved. I'll miss her, but there's a lot to be said for diversifying the gene pool a little bit. Brewsters have their good qualities, but none of them are all that useful. We're great at showing up, and tipping over, but don't look to us for direction. There have been Brewsters in this country a long time; the starter set barreled over on the Mayflower full of righteous fire and not much else, watched everybody drop dead the first winter, and had barely enough gas left over to procreate. Now, nine or ten generations later, we're still a sparse population of, shall we say, unusual intellects.

Fortunately, Dave has stepped up. Among his other fine traits, Dave does not confine his activities to the sensible. Plus, he has much higher nipples. He proved to be a natural right off the bat. I told him to look for egg masses that look like oranges (Northwestern salamander) or grapefruit-sized tapioca (red-legged frog), and, attuned to all things edible, he homed in on some right away. Everything stops at this point while we write down our data and flag the eggs. Elizabeth and I had trouble with this, juggling a clipboard, several markers, a spoon (don't ask), tape, a stopwatch, and a large bundle of bamboo sticks. It was always an ordeal. Dave starts right out by laying the bundle of bamboo sticks on the water.

"Bamboo sticks float?" I said. Well, don't that beat all.

Minutes later, he was working his problem-solving skills again, when he tried to determine if his waders leaked by farting in them and looking for bubbles. The man complains that his cognitive powers are slipping, but he has a long way to slide before he gets to the Brewster mental terrain.

Last year, our assigned patch of wetland was barely manageable for two monitors. It was a lot of territory. This year, same location, Walden Pond had been replaced by Lake Michigan. We're going to be at this a while, I thought. Meanwhile, Dave was hard at work.

"Whoa," he said, bending over.

"You got eggs?"

Dave nearly had his nose in the water. "Pretty soon," he said.

Whereupon he reached in and scooped out a pair of rough-skinned newts, locked in embrace. "Dude," you could almost hear them saying, but nobody was letting go of anything. The female was smaller and had the standard grainy skin texture, and the male was so engorged--all over,

mind you--he'd gone smooth. They can remain clasped together for hours or days, and sometimes a whole group of them are tangled together. It's called a mating ball--which isn't what we used to call it back in college, but we might as well have. We started to see them everywhere. We haven't logged too many egg masses yet, but there's romance in the air. It doesn't look like these guys are giving anything up for Lent.

It's still Muddy Gras in the old town tonight.