I’m a fan of NYRA, Catty Corner, Eric Schwartau—and beavers (see “The Beautiful and the Damned,” #42). Obviously, you must cover North America’s largest rodent in depth and often. (They are way better than rats IMHO. I could go on about the financial impact they had in building New York City and Albany, which began as a beaver trading post.) Beavers, though, aren’t just architects but landscape architects with nearly as big an impact on our continent as humankind. While they may be monogamous, I too am skeptical of the het-norming prejudices of animal behaviorists. The bias I do bring: socialist. Castor canadensis are the rodent socialists of the animal realm. They are collective, cooperative, and to my mind, utopian. They allow mice and muskrats and frogs to share their home, even the food.
Near my house upstate is a defunct beaver lodge, and for years the animals created a terraced series of dams to cache food and extend their terrain. In our moment of climate collapse, beavers, with their systems of dams, help control flooding and bring water to parched regions. Master hydrologists, the beavers on our land also built an ecosystem for threatened species: songbirds, amphibians, and turtles. There are efts and newts, wood frogs, and spring peepers (tiny tree frogs) who still thrive in the diminished pond, plus wood turtles (so rare as to be a candidate for the endangered species list), and snapping turtles (the New York State reptile, who will lay a clutch of eighty eggs and can nearly outlive us), and painted turtles. (Last year one tried to lay her eggs on our patio. I directed her to a more suitable location, and she peed all over me. Not exactly the golden shower I was looking for.) Thanks to the beavers and their values—or, at least, the values I want to see in them—I have long wanted to make a zine called Beaver Fever, dedicated with equal devotion to beavers’ dams and lodges and the janky hunting camps that dot the Catskills. (“Beaver fever” is another term for giardia. Small warning to Eric’s loon-like swimming friend).
A few years ago, the beavers finally abandoned us, moving upstream to our Trump-voting, Bible-quoting neighbors, who are also close friends, though that is a different story. I think they left us not for the heterosexual monogamy our neighbors preach but for the fact that the beavers ate through all the willow on our land. I believe they will soon return. The willow certainly has.