The romance of the beaver; being the history of the beaver in the western hemisphere,

Abstract

The Romance of the Beaver by A. Radclyffe Dugmore, 1914 CHAPTER III RESULTS OF BEAVERS WORK-IN WHAT WAY MAN DERIVES BENEFIT FROM THE ENGINEERING FEATS OF THE COUNTLESS GENERATIONS OF BEAVERS-METHODS FOR THEIR PROTECTION IN the foregoing chapters the actual work done by the beaver and the immediate object of such work as it affects the animals themselves has been reviewed. We may now turn to the far-reaching results of what is done, and has been done by them during the past thousands of years, and the conclusion is forced upon us that the debt we owe to the beaver is of such magnitude that it can never be repaid. It is very doubtful indeed whether the work of any animal has such far-reaching results. Other creatures have been of greater value, either as furnishing food, or clothing, or means of transportation, but by themselves, unaided by man, they have done no work, they have accomplished little or nothing which has been of any direct benefit to man except in the way of killing our enemies, in which work birds take the highest place, for without their perpetual aid we should be overrun by insect pests, and be unable to grow our food crops. Slowly we are beginning to realize this and are making a fight against the dastardly destruction of these innocents for purposes of personal adornments and other equally useless objects. But the beaver is almost without any champion. He even has enemies who demand that he shall be killed for the harm he does to their particular interests. They do not stop to consider how they benefit by the results of the little animals' work which far more than counter-balances any slight harm they do. In this chapter I shall endeavour to show what the beavers' work means. The question of the value of the animals themselves as fur bearers, and the results to the country from their pursuit, will come in a later chapter. We have seen that through making dams the beaver floods tracts of land which vary in size from less than an acre up to hundreds of acres, perhaps we might even say thousands. So long as these ponds or lakes are inhabited by the animals the dams are kept in repair, but gradually, as the size of the colony increases, the supply of food trees becomes more and more remote and the place eventually is unsuited to their needs, so the beaver move away and seek new pastures. In the natural course of events the dam, no longer kept in repair, soon begins to break down. Willows and alders take root and open up seams through which the water escapes. Running water soon enlarges any holes in earth works, and so within a short time the dams no longer hold back the water, the pond gets lower and lower until finally it vanishes. So much for the dam; now let us watch the pond itself throughout its course of existence. It began as a stream whose banks were probably wooded. As the water rose and flooded the land the trees, which had not been cut for food by the beavers, becoming choked by water soon died, and as the pond grew with each year's additions to the dams, more and more trees were cut down for food and killed by water. What started as a pond of perhaps fifty feet wide and covering far less than an acre becomes a lake of fair size. Gradually the trees that have died fall and no trace of them is seen above water. Their roots may remain hidden in the ground to be dug up later as proof of the previous existence of the trees. Nothing remains to break the smooth surface of the lake except perhaps one or more beaver islands on which the lodges were built. After the place has been occupied by many generations of beaver it is abandoned owing to lack of food, or for the more dismal reason that the trapper had paid his visits of destruction to the peaceful colony, and the pond of maybe ten or a hundred years' growth slowly subsides. During all these years there has been a rich land-forming process going along in an automatic way. The growing vegetation, having been killed by the rising water, has decomposed. wood and leaves, grasses and roots, and even stones have become a homogeneous mass of material which under certain conditions makes soil. Year after year the trees on the surrounding hills and valleys have shed their myriad leaves, and these have been blown into the lake, or carried to it by the rains and melting snows. Debris is of all sorts has been brought down to the flooded areas where in the still waters it all settles to the bottom so that gradually a deep vegetable muck has formed over the land that once was covered with trees and flowers and richly coloured mosses. Most of this refuse of the woods is under normal conditions carried down by the various streams into the rivers and so out to the sea and apparently man gets no benefit from it. But the beaver lake has arrested this valuable material and prevented it going to waste. Instead of being lost it has been stored up, not in one pond, but in hundreds of thousands, large and small. With the desertion of a beaver pond the water, as already stated, being no longer held in check by the well- built dams, gradually finds its way out. The subsidence may be slow or rapid, but the effect is the same. The whole area of flooded land begins to dry, and what was formerly a rough irregular tract has become smooth and level. For some time the water-soaked land is too heavy to allow of a good growth of vegetation, but it is opened and ploughed by the winter frosts, while the sun and the rains prepare it for its great mission. Grasses take possession and soon the lake becomes a meadow luxuriant, smooth and beautiful, a visible result of the beavers' industry and the super-human direction of the power which controls all material things, and produces the greatest results from the smallest and most insignificant beginnings. How many acres of the finest meadow land and richest valleys are the result of beavers' work no one dare say. But throughout North America it is fairly safe to say that many hundreds of thousands, or even millions of acres, of the finest cultivated land owe their existence to the beaver. Of course in most places all trace of the origin of these bottom lands is lost, but every once in a while a beaver-cut stump is discovered by those who have to dig down a few feet below the surface, and in some cases these evidences of beaver work have been found fully thirty or forty feet down, where for countless ages they have been preserved by the peat which has formed over them. Agassiz, speaking of the age of beaver work, mentions the building of a mill dam which necessitated some excavating. "This soil was found to be peat bog. A trench was dug into the peat twelve feet wide, by twelve hundred feet long, and nine feet deep; all the way along this trench old stumps of trees were found at various depths, some still bearing marks of having been gnawed by beaver teeth." By calculating the growth of the bog as about a foot a century there is fairly good evidence that the dam built by the beaver must have existed about one thousand years ago. Do the farmers realize what debt they owe to the beaver? I fear not. Their one idea if a beaver is found anywhere within their property is to immediately kill it. For they regard its wretched skin, worth perhaps ten dollars at most. as being the only value of the beaver, and so the wretched beast is caught and its skin saved, while the brains which have accomplished so much are thrown to the dogs. Who is to blame for this? Those who have the teaching of our children. If only the schools taught more about the usefulness of animals and birds, even from the selfish point of view of their results to men, and taught these things intelligently, much good would come. But a trip into any part of the country where the beaver still exists in its wild state will show how blind people are to their own interest in allowing these animals to be destroyed. Before going further into this side of the question it might be as well to show some more ways in which the beaver is of almost unlimited benefit to mankind and the country in general. Water, as we well know, is the most essential of all things; on its supply a country thrives or perishes. Millions of pounds are spent annually to protect and conserve the supply, so that towns and farms, and forests too, shall have all that is needed. With the opening up of country and the consequent destruction of forest land, the supply is inevitably bound to decrease, as the thousands of smaller streams are deprived of the shelter which prevents the rapid evaporation of the water; the result is of course the lessening of the amount in the larger rivers. At certain seasons the supply is too great, and floods do infinite damage. At other times there is a great shortage. Man, in order to prevent this uneven supply, builds enormous dams which retain the water during the season of plenty, and deal it out as needed during the hot summer months. But even with man's most carefully arranged plans and vast expenditure of money, we hear of periodic water famines, with the resulting hardships which have such far-reaching and disastrous results. But what, may be asked, has this got to do with beaver? A glance at the work of those small animals will answer the question. Their dams, built most often near the head waters of streams, result in countless reservoirs, which keep the water in check and allow only the steady flow of a small amount, so that droughts in a beaver country are almost unknown, as there is always a sufficient supply kept in reserve. In some few parts of the country stock owners have begun to realize this important fact with the highly satisfactory result that these men are protecting beaver, which they regard as of the utmost value, because they can actually see the benefits which result from the work of these insignificant engineers. In the western States this exhibition of the importance of the beaver is most in evidence, and we may hope that other parts of the country will event