You don’t often hear it for the modest, hard-working little beaver. That’s because they are, well, modest and hard-working. But last night, I just happened to gaze out the window and straight into the face of the newly-risen beaver moon: yes folks, that’s what they call the October one. It was large and round and lustrous and every bit as magical as the October full moon should be. Like I said, you don’t often hear it for the modest little beaver. Lacking the glamour of, say, the cat family, they shun publicity and devote their time to building dams and houses – you might add tree lopping to that. Truly, the talent of the beaver is jaw dropping. Aside from an unfortunate resemblance to Boris Johnson, you can’t praise this little creature too highly. Using nothing but their teeth, they gnaw the trunk of a tree until that critical moment that every lumberjack knows; the trunk breaks and crashes down onto the ground. Then, beaver sets to work on newly-fallen tree, gnawing it into logs and chewing off the branches.
Using his skill as an underwater swimmer and navigator, beaver drags his material and inserts it into just the right area of his own dam to prevent the breaches and floods that might follow. Beaver lives in his lodge, address ‘Penthouse upon Dam’, together with Mrs Beaver and the little beavers. Some years ago, doyens of a television creature-feature placed a movie camera inside a beaver lodge. But a clever inmate came along, peered into the lens and, knowing an intrusion had happened, covered the alien eye with a branch – no
Big Beaver House on television that year. What I want to know is, at what stage of evolution did they, their brains hard wired for tree lopping, building design, repair and maintenance, underwater swimming, detecting movie cameras, decide not to evolve any further? Perhaps it was that resemblance to the former prime minister? In the light of the full beaver moon, let’s give these enterprising little architects their rightful recognition, now.
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