”Tales From The Underbrush” documents, with occasional hyperbole, the experiences of the artist over a lifetime of interaction with what used to be called nature, now reinvented as the environment for reasons apparently best known by just about everyone in the world excepting the artist-writer. These wilderness interactions have come mainly while working as a geologist, briefly as a forester, but sometimes as just a guy whose principal happiness in life has been derived from being outdoors. Not that life in the wilderness, be it at work or at play has been without pain, discomfort, deprivation and even danger. Fortunately, the passage of time more often then not artfully blots out or at least dims the recollections that wound, substituting instead a recall that if perhaps not substantiating the aging athlete’s jest of “the older I get, the better I was”, at least allows tales to unfold that warm the memory and give substance to the life that experienced them.
The artist proposes to post monthly herein a chapter from his book “Tales From The Underbrush” in the hope that his adventures may be shared and enjoyed by those who might stumble onto this blog. This month’s entry continues the tale.
A Nickel’s Worth Of Fame, A Dollar’s Worth of Aggravation.
“Great works are performed not by strength but by perseverance.”
Samuel Johnson
While considerably higher in stature and esteem than the common rat, the beaver is nonetheless a rodent that as much or more than the maple leaf has traditionally symbolized Canada. When not in its natural forested habitat the beaver resides on the backside of the Canadian nickel as a now perhaps less glorious symbol than when the coin was first issued in 1937. That’s depreciation for you. I suspect that the expression ”a penny for your thoughts” might have at one time also been more expensive. So too may the burgeoning philosophy of entitlement that now pervades the nation have eroded the symbolism of industry, diligence, independence and perseverance that honours the beaver…………or is it now only the beaver that honours the symbolism? It is not the beaver that has changed, but rather the country. Fortunately, although its habitat has come under threat in certain areas, the beaver itself remains steadfast, its industry undiminished and its reputation untarnished. If only it could run for politics!
Despite their absence in some parts of the world, notably western Europe and Great Britain where they were hunted to extinction, there are still species of beavers native to and extant in a number of areas of the world as well as those being reintroduced in other parts. This essay will however confine itself to the Canadian beaver and the paths that we both did cross on numerous occasions during my bush life.
Outside of the capybara in South America, the Canadian beaver is the largest rodent in the world, weighing up to 35 kilograms and together with its 30 centimetre tail, achieving a length of over a metre and a lifespan up to twenty years. Ungainly on land with its rotund, compact form, it has been superbly adapted for a marine environment and is a powerful and graceful swimmer. A specialized membrane protects its eyes while diving, at the same time providing as good vision underwater as on land. In addition its nose and ears can be closed while swimming. Its famous tail, whose sharp slap on the water like a pistol shot signals an alarm of danger to the beaver community, is a thick, flat, scaly “paddle” of fat some 30 centimetres long and 18 centimetres wide, acts as a four way rudder in the water and a prop or counterbalance on land when on its hind legs it carries dam or lodge building materials in its front paws to the water’s edge. Of particular relevance to any discussion of a beaver are its exceptional teeth. Strong, long, sharp incisors hardened with orange enamel and lodged in both lower and upper jaws are in continuous growth, and grinding against each other are maintained sharp as chisels. Interestingly, a beaver’s lips can be closed behind these incisors, allowing it to gnaw on twigs and branches while underwater.
Occupying principally a forested habitat where deciduous trees and shrubs can be found, a beaver’s teeth and its lifestyle can arguably considered to be the cornerstones of its fame. They are certainly appropriate as a lead-in for the events described in this essay, for the beaver’s life is inextricably connected to logging for both sustenance and habitation. Perhaps unwisely, the beaver’s reputation as a logger has helped maintained the stereotype of Canada and its citizens as a nation of lumberjacks. This was most famously portrayed by the Monty Python troupe of entertainment geniuses in their “Lumberjack Song” where:
“I’m a lumberjack and I’m okay, I sleeps at night and I works all day.
“I cut down trees, I eat my lunch, I go to the la-va-tree.
“On Wednesdays I go shopping and have buttered scones for tea.”
I don’t know about the latter although if a lumberjack were to wander into Victoria, British Columbia, a city perhaps more British than most of Britain, he would have no trouble with finding his scones and tea. Nor is it necessary to pursue the balance of the lyrics and visual props that progressively got raunchier and more hilarious with every verse. But I digress, as usual.
Beavers live by ponds, and lakes, rivers, streams. It is their domicile beside the latter two that normally requires the construction of two structures for which the beaver is famous, namely dams and so-called lodges. The former is built when the stream or river is not deep enough to prevent freezing to its bottom in winter. The dam serves to in effect deepen the water to the degree that will allow underwater travel in winter. This serves to provide both habitat for the beaver lodge and an underwater food cache for the aquatic plants, and the poles and branches from certain deciduous trees that form the diet of the animals. Subsidiary structural forms also built by beavers on occasion are canals that may extend for several hundred metres along the base of a hill. Perhaps a metre deep and the same in width, the canals serve to facilitate the transportation of food supplies.
It is not the purpose of this essay to provide encyclopedic treatise on the beaver’s construction techniques. That can be acquired on the internet. It is only the construction activities of the beaver that have relevance to this tale. Suffice to say a beaver lodge, built and occupied by a single beaver family, one to a pond and on the upstream side of a dam, is a domal, normally a multi level structure with several living chambers and underwater tunnel entrances. Layers of wood, twigs, grass, stones and logs from which the bark has been eaten are piled on the ground with alternating layers of gravel and mud. When finished, the outer surface is plastered with mud to seal it from the weather. The lodge remains as long as the pond and its surroundings continue to provide sustenance to the family. As such, over the years a lodge, continually maintained can grow to an impressive size, as I can attest to from personal encounters. Typically maybe a metre and a half high by 5 metres in diameter, a mature lodge may evolve to a height of 4 metres and a diameter of more than 6 metres.
The dams that beavers build are in many ways more spectacular, a fact I can again attest to. Depending on the area to be contained, dams can vary greatly in size, largest yet seen reportedly over 650 metres long, nearly 5 metres high and 7 metres thick at the base, sufficient to create a sizeable lake behind it! Starting sticks and rocks at the narrowest part of flow where the current is swiftest, branches and limbs are progressively interwoven and packed with more stones, roots, leaves and mud, the water flow helping pack these materials. Layer on layer is added resulting in a very stable structure capable of withstanding considerable water pressure and erosion. The largest and highest dam encountered in my own experience has exceeded a football in length and some three metres high, a very impressive structure!
The immediate area behind the pond that builds behind the dam forms the location of both a lodge as well as a food cache where tree trunks, branches and twigs logged by the beaver are stored for foraging during the winter period when the surface of the pond is frozen over.
This brings up the subject of logging again. A single beaver using its razor-sharp incisor teeth is capable of felling a 3 to 4 inch diameter tree in an hour, and may similarly topple some 200 trees a year, some of them up to 18 inches in diameter!
Readers may have by now, if not bored to death by all this encyclopedic information, have developed the admiration and respect that this so industrious of rodents rightly deserves. Yours truly is no different in that admiration. If however you are a young, or even old for that matter, exploration geologist bashing your way through northern Quebec bush that even at the best of times is not a stroll through the park, anything or anyone that makes that task even more arduous, becomes if not an enemy, then certainly a candidate for a large amount of unpopularity. Picture this. A young explorationist whose principal responsibility is maintaining an imaginary straight line through the bush, a path that replicates as closely as possible a line drawn on a map or air photo, suddenly comes upon a stretch of water that, swimming aside, must be detoured around, the traverse line to be continued from a point exactly opposite the point of detour. Now we are not talking about stepping around a puddle here. If this body of water be a beaver pond, the required detour might comprise a significant number of additional miles in order to circumvent around the upstream top end of the pond and return to a position on the opposite side where the traverse might be renewed. Not only was effort involved but considerable time, threatening completion of the traverse from daylight considerations or in the extreme, even canceling the traverse. Why you may wonder would you not have checked your map or photo for this obstacle before setting out on the traverse, constructing a planned course that would avoid the beaver pond? The problem with that recourse is that the maps and photos you were using might considerably pre-date the construction of the beaver dam and resultant pond, making its encounter an unpleasant and unplanned surprise.
The aforementioned detour at least is one which is normally singular in nature although its occurrence may be more frequent in lockstep with the number of different beaver dams that might exist in a mapping area. Occasionally, where a more advanced exploration project than basic mapping is involved, the area in and around a beaver pond may demand removal of the water to allow access and work. Achieving this goal ultimately may involve destroying the beaver dam so as to allow the pond to drain. Lest there be a hue and cry as to this desecration of the beaver’s habitat, let me hasten to inform you that the beaver family involved will quickly find another suitable area in which to reestablish themselves, no harm done. And after all, we can’t have them sitting around with nothing to do can we? There is only one problem. Dismantling a beaver dam is not an easy task.
Attempting to destroy a beaver dam by hand is something of a joke. Its construction of logs, sticks, branches, twigs, leaves, stones mud and any other debris is severely entangled and as impenetrable and structurally sound as reinforced concrete. Any miniscule damage done by hand is quickly repaired by morning. The use of a pick axe and shovel may appear to inflict a greater degree or even irreparable damage to the dam but again, as quickly as sections are destroyed, they are just as quickly restored. The ultimate method in destroying a dam such that its engineers are persuaded to relocate involves the use of dynamite, and even then it is amazing how much charge is required or how so little is effected with insufficient charge.
Standing on a beaver dam I amazed at its construction and the environment of sustenance and habitat it had created. While marveling at the industry it represented, as a foot slogging field geologist I often wished that in the bush we were symbolized by a less aggravating force of enterprise.
“Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.”
Vincent Van Gogh
Copyright © 2009 Ian de W. Semple
