Happy Thought for 23 May 2025

Have a Happy Thought: 

Beavers exist. That’s all you need to know, to be happy this week. If you don’t know why that is, here are some reasons:



1. Beavers are what scientists call “ecosystem engineers”. Basically, they are really active in shaping the world around them, to the point that they can literally change the course of rivers. They also cut down trees – some to eat (yes, beavers actually eat wood) and a lot more to build their dams and lodges.

 

 Image: Encyclopaedia Britannica



2. Paratrooper beavers. In the mid-Twentieth century (yes, it still feels weird to write that like it was so long ago), ecologists in Idaho packed beavers into crates, attached parachutes, flew them over remote regions of the state, and shoved them out the door of airplanes (that link is to a video, by the way. Skip to about 8 minutes in if you’re impatient). The idea was the crates would open on landing and the beaver, having just had the rush of its life, would wander out and find a stream to dam up and make its own. (You can read the full details of the process if you think this is too crazy to believe.)

Image: Idaho Fish and Game



3. The beavers weren’t originally sent by airmail because they were known to be good ecosystem engineers – it’s because they were seen as pests and needed to be evacuated from areas humans were moving into. Turns out, though, that this had really good results for the forests the beavers were sent to.

 Image: Satellite imagery showing beaver-created refuge landscape (“green island”) following a forest fire. FSEEE.org



4. A very distant ancestor of modern beavers used to tunnel down into the ground, rather than building its home in a dam across a river. This digging was not straight down, though – it was corkscrewed!

Image: Burrow of Paleocastor fossor at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. By Ryan Schwark - Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=146044648



5. They are adorable.


 Image: American Beaver By Steve from Washington, DC, USA - American Beaver, CC BY-SA 2.0


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