This publication was executed for the first time last January, but now it is equally relevant.
Years ago, Carol Evans, then a biologist from the Land Management Office in the Northeast of Nevada, told me that I wanted to write a book called Transmission stories – A series of Vignettes About the many streams that made their region and defined their career. I have no idea if she is working on this today (Carol, if you are reading this, I hope you are!), But it always seemed like a brilliant premise. The currents and narratives have much in common: they flow between points, but they never really end up, they are subject to the forces of history, but they shape themselves. And both have protagonists: in the case of the currents, the living beings who live within them and, in some cases, sculpt their physical form.
Here, then, is my stab in a brief Stream story, with a river route called Sevenmile Creek. And, like so many good transmission stories, co -starring Beavers.
Seedmile Creek runs through a disheveled forest shoulder Pinyon-Juniper that looms over Buena Vista, Colorado, a city on the banks of the Arkansas river. In recent years, Sevenmile’s flow has been decreasing, for reasons that are not entirely clear: drought, perhaps or some subtle change in hydrology or land use. Anyway, the water decreasing has spelled problems for its resident beavers, who, although capable of transforming even the thinnest currents into robust ponds, cannot conjure water from the thin air.
One January morning, I visited Beards from Sevenmile with Mark Beardsley, Cat Beardsley and Jessica Doran, three fans of the Casters who restore the Colorado currents under the flag of a company called Ecometric. We walked a couple of miles through one of the land roads of Gazillion Roted that crosses public lands in this corner of Colorado, our dogs are woven around our ankles. Distant coyotes were put and cried.
When the road arrived in Sevenmile Creek, we discovered that it had been practically dry. A Cabaña de Castor Varada, its normally submerged tickets yawning like mouths of caves, stopped in a humid meadow, the faded ruins of an ancient kingdom. I felt a stab of feeling.
A little higher, a beaver colony was still enduring, but barely. Behind the long berma of its prey, a frozen pond, not bigger than a pickleball court, was put against a pure rock face. The spots on the top of the granite wall revealed where the water that quickly detaches months before. The pond locked and ice cream was almost solid, enclosing in the place of the food cache, the sauce stems package that the fall had passed assembling in their place. Only a narrow open water opening, approximately the diameter of a five gallon bucket, which stayed with the rock: the only exit point in the colony from its strength now frozen.
The beavers, of course, are well adapted to winter; Usually, the cold months pass by feeding and frozen under an ice ceiling as the Arctic seals. But this situation seemed abnormal and dangerous. His stream had almost dried up, his food stores had frozen and his pond disappeared almost in real time. The beavers always had the option to leave, that was true. But, since the current only had sporadic water bags, that would mean famoting long stretching by land, not the preferred travel mode of a semi -chematic mammal. And there were those howls howls to worry.
“I thought they would leave him out of here when he became really bad,” Mark said as we survey the scene from above a lantern. “But once they are installed, they are like, no, this is home, man.”
“It’s so gloomy. Do they wake up in the middle of the night worried about them? Jess said.
“A little,” Mark acknowledged.
A week earlier, Mark and Cat had visited the colony and delivered a carrot pack, a food that captivates Generally worship. But the vegetables were still unparalleled on the ice. (Maybe an encouraging sign that the creatures were not actively hungry? “He took out his head, grabbed one of those branches and threw it from,” Cat said.
Today the beaver was not seen, although we listened to the occasional hollow hole of a portlucio rodent body that moved around the ice, and saw disturbed water undulating in the breathing hole. When we endured breathing and the wind calmed down, we could also hear the distant squeak and the groan of the kits, the babies, who rose from a hidden burrow. It was difficult not to interpret your calls as a help shouts.
***
What is, if any, is the moral of this particular transmission story? It is difficult not to see it as a parable of the anthropocene: the weather is changing, once reliable, the resources are becoming ephemeral, our wild brothers are suffering, etc. And they write great, all that is certainly true.
But I’m not sure this perennial leaf lesson is applied to Sevenmile Creek. Beaver’s literature is full of analogous stories, in which smart observers are convinced that winter will mean the fatality for a favorite colony. The naturalist of Colorado Enos Mills, in his masterpiece of 1913 In Beaver WorldHe described the monitoring of a Beaver Lodge whose only occupant had been sealed by ice for a cold click. When Mills and a friend broke the walls of the shelter and crawled inside, they discovered that the beaver was successfully resisting the harsh conditions. “(H) e had subsist in the wood and the bark of some green sticks that had been built in an addition of the house during autumn,” Mills said. However, Mills, convinced that the beaver seemed “emaciated”, brought regular delivery of Aspen over the next six weeks; Finally, the pond was defrified, and “again the old companion went into the water.”
Mills seemed to believe that he had saved the life of the beaver, and perhaps he had done it; Surely the creature appreciated the gifts. For me, however, it seems that the beaver had gone very well through its own innate intelligence and ingenuity.
Or consider the author HOPE Ryden, whose 1989 book Lily pond I did so much to love beavers to the public. An fall, Ryden began to worry that his local colony, in which he had invested so much time and love, had not prepared properly for winter. “I had to conclude that his winter food larder left much to be desired,” he wrote, inspecting his unfortunate bureau of blueberries and mountain laurel. “Would they survive in those things? Why hadn’t they moved? Like Mills before her, she delivered them branches of Aspen, doubting that they survive without help. “We have brought you Christmas dinner,” he told them when leaving a burden.
However, when Ryden realized that he didn’t need to have bothered:
“(I) I made a surprising discovery. The coast was full of hundreds of curls of blackened lilies, waste that had been washed after ice. And each of these had been partially eaten. This is how the beavers had managed to spend the winter! I examined dozens of long fibrous roots, I separated them and looked inside. They had the consistency of raw potatoes. Clearly, the beavers had dug these roots of the Pantan of La Lonía and have been supported by them during their long prison. Then our donation of Aspen branches had not been necessary after all!
The need to worry about the beavers, and even to intervene in their name, is obviously common, and perfectly understandable: we feed the birds in winter, why not the beavers? And many surely do die every winter, hunger, predation or exposure; Obviously it is a dangerous season for any creature. Still Canadensis Castor It is also a flexible and intelligent species; Casters have survival strategies and techniques, perfected for millions of years of evolution, so that we cannot understand or credit. As Castor Bob Arnebeck’s observer A blog post about Lily pond: “I always suppose the beavers know their business better than me”
So where does that leave the story of Sevenmile Creek Stream? Like sagas and transmissions, it turns on. Sevenmile Beavers may well be in serious problems, such as being; When we visit them later this winter, we could find them missing or dead. Taking the carrots and branches of Cottonwood is, in my opinion, completely justifiable and compassionate, given all the ways in which we have made their most difficult lives in recent centuries; As Jess told me later, “Why not help a neighbor?” But it is also conceivable that they find a way even without us, as they should not do, taking advantage of the secret reserves of cunning, creativity and preparation. This particular transmission story can still have a happy ending.
After all, they have endured so much time. “I thought they would move or croan,” Mark said as we wandered along the way and leave the beavers to their own devices. “Well, they are still kicking.”
Photos: The Sevenmile Beaver Pond and one of his occupants, courtesy of Mark Beardsley.
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