— CHAPTER ONE—

Appetite
for Construction
T o be human is to be a survivor. Homo sapiens are the world’s only living
hominids, and we’ve likely been alone for around the past forty thou-
sand years. But our present solitude is a recent development. For millennia
we shared this planet with bipedal cousins: Neanderthals roamed the for-
ests and beaches of Europe, the Denisovans wandered Southeast Asia, the
hobbit-like Homo floresiensis sheltered in Indonesian caves. Why we pulled
through while our cousins perished remains somewhat mysterious, but we
probably triumphed through some combination of innovative tool use and
demographic luck. In that regard, we have company.
In 1891 a geologist named Erwin Hinckley Barbour was called to examine
a fossil. Barbour, an angular man whose mustache, at full wax, outflanked
his face, boasted an impeccable scientific pedigree: At Yale he’d studied
under O. C. Marsh, the world’s first professor of paleontology. During his
half-century-long career, Barbour would become Nebraska’s state geologist
and show a particular affinity for extinct elephants, describing more than
a dozen vanished mastodons, mammoths, and four-tusked gomphotheres.
If you needed a midwestern fossil identified in the late nineteenth century,
Barbour was your man. Yet when a Nebraska rancher named James Cook
requested that Barbour lend his talents to a huge sandstone spiral he’d
discovered on his property, not even the august scientist had the faintest
idea what he was looking at.
Although local ranchers were no strangers to the confounding spirals,
the fossil that confronted Barbour resembled nothing he’d ever seen.

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Clearly it was no bone. The specimen was a vertical stone helix, taller than
a man, that resembled “a great three-inch vine coiled . . . about a four or
five inch pole,” like a strangler fig wrapped around a sapling. Some adja-
cent helices, Barbour estimated, “could not be less than 30 or more feet in
height.” Each pole terminated in a “transverse piece,” a thicker, perpendicu-
lar base, like the handle of an upside-down corkscrew. The spirals peppered
several square miles of Nebraska badlands. “These fossils seem altogether
so remarkable and of such imposing size and peculiarity of form,” Barbour
wrote, “that I have felt great hesitancy into offering any suggestions as to
what they are.”1 The flummoxed geologist hazarded that he’d discovered
a gargantuan freshwater sponge; later, he revised his diagnosis to the root
castings of a huge plant. Neither guess proved correct. Still, the name
Barbour gave the spirals stuck. He called them daemonelices, a highfalutin
Latinization of the ranchers’ old moniker: Devil’s corkscrews.
In investigating the cryptic corkscrews, Barbour noticed that the helices
were lined with vegetal material and, on occasion, rodent bones, which he
interpreted as evidence of his giant plant theory. When the Austrian pale-
ontologist Theodor Fuchs analyzed the daemonelices in 1893, however, he
realized the structures weren’t organisms at all—rather, they were titanic
burrows carved into the earth by the rodents entombed at their bottom.
In 1905 Olaf A. Peterson finally described the diggers, identifying them as
members of a genus that would come to be known as Palaeocastor: literally,
“ancient beaver.”2
At least superficially, Palaeocastor, in its subterranean habits and small
stature, less resembled contemporary beavers than it did gophers. Although
they possessed hefty front teeth, the proto-beavers didn’t use their incisors
to fell trees or wood. Instead they were dental excavators. “The walls [of the
burrows] were covered with broad grooves that I could match by scraping
the incisors of the fossilized beaver skulls into wet sand,” Larry Martin, a
paleontologist who examined more than a thousand daemonelices during
the 1970s, reported in Natural History. “The beavers had used their teeth
to scrape dirt off the walls. . . . A burrowing beaver must have fixed its hind
feet on the axis of the spiral and literally screwed itself straight down into
the ground”—not unlike a drill bit twisting into a board.3 They’d cleared
away loose sand not by flinging it with their claws, but by pushing it out
with their broad, flat heads.

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If all of that strikes you as a gritty way to eke out a living, bear in mind that
Palaeocastor survived for about four times longer than Homo’s run to date.
The spirals may have allowed the beavers to cluster many deep burrows in
a small area; deterred predators; modulated humidity and temperature; or
helped the animals survive flooding. But not even their unique abodes saved
ancient beavers from extreme planetary makeover. As temperatures fell,
the world dried up; Palaeocastor, adapted for a wetter climate, went extinct
during the early Miocene, around twenty million years ago. The beavers
who dug Barbour’s daemonelices were among the last of their lineage, give
or take a few million years.
Although hundreds of corkscrews remain scattered around the bad-
lands, nearly all are sequestered on private ranches. Your best option
for visiting the Miocene today is to trek to Nebraska’s Agate Fossil Beds
National Monument, a charming, middle-of-nowhere parcel of limestone-
capped buttes and lush hollows that receives fewer tourists in a year than
Yellowstone gets on a busy summer day. One June morning I parked near
the monument’s entrance and walked up a short trail toward a sculpted
sandstone bluff that towered above the prairie like a tallship. Twenty
million years ago Nebraska resembled nothing so much as the Serengeti,
a river-webbed grassland upon which foraged a spectacular mammalian
bestiary: tiny camels and giant wolverines, two-horned rhinos and pig-like
oreodonts, muscular beardogs and lithe horses. Since the Miocene the land
has gained contour and lost wildlife, though a sign at the trailhead advised
me to avoid rattlesnakes. Trailside placards identified evocatively named
prairie plants: downy paintbrush, bottlebrush squirreltail, rubberweed. I
could have driven a golf ball in any direction without striking a tree.
I found the daemonelix at the base of a gray outcropping, its curves
etched in sandstone like Han Solo frozen in carbonite. The towering spiral
stood behind a smudged glass case, its corkscrew geometry so close to
perfect that it looked unnatural. I sat on a nearby bench, listening to the
burbling meadowlarks and whirring grasshoppers, feeling like a religious
pilgrim come to genuflect before a sacred relic. Here it was—among the
holiest objects in Beaverdom, a castorid mecca.
I hustled down the trail to catch up with a park ranger, his broad-
brimmed hat bobbing over the prairie as he led a couple on a guided stroll.
The ranger, a genial geologist named Trevor Williams, was explaining the

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competing hypotheses about the helix’s function. His preferred theory was
that the slight incline of the burrow’s bottom chamber offered a refuge
against the flash floods that must have swept the ancient pan-flat plain.
“Kind of like how I try to drown my moles,” the woman said.
Although the burrows had perplexed paleontologists, Williams said,
local indigenous people had no misconceptions about the structures’
architects. The spirals featured in the mythology of the Lakota, a tribe
who say that ancient Thunder Beings turned beavers to stone to provide
protection against devastating Water Monsters. It’s impossible not to be
amazed by these indigenous archaeologists: Even though the burrows in no
way resemble modern beaver lodges, the Lakota weren’t fooled. Their word
for the rock helices was Ca’pa el ti, or “beavers’ lodges”—far more accurate
nomenclature than anything white people concocted.4
“I like to imagine Dr. Barbour presenting his tree root hypothesis to a
room full of academic bigwigs, and everyone’s clapping and saying, ‘Bravo!
Bravo!’” Williams said. “And the two Lakota guys are standing in the back
of the room with their arms crossed, going ‘Should we tell him about the
beavers? Nah.’”
We walked down the short loop trail, and I thought about Palaeocastor’s
world. What selective pressures drove its relatives to adopt an aquatic life-
style? There’s always a bit of conjectural storytelling involved in re-creating
evolution, but they’re still questions worth asking: Why Castor canadensis
but not Palaeocastor; why Homo sapiens but not Homo neanderthalensis?
What did our respective species figure out?
Williams, evidently, was pondering the same questions. “It’s amazing to
think that these guys are still around in some form,” he said. “The beardog
has no living relatives. The rhinos have disappeared from America. Of all

—
the animals that used to live here, beavers are the big winner.”

Although the evolutionary paths of rodents and primates forked more than
eighty million years ago, don’t let our divergent lineages fool you: Beavers
are among our closest ecological and technological kin. Homo sapiens and
Castor canadensis are both wildly creative tool users who settle near water,
share a fondness for elaborate infrastructure, and favor fertile valley bot-
toms carved by low-gradient rivers. And while all organisms have evolved

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 Appetite for Construction

to fill niches provided by nature, neither beavers nor people are content
to leave it at that. Instead we’re proactive, relentlessly driven to rearrange
our environments to maximize its provision of food and shelter. We are
not just the evolutionary products of our habitat: We are its producers. If
humans are the world’s most influential mammals, beavers have a fair claim
at second place.
Castoridae, the beaver family, evolved from the soup of Rodentia between
thirty-five and forty million years ago, as tropical forests ceded to grasslands
in the late Eocene. Palaeocastor may have been the oddest early beaver, but
it wasn’t the first; that honor likely goes to a little-known ancestor called
Agnotocastor, a groundhog-like creature that probably sported a rat’s scaly
tail. (Their fossils are identifiable as early beavers by the shapes of their
skulls.) Over millions of years around thirty genera of beavers evolved and
vanished, from tiny blind root eaters to the hippo-like Castoroides, a beaver
the size of a small black bear that roamed from Florida to Alaska and disap-
peared just ten thousand years ago. According to Pocumtuck legend, hills
near Deerfield, Massachusetts, were molded from the bodies of giant bea-
vers, perhaps a cultural memory from when our two species shared the earth.
All that remains of this once-flowering tree today is the genus Castor,
comprising the familiar Castor canadensis in North America and Castor
fiber, the Eurasian beaver, across the Atlantic. These two creatures, and the
behaviors that we consider intrinsic to beaverhood—living in water and
building dams—appear to be the scions of a mysterious progenitor whose
novel adaptations shaped not only beavers’ evolution, but the contours of
two continents. While Palaeocastor’s side of the family tunneled into the
Great Plains, the direct antecedents of modern beavers took to water.
Ellesmere Island is a windswept hunk of land, around the size of South
Dakota, in the Nunavut territory, Canada’s northernmost district. Save for
the occasional willow, the island is layered in tundra, and patrolled by wolves
and musk ox. It is no place for a beaver to live. Once, though, Ellesmere
boasted a more forgiving climate and forests that resembled those you’d
find in contemporary Montana. Some of those spruces and pines, alongside
the bones of wolverines, deerlets, and horses, eventually sank into peat
layers, thicker than a man is tall, at the bottom of an Arctic pond. That
pond was also home to beavers—the source of some of the world’s most
important castorid fossils.

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The beavers of Ellesmere’s pond were members of a now-extinct genus

called Dipoides. Like today’s beavers it lived in water and chewed wood:
Scientists have extracted Dipoides-gnawed sticks from the Ellesmere
Beaver Pond, including a jumble of trunks and cobble that resemble the
remnants of a dam. Although Dipoides was only two-thirds Castor’s size and
couldn’t match its gnawing ability, Natalia Rybczynski, the paleontologist
who excavated the Ellesmere trove, wrote that it was nonetheless an “avid
woodcutter” whose chewed sticks hold boggling significance.5 Since it’s
unlikely that a behavior as bizarre as tree harvesting evolved more than
once, the odds are good that the most recent ancestor shared by Dipoides
and Castor, which lived around twenty-four million years ago, was also
a wood-chewing, dam-building engineer. Why does that matter? As the
Canadian author Frances Backhouse explained in her book Once They
Were Hats, “The longer that beaver dams have been around, the more
liable they are to have affected the evolution of a multitude of species,
from aquatic invertebrates and plants to fish, amphibians, and wetland-
dependent birds and mammals.”6 As we’ll soon see, a menagerie of North
American plants and animals rely upon beaver-created water features—
and, if Dipoides was indeed a dam builder, that dependency may reach back
twenty-four million years.
So who was the ur-cutter, the first beaver to use her incisors to gnaw off a
stick—and to what end? In 2007 Rybczynski advanced two theories about
the origins of wood cutting. By the early Miocene, the High Arctic had
succumbed to climatic cooling, and lakes like the Ellesmere Beaver Pond
had begun to freeze. Wood cutting may have helped early beavers construct
“food caches”: piles of edible sticks, driven into muddy pond bottoms,
that modern beavers in northern climes still hoard to sustain themselves
through hard winters. Or it may have allowed the rodents to build snug
lodges, which would have been warmer than tunneling into the earth.7
From those humble beginnings, the conjoined behaviors of living in
water and constructing woody architecture flourished. While the gopher-
like burrowers died out, the aquatic side of the family wandered between
North America and Eurasia via Beringia, the land bridge that once con-
nected the continents, giving rise some ten million years ago to Castor, the
genus that includes modern beavers. Although even experienced wildlife
biologists struggle to tell North American and European beavers apart,

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DNA analysis suggests their trajectories diverged around seven and a half
million years ago, when intrepid Castor colonists emigrated back across
the land bridge from Asia. After rising seas flooded Beringia and divided
the continents two million years later, the lineages were isolated, free to
independently evolve.8 (If you’re keeping track of all this, you’ll notice
that beavers arose in North America, crossed into Eurasia, and eventually
returned, the prodigal rodent come home.) Castor canadensis, the modern
North American beaver, arose around a million years ago and, like the
Clovis people who eventually followed, dispersed rapidly across a fertile
continent. From the Alaskan interior to northern Mexico, Newfoundland
to the Florida panhandle, where there was water, there were beavers. And

—
where there were beavers, there was water.

The road to Taos Ski Valley in northern New Mexico follows the Rio Hondo,
a dazzling mountain stream that trips through a steep defile cloaked in dark
ponderosa pine. Near the banks the conifers cede to aspen, whose leaves,
each fall, shiver golden on papery branches. Beavers dominate the Hondo:
Every quarter mile the route winds past another limpid pool formed behind
another stream-spanning dam. Taoseños have, for the most part, wisely
resisted the temptation to build homes within this narrow, flood-prone
valley. Drive far enough, though, and you’ll come upon a scene of stunning
watery conflict, where beavers and humans jousted for control of the valley
bottom—and where humans surrendered.
I first visited the abandoned house on a September day with my friend
Leah, a local who was aware of my beaver obsession. Around eight
miles outside of Taos, we pulled off the road to admire the site. Calling
it a “beaver pond” scarcely did it justice—“beaver industrial complex”
seemed more apt. The resident rodents had laid down a hefty blockade
of branches, some six feet tall and fifty feet long, in the middle of the Rio
Hondo, diverting the creek into the front yard of a small red cottage with
a peaked roof. The house stood derelict, a lonely island half submerged in
a shallow lake. Black smears of water damage crept up the wall. The septic
tank wallowed in a swamp. A few lonely telephone poles stood marooned,
guy wires trailing uselessly into the pond. To our amazement, we saw
that the beavers had deftly extended their main dam until it reached the

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front porch, whose supporting struts became, in turn, another piece of

the immense wall. We wandered the marshy fringe, running our hands
over chiseled aspen stumps. The few trees still standing, I noticed, were
wrapped in chicken wire.
Although the property owners probably weren’t too pleased, the com-
pound was, to my eye, a magnificent feat of infrastructure. Each disparate
design element functioned in harmony: The half-dozen adjunct dams,
placed with surgical precision, shunted water into the spidery canals wind-
ing into the willows, an intricate network of channels that permitted the
miniature Venetians to fell and transport trees without risking dangerous
overland travel. Below the dam the river raced white-flecked and impla-
cable; above, it spread serenely over grass and cobble, a half-acre harbor.
More remarkable than the compound’s immensity was its sophistication,
the way the creatures had melded environment and architecture with an
adroitness that recalled Frank Lloyd Wright. Leah, a relative beaver neo-
phyte, was gobsmacked. “This is so impressive,” she said, and I had to agree.
How do beavers engineer such epic works—and why go to such elaborate
lengths? The primary reasons are the same ones that first drove humans
to build domiciles of their own: safety from predators, shelter from the
elements, and food storage. On land, beavers—North America’s biggest
rodent, and the world’s second largest, after South American capybaras—
are ungainly and vulnerable, and their pear-shaped bodies make delectable
meals for black bears, cougars, coyotes, and wolves. Yet beavers are as
balletic in water as they are clumsy out of it. They can hold their breath
for up to fifteen minutes, and their underwater gymnastics are powered by
webbed hind feet. Transparent eyelids allow them to see below the surface,
while a second set of fur-lined lips close behind their teeth, permitting
them to chew and drag wood without drowning. Building dams expands
the extent of beavers’ watery domains, submerges lodge entrances to repel
predators, and gives them a place to stash their food caches. Ponds also
serve to irrigate water-loving trees like willow, allowing beavers to operate
as rotational farmers: They’ll chew down vegetation in one corner of their
compound while cultivating their next crop in another.
Like any smart construction workers, beavers begin their dams by laying
the foundation, a low ridge of mud, stones, and sticks set perpendicular to
the stream’s flow. Next come long wooden poles, stacked at an angle and

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fixed in the bed, followed by smaller branches woven into the superstruc-
ture. (Beavers aren’t picky about their materials: In 2016 canoeists found
a prosthetic leg jammed into a dam in Forest County, Wisconsin. The
prosthesis, fear not, was restored to its rightful owner, who’d offered a fifty-
dollar reward on Craigslist for his limb’s safe return.9) Finally, they caulk
the gaps with mud, grass, and leaves. The structures come in an almost
limitless range of shapes and sizes, from speedbumps the length of a human
stride to a half-mile-long dike, visible from space, that winds through
Albertan swampland. A single prolific colony, or family unit, can construct
and maintain more than a dozen dams, converting a narrow stream into
a broad chain of ponds. A typical compound of ponds and canals, writes
the biologist Dietland Müller-Schwarze, serves as “highway, canal, lock
(in two senses), escape route, hiding place, vegetable garden, food storage
facility, refrigerator/freezer, water storage tank, bathtub, swimming pool,
and water toilet.”10
In addition to dams, beavers also create burrows and lodges, “both of
which,” one nineteenth-century observer wrote, “are indispensable to
his security and happiness.”11 When convenient, the architects prefer
the expediency of digging tunnels directly into a river- or lake-bank, just
below waterline. Although busy as a beaver is a compliment in our labor-
fetishizing society, the rodents are hardly monomaniacal builders; in the
1980s Russian researchers found that around a quarter of the beavers they
studied were content to live inconspicuously in bank burrows.12 When
geography demands it, beavers construct more classic lodges: mounds of
logs and sticks, sometimes as large as a human living room, set atop the
bank or surrounded completely by water. Entrance tunnels lead from the
snug darkness of an inner nest chamber, where the home builders sleep and
rear kits, to the aqueous outside world. Beavers often plaster their fortresses
with mud, which freezes into a concrete-hard sealant, rendering the lodge
as winterized as an Earthship. Scientists in Minnesota discovered the cozy
interiors hovered several degrees above freezing, even as temperatures out-
side plummeted below zero degrees Fahrenheit.13 Beavers don’t hibernate,
instead spending the winter dragging morsels from their submerged larder
of sticks and roots to the family waiting at home. Trappers once watched
for plumes of steam curling from a lodge’s ventilation shaft to identify
occupied huts, the beavers within betrayed by their own condensed breath.

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To acquire their building materials, of course, beavers chew down

trees—teetering precariously on hind legs, tail propped beneath the body
like a kickstand, forepaws braced against trunk as they chip away with mas-
sive incisors. Once they’ve captured their ligneous prey, they dismantle it,
gnawing off large limbs and sectioning unwieldy trunks for easier dragging.
Beavers work as smart as they do hard: One Saskatchewan study found
that 62 percent of felled trees toppled toward the dam, making it easier for
the diminutive loggers to tug materials to their construction sites.14 Still,
accidents happen. In 1954 Harold Hitchcock, a biologist at Middlebury
College in Vermont, reported a beaver crushed by a split ash tree, “its head
pinched between the halves of the trunk.”15 Timber cutting is among the
world’s most dangerous professions, whether you fell hardwoods with
chainsaws or teeth.
Stoop to examine the sticks that constitute a lodge or dam, and you’ll
usually find that they’ve been peeled smooth, as if whittled with a pock-
etknife. Beavers are reliably efficient, and, true to form, they generally eat
the inner bark—the sugary tissue layer, known as the cambium, that does
the growing—like corn on the cob before weaving sticks into their edifices.
In summer, when the world is succulent, beavers graze on green plants as
contentedly as any cow, munching everything from ferns to poison ivy;
come winter, they switch to a woodier diet, subsisting on stems and bark.
Their favorite foods are aspen, cottonwood, and willow, but they’ll eat
just about anything in a pinch. When one researcher sliced open beaver
stomachs in Mississippi, he found them packed with forty-two tree species,
thirty-six genera of green plants, four kinds of woody vines, and a sodden
mulch of grasses.16 Thrifty as ever, they also practice caecotrophy, eating
their pudding-like excretions to extract every last iota of nutrition; by the
time their feces reemerge a day later, they’re nearly sawdust. Beavers man-
age to digest around a third of the cellulose they consume, a process that’s
aided not only by poop eating but also by an unusually long intestine and
a spectacularly diverse microbiome.17 In 2016 researchers found more than
fourteen hundred species of bacteria dwelling in beaver feces—hundreds
more than have been detected in our comparatively impoverished guts.18
Nonstop gnawing requires mighty dentition, and the beaver’s famous
chompers are up for the task. Beavers whittle with their incisors—two
upper, two lower, all of which grow continuously to compensate for constant

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erosion. These peerless cutting tools are self-sharpening: The outer surface
of beavers’ front teeth—the side they show to the world—is coated in hard,
dense enamel, while the reverse side is made of softer dentine. The inner
face wears down more quickly than the outer, creating a beveled, chisel-like
edge. The incisors are orange, exposing the iron that’s built into the chemi-
cal structure of their enamel. Despite lacking toothbrushes and fluoride,
beavers are remarkably resistant to tooth decay, a sensible adaptation for an
animal that lives and dies by oral power tools.19 If, however, a tooth jostles
out of alignment, preventing it from filing down its counterpart, endless
growth can become a hazard. Historical records are rife with reports of
beavers who starved—and even allegedly impaled their own brains—after
gruesome incisors grew amok.
Nearly as remarkable as beavers’ teeth is their fur, the material so soft
and pliable that it spurred the colonization of a continent. Beavers have two
types of hair: coarse guard hairs, about two inches long, overlaying luxu-
rious underfur, or wool. Their fur is thick, buoyant, and virtually water-
proof, serving at once as armor, life preserver, and dry suit. Altogether, a
stamp-sized patch of beaver skin is carpeted with up to 126,000 individual
hairs—more than the average human has on her entire head. While the stiff
guard hairs are plucked and discarded by hatmakers, the underfur is one of
the finest materials in which humans have ever clothed themselves. In his
poem “The Triumph,” Ben Johnson analogized feminine beauty to swan’s
down, lilies, fresh snow, and “the wool of beaver.”20
If Johnson had wanted to pay his paramour an even higher compliment,
he might have compared her aroma to the rodents’ glandular secretions.
Beavers delineate their territories using their castor sacs, internal pouches
that produce a musky, vanilla-tinged oil. The mammals, whose powerful
noses make up for their mediocre eyesight, mix castoreum with urine and
spray the cocktail onto mounds of dredged mud to warn off intruders, as if
erecting pungent picket fences around property lines. In his Natural History,
written in ad 77, the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder describes castoreum
as a miracle drug capable of curing headaches, loosening constipated bow-
els, and staving off epileptic fits. Fantastically valuable “beaver stones” later
followed trade routes from western Europe to Persia and Africa, and doc-
tors prescribed a dose for maladies including “gastralgia, dysentery, worms,
retention of urine, induration of liver and spleen, pleurisy . . . gout, hysteria,

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hemicrania, and loss of memory.”21 In an anatomically preposterous fable

dubbed “The Beaver and His Testicles,” Aesop claimed that a beaver pur-
sued by castoreum hunters would gnaw off its gonads and gift them to its
tormentors. “As soon as the hunter lays his hands on that magical medicine,
he abandons the chase and calls off his dogs,” the Greek claimed. Never
mind that castoreum comes from the castor sacs, not the testicles, and that
a beaver’s testicles are internal, so there’s nothing to gnaw off.22 Although
castoreum’s salutary properties were no doubt overblown, the craze wasn’t
entirely driven by junk science: Among dozens of other plant-based com-
pounds, the substance contains salicylic acid, which the mammals derive
from willow—and which happens to be the active ingredient in aspirin.
Aesop’s testicular fable may have been the weirdest beaver-related myth,
but it wasn’t the only one. “Pictures have appeared  .  .  . which show the
houses with two stories, and with windows and doors cut square,” groaned
the naturalist Arthur Radclyffe Dugmore in his 1914 book The Romance of
the Beaver. “It will not need much intelligence to see the absurdity of these
‘facts.’”23 The beaver’s broad, pebbled, paddle-like tail provided another
source of confusion. Fur trappers claimed beavers employed their tails as
pile drivers to pound in sticks, and a print made in 1715 depicted a beaver
assembly line using them as hods to lug rocks.
The reality is stranger than the legends. The beaver’s flat, scaly tail is a
nifty multi-tool exquisitely adapted to semi-aquatic life. In addition to serv-
ing as a kickstand, it’s a rudder and an alarm system: If you’ve ever kayaked
a beaver pond on a clear evening, you’ve likely had your serenity shattered
by the gunshot of a tail striking water, a clarion signal that startles preda-
tors and sends nearby family members scrambling for safety. The tail is also
lined with a rete mirabile, a “wonderful net” of tightly meshed blood vessels
that exchange heat through their walls and regulate the beaver’s tempera-
ture. Finally, the leathery appendage contains a substantial fat reserve that
helps its owner endure hard winters. The creamy fat of a spit-roasted tail,
wrote David Coyner, was a trapper’s delicacy: “When the heat of the fire
strikes through so as to roast it, large blisters rise on the surface, which are
very easily removed. The tail is then perfectly white, and very delicious.”24
Beavers are family-oriented creatures, and like many humans they’re
generally, though not exclusively, monogamous. A typical colony consists
of four to ten members, including the mating adults; newborn kits, birthed

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Beaver ponds, wetlands, and meadows are refuges not only for the rodents themselves,
but for a menagerie of other plants and animals, including moose, otters, trumpeter
swans, coho salmon, and, in North Carolina, the endangered Saint Francis’ satyr butterfly.
Illustration by Sarah Gilman.

in May or June; and yearlings born the previous spring. Two-year-olds

tend to move out in search of their own territories soon after the birth
of their youngest siblings, like teenagers heading off for college—though
in Quebec, Françoise Patenaude observed two-year-olds remaining at
home to groom, feed, and guard their kid brothers and sisters.25 For kits,
their two-year homestays serve as internships, during which they learn
and hone tree-felling, dam construction, predator avoidance, and other
aptitudes. The naturalist Hope Ryden, in her book Lily Pond, observed kits
and yearlings picking up a wide variety of behaviors from their caretakers,
from the finer points of food-caching to rolling up a lily pad, burrito-style,
for easier munching.26

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As much as beavers value nurture, nature still hardwires their most

important behavioral building blocks. In the 1960s Lars Wilsson, a Swedish
ethologist, performed a series of clever experiments on captive-born bea-
vers who lacked dam-building experience. Wilsson found that the naive
beavers, released into running water, erected exemplary dams on their first
attempts. When Wilsson subsequently played the trickle of flowing water
over a loudspeaker in a dry room, the confused creatures built dams across
the concrete floor.27

—
Although beavers’ damming instincts produce some laughable results in
captivity, in the wild their legendary assiduousness is an asset. Beavers,
wrote Arthur Radclyffe Dugmore, “seldom allow a night to pass . . . without
making a tour of inspection and building up and strengthening any part
that shows signs of weakness.”28 In “flashy” streams whose courses are
annually scoured by huge pulses of snowmelt, dams are often ephemeral,
washing out each spring and requiring reconstruction when the waters
recede in summer. But when conditions allow, beaver compounds can
prove astonishingly durable, maintained by succeeding generations for
decades—or even centuries.
Much of what we know about the extraordinary longevity of beaver
complexes comes courtesy of Lewis Henry Morgan. Morgan, an anthro-
pologist and railroad profiteer, was a dubious scholar whose work often
descended into racism—he notoriously classified human cultures as either
savage, barbaric, or civilized—but an undeniably keen observer of casto-
rids. His travels to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where he sought to open
an iron mine, brought him into close contact with the rodent, whose dams
and canals soon caught his anthropological fancy. “There is no mammal,
below man  .  .  . which offers to our investigation such a series of works,”
Morgan enthused in his 1868 book, The American Beaver and His Works,
“or presents such remarkable materials for the study and illustration of
animal psychology.”29
Morgan’s corner of Michigan was then a beaver paradise, an “unbro-
ken and an uninhabited wilderness” webbed with creeks and forested in
birches, maples, and willows. By Morgan’s count, beavers had constructed
sixty-three dams in the area, including one colossus that stretched 260

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feet long and stood over 6 feet high. “It has undoubtedly been built upon
and repaired year after year until it reached its present dimensions; and it
is not in the least improbable that it has existed and been continued for
centuries,” he wrote. Morgan gushed about the structures’ “remarkably
artistic appearance,” their strategic placement, and their craftsmanship.
“They appeared to be loosely thrown together, but on attempting to raise
a number of them they were found to be fast at one end or the other, or so
interlaced that it was difficult to remove them,” he marveled. One earthen
embankment, he wrote, was so solid and broad “that a horse and wagon
might have been driven across the river upon it in safety.”30
Morgan’s dam observations were as precise as they were enthusiastic.
With the help of two railroad engineers, he drafted a map of the region’s riv-
ers, railroads, and beaver-created lakes: Lake Helen, Grass Lake, Stafford
Lake, and dozens more. Morgan’s map is a work of delicate art, the kind
of fanciful schematic you’d find at the outset of a Tolkien novel. It’s also
one of the most meticulous representations of a fully beavered landscape
ever rendered. Although the region fell within the historic territory of the
Ojibwe, for whom beaver served, as one chief put it, as “Indian’s pork,”31
the mining railroad represented virtually the first white intrusion into this
damp region. The map folded into the 396-page American Beaver therefore
provides a key to a lost world—and an invaluable tool for science.
More than a century after Morgan’s death, Carol Johnston, an ecolo-
gist at South Dakota State University, learned about his map during the
course of her postdoctoral research.32 What, she wondered, had become
of the beaver-built landforms that Morgan had documented? When she
examined an array of contemporary aerial images in 2014, she discovered
that three-quarters of the dams and ponds that appeared in The American
Beaver’s diagram remained visible. Many of the sites appeared to have been
abandoned, and, without active maintenance by their beavers, filled in
with earth to become meadows or shrublands. Other ponds had actually
grown in the past 150 years, an indication that beavers had raised their
dams to capture still more water. Morgan’s map and Johnston’s update
demonstrate the seeming paradox at the heart of beaver ecosystems: that
even as topographic features evolve year by year, a colony’s footprint can
persist for decades or longer. Beaver landscapes are cauldrons of turmoil
and bastions of stability, dynamic and durable in equal measure. “This

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constancy is evidence of the beaver’s resilience,” Johnston wrote, “and a

reminder that beaver works have been altering North American landscapes
for centuries.”33
One of the finest places in which to grasp the extent of that alteration is
Montana’s Centennial Valley—a broad, grassy bowl, stunning in its wind-
scoured austerity, ringed by a quartet of snow-frosted mountain ranges.
The Centennial is filamented with streams and pocked by shallow lakes;
grizzly bears trundle across its wooded shoulders and trumpeter swans
splash down in its wetlands. It’s the Lower 48’s closest approximation of
Mongolia: a place where you can gaze to the horizon without a human-built
structure marring the panorama, where the US Fish and Wildlife Service
warns bird-watchers to bring a full gas tank and a spare tire, where you’re
more likely to hear the eerie whinny of a sandhill crane than the rumble of
an engine. During winter, you can practically count the valley’s population
on two hands.
One of the few souls brave enough to inhabit the Centennial year-round
is Rebekah Levine, a high-spirited, freckled professor at the University of
Montana Western. Levine—along with her husband, Kyle Cutting, a biolo-
gist who works at the valley’s wildlife refuge, and their twin children—has
made the Centennial her year-round home since 2010. It’s an eventful place
to raise a family. One winter day in 2017, a few months before my visit, the
Cutting clan was playing outside when they were charged by an enraged
moose cow, all flared nostrils and flailing hooves, the animal funneled
toward them by a towering snowbank that ran parallel to the house. Levine,
certain they’d be trampled to death, grabbed the nearest kid and dove for
cover. Kyle, meanwhile, instinctively snatched up an iron rock-prying bar
leaning against the side of the house and, channeling his collegiate baseball
career, clobbered the advancing ungulate, who promptly keeled over in the
powder. Several minutes later, with the family now watching safely through
a window, the moose woke, staggered to her feet, and wandered groggily
away, never to bother Rebekah and Kyle again.
That heart-stopping encounter notwithstanding, moose aren’t the
mammals Rebekah Levine spends the bulk of her time pondering. Levine
is a fluvial geomorphologist, meaning she studies the formation of streams
and rivers: how they were created, how they function, how they change
over time. Inevitably, that brings her into contact with a certain aquatic

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mammal—“a fun little rodent that can do a lot of work,” as she put it to me.
And in the Centennial, where the wetlands are many and the humans few,
there is no shortage of fun little rodents.
Levine and I rendezvoused in the valley on a chill late-spring day.
Galloping winds swept across the prairie, driving cobalt-bodied Steller’s
jays to take shelter in runty willows. I was tagging along on a meeting of
the Greater Yellowstone Hydrology Committee, a group of around twenty
scientists who’d gathered in the Centennial for three days to talk shop.
In testament to beavers’ ascendancy, the creatures were a prime topic of
conversation at this year’s meeting—which was where Levine, the resident
expert, came in.
Levine, her frizzy hair bursting from beneath a cinched safari hat, led
our group along Odell Creek, a stream that twists under a cratered dirt road
and spills into Lower Red Rock Lake. I noticed she wore calf-high rubber
boots. “If you haven’t ever walked over a beaver-impacted floodplain,”
she cautioned, “it feels like you’re going on a wilderness expedition even
though you’ve just jumped off the road.” She kept up a patter of geologi-
cal trivia as we hiked, and the visiting hydrologists hustled to stay within
earshot, fighting clumps of chest-high willow that lined the eroding banks.
Levine proved a gifted teacher, with a knack for interpreting landscapes
for dunces like me. At one point we trekked through a shallow depression
in the prairie, a faint, sinuous ditch whose outlines were stenciled in the
matted grass—the ghost of streams past. “The modern channel is mostly
single-thread, but the fan is riddled with paleochannels,” she called over
the wind. “You’ll see all these abandoned oxbows and dry former wetland
habitat, where there isn’t any flow now but could fill up again.” Some of
that might have the ring of jargon, but here’s the point: Beaver streams, like
Odell, are messy—and that’s a very good thing.
We tend to imagine rivers as blue lines meandering through valleys
like sine curves wending across graph paper. I’m guilty of perpetuating
this image; in this book you’ll catch me referring to streams as “strings” or
“ribbons.” A more historically accurate simile, however, might be a meal of
spaghetti—its strands writhing, intertwining, and occasionally spilling off
your plate. A geomorphologist would describe such a helter-skelter river as
anabranching; we civilians would call it chaos. Whatever your terminology,
it’s hard today to conceive how freely many American rivers once scam-

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pered across the landscape. In The Control of Nature, his riveting account of
the Army Corps’s grueling war against the Mississippi River, John McPhee
wrote that the Big Muddy once “jumped here and there within an arc about
two hundred miles wide, like a pianist playing with one hand—frequently
and radically changing course, surging over the left or the right bank to go
off in utterly new directions.”34
If a dynamic river possesses the hands of a pianist, then beavers had
turned Odell Creek into a virtuoso. Although the stream currently flowed
through but one visible course, Levine told us the floodplain was scari-
fied with a maze of historic channels, between which Odell had hopped
over the millennia like an impatient driver changing lanes. Beavers were
largely responsible for that dynamism: By slowing down flows, capturing
sediment, and raising the height of the stream’s surface, their dams had
repeatedly forced Odell’s waters onto its surrounding floodplain, furnish-
ing meadows with nourishing sediments and transforming the stream into
a bewildering maze of wetlands, side channels, and meanders—from single
thread to proverbial spaghetti bowl. Even the brushy, pitiful vestiges of
neglected dams changed the stream’s course, scouring holes and deflecting
flows. One Colorado study found that islands often form behind aban-
doned dams, forcing the channel to split and turning single-thread streams
into braided ones.35
“One of the coolest things that beaver dams do is fail,” Levine said with
an admiring nod to one half-blown dam, its constituent sticks shuddering
slightly in the current. “These structures are actually affecting sediment
transport and channel movement and creating dynamism in these systems.”
Beaver country, with Levine as guide, was rife with signs and patterns,
the sort of telling details that Annie Dillard called “unwrapped gifts and
free surprises”—an eroding bank here, the ghost of an old dam there. It
helps, of course, to be a geomorphologist, but it matters more that you see,
that you attend to the clues that together tell a river’s story. Levine paused
at a point bar—a sandy beach, deposited on the inside of a riverbend, on
which you might land your canoe for a picnic. She called our attention to
the peeled willow stems that littered the bar.
“Basically all of the willow sticks on point bars in this creek, guess where
they came from? Beavers,” Levine said. “They’re extremely messy build-
ers, and there’s a constant flux of sticks downriver when they’re working.

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Willows can sprout from these cut stems, and that’s adding even more
complexity to the habitat.” As beaver-transported willows took root on the
point bar, they forced the creek toward its outer bend, where it chewed into
the bank and carried off still more earth, which would later settle behind
downstream dams. The saga’s details change in every stream, but the over-
arching reality is this: Beavers are agents of profound change, responsible
for sculpting streams’ forms and dictating their functions.
Although it seems unmistakable today, the notion that beavers shape
entire watersheds was not always obvious. The founding patriarch of
fluvial geomorphology was a Berkeley researcher named Luna Leopold,
son of the legendary ecologist Aldo Leopold. Leopold was a visionary
whose fastidious measurements did more than anyone’s to help us under-
stand how rivers work, yet he had a blind spot. In his seminal paper River
Flood Plains: Some Observations on Their Formation, beavers don’t earn a
mention.36 The broad, grassy floodplains that flank many rivers, Leopold
wrote, owe their existence to “material deposited from high water flowing
or standing outside of the channel”—overbank floods produced by rainfall
or snowmelt. That streams often rose so high thanks to the activities of a
knee-high rodent escaped the great geomorphologist’s attention. “The
classic story of how valleys fill is a meandering stream going back and forth,
depositing sediment,” Chris Jordan, a beaver-admiring fisheries biologist
with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told me. “But
with beavers around, the historical landscape processes would have been
completely different.”
It’s hard to begrudge Luna Leopold his oversight. The stream flow data
he drew upon were collected after 1900, long after beavers had disappeared
from nearly all of America’s lands and waters. As the animals rebound from
the fur trade, we’ve had to update our conceptual models to account for
their influence. In 1980, for instance, the field of aquatic ecology came to be
dominated by “the river continuum,” the notion that waterways transition
along their course, seamlessly and predictably, from steep, forested head-
waters to open valley bottoms. Three decades later, however, an engineer
named Denise Burchsted proffered a different model: the river discontin-
uum, which held that pre-colonization streams were disrupted along their
length by glacially scoured holes, downed trees, and, most of all, beaver
dams. Rather than free-flowing chutes, Burchsted wrote, historical creeks

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were patchy networks of ponds, meadows, and braided channels—only fit-

fully connected upstream and down, but inseparable from the floodplains
that bracketed their banks.37 Many natural river systems seemed to blur
the line between land and water: Floodplains were less discrete landscape
features than ecotones, fuzzy transitional worlds where wet bled into dry
and turned everything wondrously damp.
Although North America may never again host its full beaver comple-
ment, we can still envisage the soggy world that once prevailed. In 2005
David Butler and George Malanson, geographers at Texas State University
and the University of Iowa, respectively, calculated that somewhere
between 15 and 250 million beaver ponds puddled North America before
European arrival.38 Given the continent’s diverse topography, there’s really
no such thing as a “typical” beaver pond: Researchers in Montana’s Glacier
National Park surveyed ponds whose area averaged a skimpy tenth of an
acre, while others in eastern North Carolina found that average ponds
measured a robust four and a half acres. For argument’s sake, though, let’s
split the difference and estimate that the continent was laced with 150 mil-
lion ponds that averaged a single acre apiece. If that’s true, beavers once
submerged 234,000 square miles of North America—an area larger than
Nevada and Arizona put together.
Thanks in part to beavers, ours was a watery country, a matrix of ponds
and swamps, marshes and wetlands, damp mountain meadows and tangled
bottomlands. But the same luscious fur that made beavers so well adapted
for this aquatic world would soon prove their downfall—and the undoing
of the ecosystems they helped create.

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