Beavers of the world unite

I like all things natural.

The road to my daughter’s school at one point runs along a swamp. And, probably as part of legislation the good citizens of Massachusetts passed a few years ago that banned the use of leg hold traps throughout the state, there is some serious beaver activity going on right along the road. You can see sharpened stumps, the height of a beaver standing on its back legs, sticking up everywhere. And for the longest time there was this good-size tree standing with gnaw marks all around the perimeter of its base. This morning I noticed the tree was down, the crown of the tree laying in the water.

A sight like this gives me all the hope in the world. Because there is something going on in the brain of that little rodent that told it just how to drop that tree right where it wanted. Not across the road. Not anywhere but in the water. A rodent did this.

My dog knows words and continues to learn new ones well into his nine years. He knows truck and walk and mommy and cookie and kibble and dinner and out. He knows a whole lot more, too. People think this is amazing, but if you’ve spent any time around animals, the non-human kind I’m referring to because apologies to all the fundamentalists of the world, but we are animals, if you’ve spent any time around animals you’ll find they have so much more on the ball than most people can ever imagine. Seeing that tree dropped just so told me that if we humans somehow destroy ourselves, which we seem hell-bent on doing, there’s other life around that can rebuild the world that we destroyed, and can probably do a better job than we did in the first place. One tree at a time.