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‘Eager’ details the inner and outer workings of beaver

Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter AUTHOR: Ben Goldfarb PUBLISHER: Chelsea Green Publishing PAGES: 304 COPYRIGHT: 2018

Beavers are an almost ubiquitous sight within the Blue Line. There are few river paddles that don’t take one over or around a beaver dam, and the large stick and earth lodges can be seen on hundreds of Adirondack waterways.

But it wasn’t always this way, as a book by Ben Goldfarb details. According to Goldfarb’s Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter, people should pay closer attention to the large rodents.

“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 technical kin,” Goldfarb writes. “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 bottoms carved by low-gradient rivers.

“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 … If humans are the world’s most influential mammals, beavers have a fair claim at second place.”

The Adirondacks are mentioned throughout the book, even though Goldfarb focused his research in other places. Beaver behavior, it turns out, is pretty consistent regardless of where the animals live.

Before making the case for beavers to be more revered, Goldfarb offers history lessons on native Americans’ relationship with the animals. But Eager is not just for people who are really into beavers. Goldfarb’s narrative and the people he interviews offer more than just a story about rodents.

There are crazy facts that are sure to come out during a canoe trip: “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.” Historical anecdotes: “In New York’s Adirondacks, wrote Harry Radford, ‘it is evident that every lake and pond was occupied, and every river, brook, and rill, from the largest to the most insignificant, thickly peopled with these industrious and prolific animals.'”

Eager offers a little something for the history buff, the wildlife viewer and the casual paddler.

Goldfarb spent a lot of time with people working to restore beavers to their historic habitat. These folks recognize that not every waterway can be re-beavered, but look for places where the animals can make a positive impact.

Although many of the reasons people want to release beavers — water storage, flood mitigation, fish, bird, plant and wildlife habitat — are essentially selfish, this is a rare instance where people and nature may each benefit with no real downside to either the ecosystem or society.

While Goldfarb did not focus on the Adirondacks, this area was once similar to the rest of the country. Trappers and loss of habitat killed off most beavers, but in the early 1900s, the state of New York made efforts to reintroduce the animals. Those efforts are now being followed by Goldfarb’s interviewees across North America.

“The former Old Forge Fish Hatchery (also called the Fulton Chain Fish Hatchery) was located in the Hamlet of Old Forge at the turn of the century, and served as the winter haven for seven beavers purchased by the state from the Canadian Exhibit at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis in 1904,” the state Department of Environmental Conservation says in its unit management plan for the Fulton Chain Wild Forest in the southwestern Adirondacks. “In April of 1905, two beavers were taken in a zinc-lined crate from Old Forge to Inlet by rowboat. From Inlet, they were carried to a small Moose River tributary named Sumner Stream and released.

“The next year, the state contracted with the Secretary of the Interior for the purchase of 25 live beavers to be captured and shipped from Yellowstone National Park. Excepting four animals that were lost to the rigors of the cross-country trip, these beavers were released to the wild. It was from the 30 beavers released between 1901 and 1907 by the State and by private individuals that the present large population of beavers in the Adirondacks has developed.”

Goldfarb’s Eager is not only informational, but eminently readable as well. It’s always a thrill to see or hear a beaver tail slap while out paddling, but I — and many other Adirondackers — take the presence of beavers for granted.

Goldfarb details just how mistaken that view is, especially when compared with other parts of the country. With subject matter that all residents and visitors to the Adirondacks have some familiarity with, combined with easy reading, fun facts and fascinating history, Eager should make its way to the bookshelves of everyone who loves the Adirondacks, paddling or wildlife.

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