On beavers, interventions and making change for the descendants to come — Susan Raffo

For much of this walk, I am going to be sharing things as audio files rather than written posts. I am currently sitting in a kitchen in Bowdoin, Maine with a friend who is away for the day and left me the use of her computer. This piece has been whispering to me over the last chunk of days so I am beyond happy to have a chance to do the kind of thinking that my keyboard fingers enjoy.

When our daughter was small, my partner and I decided that we would organize family media time by watching nature documentaries. When we watched something together, we wanted to watch something that all of us enjoyed. One of our family favorites was a half hour movie about beavers called, well, Beavers: The Biggest Dam Movie You Ever Saw . So, so good. The movie has everything including a moment when beaver romance happens; the lights dim and you hear the slap grunt of beavers getting it on.

While we were obsessed by this movie, we talked alot about how beavers shifted ecosystems. On walks in the woods, we assessed the streams we passed, imagining where beaver might want to build a dam. We talked about how a dam turns a stream into a pond and then new species like frogs and salamanders show up. How, we wondered together, did the frogs and the salamanders know that there was now a new pond on…