BEAVERS to the Rescue
- Rebecca Jim
- 1 minute ago
- 3 min read
A small colorful acrylic painting on the wall in the living room hangs above the clock that my great grandparents bought the day my mother’s mother Maude was born. Maude, who I called my Little Grandma had died years before my mother discovered that old clock had been hidden under a relative’s bed. She brought it home and installed it on a bookshelf in her home, more like an art object than its actual essence, a clock, since it no longer kept time.
After my mother passed away, the clock seemed lonely on the bookshelf with no one to admire it, so I brought it home and sat in atop a little desk my mother’s only brother David had built for me. And then one day my older brother took it to a clock doctor who had many clocks just like this one, and when it came home, it could keep time, chime again after at least 60 years of silence.
Above the clock that must be wound every 18 hours first one side and then the other by pulling large LEAD weights, is the painting I completed 60 years ago. The image is of a beaver, featuring the tail and prominent teeth highlighted by sunlight radiating colors.
When my parents moved to Oklahoma from Texas, as I have probably said before, the first place my dad wanted to take my mother on the property was to see the lake he had made which was way down past the big pasture and the Rock Pond. When they got to where the lake had been, they found the dam had been washed away and all was gone. A lovely pecan grove had grown up nearby instead.
After my parents died, the pond dam was rebuilt with great help from Craig County’s NRCS’ “pond guy.” A few years later I discovered the beavers were messing around with the dam and the pond seemed to be growing each time it rained, holding more water. The pecan trees’ feet got wet. Pecan trees like their feet wet, but I learned they don’t like them sopping wet for months on end. Ghost trees now stand as indications of the early boundary of the pond. I hired trappers to find them and take them to new homes. But the beavers returned and the pond grew bigger, becoming… a lake.
I never could have built a lake with my teeth, so I have learned to admire the beavers. A beaver is yes, a rodent but they are also ecosystem engineers who can shape wetlands and create biodiversity. They manage flooding by spreading water across the landscape so it doesn’t surge downstream to flood and also erode the banks along the way.
It was only tonight I noticed that painting over the lost clock might have foreshadowed a relationship I would have with the species decades after it had been created on that canvas.
While with a “birder” interested in finding public access areas for the Tar Creek corridor, Tom Whipple and I stopped at the most outrageous of insults to a named water body. We drove not on a bridge, but through her water, there on the state line road dividing Oklahoma and Kansas. And then we stopped and walked toward what looked like a beaver lodge, and then looked upstream to see yet another. Beavers have moved in. They understand the federal government has failed the creek, so they are stepping up to give it their best shot, and show us what can be done at one of the nations’ most damaged abandoned mining sites and this superfund’s namesake, Tar Creek.
It took me many years to be at peace with beavers. But I had forgotten the time and effort I had used all those decades ago to paint the features and preserve it. Post Designs found a way to settle the wrinkled canvas and simply hide it under glass when it couldn’t be tamed.
It’s been another 18 hours, time to wind the clock and take a look at that painting and reflect on the incredible efforts these beavers with their teeth and their inherent instinct to construct wetlands, and their determination to deal with running water may bring hope for the future our Tar Creek has been waiting for.
Respectfully submitted ~ Rebecca Jim
A research scientist sent an article this afternoon I know Tom will want to read, as it is all about how the common Robin may be able to serve as an ideal sentinel of heavy metal contamination. I am betting he will see many Robins in his search for the birds of Tar Creek!
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