Life is a Beech
Photograph: Evening Beaver Pond by WizenedEye.com
The beavers are eating beech trees now. Beech is as gray as cement and twice as hard, so why are the beavers doing this?
Maybe it’s the beech disease. Beech trees are dying and will soon disappear from our northern woods (like the elm and the tamarack), so maybe the beavers are chewing on it while they can. That’s not very probable. More likely it’s because the beavers have eaten all the poplar (their salad of choice), and beech is what’s left. A starving creature isn’t a complainer when faced with an unappetizing meal.
Beaver used to be native to the North Country, but trapping wiped them out. They were reintroduced in the last century, and the absence of a market for their hides allowed them to multiply like rabbits. The Department of Environmental Conservation – in its great wisdom – protected the poor beaver, absolutely forbidding flooded landowners from offing the furry rodents until it became pretty clear they had reached locust-plague proportions and they had eaten up most all of the preferred trees in their range. (Now you can snuff out a beaver without raising a D.E.C. eyebrow).
At our house, we try to live and let live, and that means the beaver are left alone and allowed to eat what they will, which is the occasional poplar, a sugar maple sapling or two, and ...beech.
We’re a bit like the poor beaver: there are too many of us. Our food choices are diminishing as we move to cloned and hybridized crops; many of our children believe that food comes from a supermarket. All of which makes me wonder: when the silage hits the ventilator fan, what will we eat? The beech isn’t going to be there.
2 comments:
Tamarasks no more? Come to the Southwest where apparently they have all escaped to (like too much of the entire NE - and Mid-West population of humans)and are devouring our ever-so-scarce water and crowding out what remains of native trees. Maybe we just need to import beavers....can beavers live w/o water? Maybe Sand Beavers like the Sand Trout that inhabit our "rivers". Maybe all of this is just a matter of perspective; maybe it's just the natural progression of life. But if so, it's happening way too fast!
Judy,
My love/hate relationship with the computer has kept me from tuning in to your web site until now, but I am glad I finally had the chance to indulge myself.
It pleases me that you and I share so many interests---which I did not fully realize until now--- photography, poetry, vegetarianism, etc. You seem to be so talented in everything you do, and I particularly appreciate the joyousness with which you embrace life. These days people seem so removed from Nature, beauty, the real essence of life. Not you, I can tell!
Someday I would love to share some of my photos with you. I have never had much time to do serious photography---never really "learned" how to take pictures, just aimed the camera at what I thought to be beautiful (with mixed results, unfortunately). I am somewhat of a Luddite, however, still enamored of film over digital, so am unable to send things across the internet.
Do you still grow your own food? That is something I would love to do, but would have to move from my townhouse (which is garden- plotless).
Thank you for sharing your wonderful pictures and poetry with us.
Betsey (formerly Liz Mann)
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