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I think I'll start out by referring you to a good professional review, https://www.seattletimes.com/entertai... I really wanted to like this book, but I had to force myself to finish it. Yes, there were some interesting facts and people in the book, but it was pretty dry and not really an engaging read. I read Eager: the surprising, secret life of beavers and why they matter by Ben Goldfarb a few years ago and LOVED it. He really brought all the beaver information to life and showed just how important they are to the environment especially when it comes to water. Philip tried to do the same, but it just came across very dry and there were lots of chapters with her trekking around with trappers and scientists in the woods. I also felt like she spent WAY too long on trapping and I still couldn't really get a good read on why trappers want to trap instead of hunting. Hunting for food I can totally understand. Trapping for fur I don't and as much as I liked Herb, the trapper she followed, I still think it's a terrible practice. The book wasn't all bad - she had some good points and highlights, but overall it was dry and long and not nearly as engaging as Eager by Goldfarb.
Yellowstone River, which they followed north and west' Actually it lies south of the Missouri. Wikipedia says they followed the Missouri to its headwaters and the continental divide at Lemhi pass, which suggests they ascended the Jefferson and then Braided from the Missouri - hard to get to from the Yellowstone. This is a passionate non-fic about beavers and the advantages they bring to the environment, mainly based on North American data but also a bit of Europe. I read it as a part of monthly reading for June 2022 at Non Fiction Book Club group.Once again I feel like I was duped into reading a book that strayed off from what it's marketing advertised. I've read several books like this, "The Library Book" and "The Dinosaur Artist" come to mind. These are books that I like to call NPR reports because like NPR segments they sort of meander from subject to subject only briefly related to one another. Rather than focusing on Beavers, for example, this book goes in depth on the history of Fur trapping in America and looks at the science of Ecology in wetlands. If you like reading about conservationists and people who try to protect natural habitats and animals, you might like this book. Growing up in Wisconsin, I had quite a bit of exposure to beavers. My father and grand-father both were avid trappers, and I could not help but absorb the lessons and lore about beavers that they taught me. I did not follow in their footsteps, but can appreciate the lessons they taught me. As a college graduate with a degree in natural resources, and a lifetime outdoorsman and fisherman, I continue to learn about beavers. They are one of the most fascinating animals I know of. Philips wrote this book over the course of several years and I was impressed with Philip's as a nonfiction author and her quest to find out more about beaver. She had been helping her mother as her health deteriorated and to buoy her spirits she often sat by the beaver pond near her house and watched the beaver in action. Sadly one day there were no beaver and it her quest to find out what happened she began looking more deeply into their history, life and ecology:
The first few sections were a little more focused on people than I would have liked. No offense to anyone depicted it's just that I was more interested in knowing more about the animal and its doings. The high point was the chapter on the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone and how some of the environmental benefits attributed to them are actually the result of beaver activity. Lots of interesting examples and good bits of nature writing by the author. She explores Native American traditions surrounding the beaver. She visits some of the oldest and biggest beaver dams in the country, which can be seen by satellite. She explores the history of her home town in New England, and the conflict between the white settlers and the Indigenous peoples, and the ecological damage done by English-style agriculture.And Dad used to take us for walks down the road to see the beaver dam in New Hampshire. Again, I longed to see a wild beaver, but, as a child, I never did. Only the one our Uncle brought by. Coyote are so adaptive, like beavers, that they disrupt our usual divisions of what is urban and what is rural. Wild animals are supposed to live in the woods, but as coyote and beavers and wolves keep demonstrating, in twenty-first-century North America, they regularly don't...A pair of coyote den in Central Park. Coyote have been photographed riding mass transit in Portland, Oregon, and walking onto Wrigley Field. In Chicago, Dr. Stan Gehrt, who heads up the longest urban coyote research project in the country, has identified a generation of coyote that now teach their young to wait at traffic lights and avoid eating rats, saving the coyote from getting hit by cars and from ingesting fatal doses of rat poison." (p. 62-63) This is an excellent popular science book about beavers, water, engineering, climate, biodiversity, and why we need beavers. Fascinating, nifty, easy to understand. Recommended." Later, hiking on the same trail, the path went by a shallow pond where water lilies were blooming. We saw a beaver swim to a lily, pull it down, and devour the blossom.
Anyway, I also learned how beneficial they are for the control of water--easing drought, easing flooding, building up the water table. IF they are in an area that has not been overgrazed and are allowed to build dams unimpeded. And there are lots of ways to somewhat control their dam building with flow devices to keep them from flooding things you don't want flooded. p. 54 - 'Hudson's Bay Company...rights over a vast expanse of what we now know as Canada.' More simply and precisely, HBC was granted rights to all land draining into Hudson Bay (including some in what is now USA) I was very grateful with the author's even handedness in her telling of the very different groups that concern beavers. And especially pleased to learn things that I did not know about beavers. She (Philip) followed in the footsteps of a modern-day fur trapper. She learned to spot the signs of beaver activity in the wild. She witnessed the process of preparing the pelts, and tried her hand at scraping the skin. She went to the fur auction, where pelts of coyote, muskrat, opossum, bear, and mink were traded along with beaver. The world of fur trapping is a complex web of government restrictions, changing public opinions, and a traditional mythos of frontier masculinity. Trappers say that culling excess numbers prevents disease and starvation among wild animal populations. The passion for not just the co-existence but the full inclusion of beavers within our waterways is on prominent display here, and it's convincing, charming, logical, and so very worthy of your time. A super-fantastic read.This is yet another book about something (an animal, an insect, a plant, an inanimate object) whose very existence is vital for lots of other things (people, animals, plants, the environment). At first I had a bit of interconnectedness fatigue and wondered if I'd made a wrong choice. The book got off to a bit of a slow start for me due to its overarching theme (my issue/fault, not the author's) but increasingly got better as I learned of the many positive environmental benefits beavers provide. The writing seemed to get a bit jauntier as it went along.
My thanks to both NetGalley and the publisher Twelve Books for an advanced copy of this book on geography, water planning, myths and the importance of one animal to an ecosystem, and too one author. Join Book Club: Delivered to your inbox every Friday, a selection of publishing news, literary observations, poetry recommendations and more from Book World writer Ron Charles. Sign up for the newsletter.
The most enjoyable book I've read this year! I had no opinion one way or another about beavers when I started this after an intriguing excerpt in The Sierra Club magazine, but by the halfway mark I was ready to join the ranks of Beaver Believers. p.44 - 'war of independence that freed the colonies' actually only the 13 colonies that formed the US I didn't believe Ben, not really. Could beavers really have been that important? But the thorough research in the first part of this book, which presents numerous quotations from early explorers of the west, leave no doubt that the number of beavers was profound and their impact widespread. And it's not just ecology that they influenced: the fur trade helped incite the American Revolution and the War of 1812, and dictated where explorers settled and founded some of the West's now-major cities. There was a lot that I didn't know about beavers before reading this book, like the fact that they are vegetarians! Just like a bunch of other people in this book, I thought they ate fish or something, even though a few years ago some coworkers and I ran across a picture book that said they ate wood and we were all like, no way! But we looked it up and sure enough, they do! Even after that I still thought they ALSO probably eat fish. Where did that come from? Are we all getting them confused with otters, or what? p.225 - 'Lewis...wrote the Narnia trilogy' There are 7 books in the Narnia series. Perhaps you were thinking of the Disney films based on 3 of the books, but Lewis did not write the films.
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