Slacker Beavers

I sure everyone has heard the expression “busy as a beaver.” Well I’m here to tell you that there is a slacker subculture in the beaver community.

I have some beavers in the creek behind my house and they aren’t busy at all. They started building a dam and I was fascinated by how they were going about it. First they pushed up a pile of rocks across the creak. Then the started with the sticks. First I thought there was going to be some interesting instinctual plan but it started to look like they just put their trash on top of their pitiful pile of rocks. Beavers eat the bark off of branches leaving a branch of stripped wood. That stripped wood was piled on top of the rocks all willy nilly like in the yard of the shiftless bunch I’m sure you all have somewhere in your town. Well in spite of this leaky lame dam it did collect a small pool behind it. I kept expecting them to work more and make something larger but they didn’t. They seemed satisfied with the little “one pond shack” they had constructed.

Well then it rained and the water can get up pretty high in my creek, and it’s fast. The next day the beaver’s dam was gone. I expected to see some real action now. I had heard about beavers repairing dam damage over night. I waited, nothin’. Every day I’d go back and look, nuthin’. Now I don’t know if they were waiting for their insurance adjuster or FEMA but it was like 2 weeks before they got around to even starting. I dunno, maybe they were in loss counciling or something. Anyway they have finally started building again, but they are slow. I plan on getting out to see them at night if it freezes so I can get across the creek at night, and I fully expect to see them with their little beaver skateboards or one of the other slacker pastimes whiling away the night when they should be building.