1. Now that Copper and Luna are indoor/outdoor cats, I get a fair amount of exercise gladly getting up from my reading and letting them in and out. Saturday, about 1:00 in the afternoon, Copper trotted outside. Normally, he spends a few hours out and comes back in to eat and often takes his place lying on the quilt on the floor by the front door.
But, on Saturday, Copper didn't come back to the porch, not late in the afternoon, not early in the evening, not late in the evening. Every time I got up during the night, I checked the back porch. No Copper. Before I went to bed, I walked around in the back yard, searching. No Copper.
I got up for the day fairly early, checked the back porch, and no Copper.
Copper had never been out this long, but, to my knowledge, he's never left the back yard either.
I wondered if he'd found his way out and was on an incredible journey. I began to think of how I might find him if he was off on a neighborhood safari.
The morning continued apace. I messaged with Stu, drank coffee, blogged, and returned to reading about beavers.
Around nine o'clock I heard a brief cat scream and some hissing in the back yard.
I leapt up, dashed to the deck out back.
I hadn't seen Copper for twenty hours and I hoped that was his yowl.
It was.
Copper had been hiding in a thicket of rhododendron and other untamed growth near the gate on the yard's west side.
Christy's cat, Grayson, had evidently come to close to Copper's nesting place and Copper let Grayson know he was too close with a scream and Grayson responded in kind. They kept several feet of distance from each other and I walked in between them. Doing so freed Copper to leave the thicket and trot up to the porch and come in the house.
I still don't think Copper has left the back yard, but because the vegetation bordering our lawn is, to put it generously and politely, unkempt (thanks to me), Copper has plenty of places in tall grass and weeds, unpruned bushes, scrubby brush, and other untamed spots to nestle himself into. He does a good job staying out sight.
Copper returned to the living room quilt and sacked out much of the rest of the day.
2. I finished reading the book, Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter by Ben Goldfarb.
While much of this book is about the ingenuity and industry of beavers and about the stunningly positive affect they have on ecosystems and the natural world well beyond themselves, it's also a book about how human endeavors, like raising cattle, building roads, farming, locating a WalMart near a stream where beavers live, and a host of other commercial enterprises are hampered by the way beavers fall trees, dam waterways, and create ponds. All of this beaver activity is supremely beneficial to countless animals -- the water soaked ground and water storing ponds are perfect habitat for water fowl, numerous insects, and fish and provide both feed and sources of drinking water for four-legged animals like moose and others.
But, because these ponds flood roads, submerge grazing land, sometimes water log houses and barns, put train tracks under water, and interfere with other human endeavors, we humans take it upon ourselves to try to manage beavers.
For me, Eager developed into the next of several books and essays I've read over the years that explores the complicated human endeavor of managing the world of nature -- whether it's climate, forest, stream, river, land, species, or any other kind of management.
I suppose part of what makes human management of so-called natural resources complicated is that humans cannot enter into negotiations with animals and rivers and forests. I mean beavers are going to gnaw through trees, transport logs, gather huge rocks, branches, moss and other materials and build dams and lodges without consideration of any nearby human activity and humans can't sit down with them and try to work out plans for where the beavers might consider doing this or not doing it.
In addition, men and women who work as managers of natural resources have widely varying ideas of how best to go about it and have widely differing attitudes toward working in tandem with the industries that extract resources from land and water. Conflicts are inevitable and beavers, salmon, whales, as well as forests, creeks, rivers, and seas are acted upon, that is, managed, in vastly different ways and the success of this management depends on whether one measures the success commercially or ecologically (or environmentally) or, I suppose, recreationally.
I indulged my imagination as I completed this book and wondered if, say, the North Fork of the CdA River and the many creeks flowing into it were ever populated by beavers and if, say Beaver Creek, near Prichard, was once a series of beaver ponds, marshy wetland areas; was it ever home to countless species dependent upon these ponds? Did it only become a heart stopping rushing creek late in its life? Were there once beavers here that were eliminated by trappers or exterminators?
I don't know, but I sure enjoy wetlands and, if nothing else, I have fun imagining, say, the 17th century Coeur d'Alene River basin and wonder where the waters flowed rapidly and where (if they did) beavers built dams and lodges and created ponds teeming with life.
3. Upon finishing Eager, I fixed myself a bowl of green salad with jasmine rice and then mixed myself a pint glass of gin and tonic -- emphasis on tonic, light on the gin.
I retired to the Vizio room and tuned into an episode of Nature entitled "Leave It to Beavers".
I had a great time watching this program. In the best possible way, it was a hybrid combining what you'd expect from, say, a National Geographic documentary with a tear jerking Lifetime or Hallmark movie.
That's right. On the one hand, the hour long show reinforced and provided video evidence of the life and work of beavers with some scintillating underwater footage of a family of beavers in their lodge, occupied cooperatively also by muskrats and other creatures.
I expected that.
I didn't expect to be moved to tears, though, and I was.
I don't want to give a lot away, but the episode featured a beaver love (mating) story and two very moving stories about two different women and their relationships with beavers. Were the human/beaver stories kind of sentimental? YES! Count me in! I found the tears these stories pulled out of me satisfying and the two stories both compelling and beautifully told.
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