{"id":108316,"date":"2017-03-02T16:01:35","date_gmt":"2017-03-02T21:01:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=108316"},"modified":"2017-03-16T13:55:08","modified_gmt":"2017-03-16T17:55:08","slug":"108316","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/03\/02\/108316\/","title":{"rendered":"Geronimo Takes Flight"},"content":{"rendered":"

Elena Passarello\u2019s column is about famous animals from history. This week: Geronimo the beaver takes flight.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Design by Kristen Radtke.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

The plane makes a careful approach, ready for the drop. Now into the air and down they swing! Down to the ground near a stream or a lake. The box opens and a most unusual and novel trip ends for Mister Beaver.
\n\u2014<\/em>from\u00a0Fur for the Future<\/em><\/p>\n

Poor fellow! He finally became resigned, and as soon as we approached him, would crawl back into his box ready to go aloft again.
\n\u2014<\/em>Elmo Heter, Idaho Fish and Game Department<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Name:<\/strong> Geronimo<\/p>\n

Species:<\/strong> Castor canadensis<\/em><\/p>\n

Years Active:<\/strong> the late 1940s<\/p>\n

Distinguishing Features: <\/strong>four orange front teeth, impressive work ethic, pungent odor<\/p>\n

Skills: <\/strong>landscape architecture, family planning, no detectable fear of heights<\/p>\n

Habitat:<\/strong> The Idaho backcountry<\/p>\n

Additional Notes:<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve spent the past week wondering how this country might have turned out differently if, two hundred years ago, we\u2019d made our national symbol the North American beaver. Thomas Jefferson reportedly selected the bald eagle for its visage\u2014that focused, Gregory Peck glower. The beaver face, on the other hand, is much more comically designed: it\u2019s myopic and weak-chinned, with Paul Giamatti cheeks. Though graceful when swimming the depths of the ponds they help dredge and fortify, on land (where most humans observe them) beavers only waddle through the mud, cutting quite the opposite figure than certain iconic birds of prey gliding\u00a0on canyon updrafts.<\/p>\n

Beavers, unlike the bald eagles who filch their food from fishing birds, know an honest day\u2019s work. Labor is so hardwired into those furry bodies that the mere sound<\/em> of running water unleashes an insatiable urge to chew. No animal (other than humans) can even approach a beaver\u2019s ability to toil at its landscape until the place changes, for better or worse. Within that dumpy frame lies a gob-smacking vision to revise\u2014to revolutionize, even!\u2014entire earthly vistas.<\/p>\n

Just imagine: our nation symbolized not by a formidable, high-flying scavenger but by thirty goofy pounds of oily fur and stinky glands. See America as a slapping, leathery tail and a pair of iron-coated teeth that never stop growing or chewing. Picture the American dream embodied in beaver lodges\u2014ingenious piles of scented mud designed with multiple rooms, hidden underwater entrances, and cold storage\u2014all built with a beaver\u2019s bare hands. See American family values made manifest in a beaver\u2019s slow-rearing of her young\u2014two full years teaching each kit the family trade, and then, along with her mate-for-life, floating that offspring out into the world to start its own cottage industry.<\/p>\n

So I ask you, dear reader, why not<\/em> choose this keystone species over a bird that merely looks menacing on a flag topper? Just because an eagle can soar? Fine, then. Allow me to\u00a0demonstrate that beavers, as history shows, can and have taken on the challenge of flight.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

During postwar expansion, as hundreds of new houses were springing up around Idaho\u2019s sleepy Payette Lake, the Fish and Game Department had to find something to do with the area\u2019s beaver population. Though the rodents make welcome ecological inroads among myriad wild spaces, they can cause problems around human dwellings, as their dam building occasionally flooded neighborhoods and roads.<\/p>\n

Idaho Fish and Game decided simply to transport the furry rodents to deeper parts of the woods. Each summer, Idaho trappers and rangers would lure beavers from around the lake into temporary wire traps and then truck them to some open meadow. But the Fish and Game officials soon saw a need to transplant the rodents even further into the backcountry, where they could enhance the ecosystems and, eventually, bolster the fur trade. The problem: no human roads had been (and still aren\u2019t) cut that far into the Idaho wild.<\/p>\n

According to a 1950 report in the Journal of Wildlife Management<\/em>, the Fish and Game Department first tried packing out the beavers to the Chamberlain Basin, strapping an odorous pair to the back of a donkey and walking them for days. But the beavers often overheated on the long journeys or became so \u201cdangerously belligerent\u201d (and stinky) that they distracted their mounts. Sometimes they arrived in their new meadows ill from the trip and unfit for the arduous work that comprises any beaver\u2019s survival.<\/p>\n

Then Fish and Game employee Elmo Heter got an idea. Perhaps it came to him after noticing the surplus of rayon parachutes housed at the Forest Service, leftover from the war. Why not hire a Travel\u00a0Air plane, attach a few dozen beavers to the chutes, and drop new colonies of the critters at their new homes? Rather than hiring a mule team to spend days moving one flat-tailed-beaver pair (a considerable expense), dropping a dozen pairs in the woods over the course of one afternoon would cost taxpayers only seven bucks a beaver\u2014less if rangers could retrieve the chutes.<\/p>\n