Beavers! – Read and Print

By Rachel Dunstan Muller, copyright 2021

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There was once a mama and a papa beaver who lived in a very comfortable beaver lodge that they’d built all by themselves with mud and sticks and logs right in the middle of a shallow pond. Now that lodge was nice and cozy for mama and papa beaver, but I’m not sure that you or I would have wanted to live there. Inside the lodge, it was snug and dry – even on the windiest winter night. But the opening to get into the beaver lodge was underwater. Which meant that anyone who wanted to get inside had to hold their breath and swim.

Now, mama and papa beaver didn’t build that lodge just for themselves. No, they built it for their young family. You see, in the spring, when this story begins, mama beaver gave birth to three kits – three baby beavers – a sister beaver, and two brother beavers. The three little beavers spent the rest of that spring safe inside their lodge, drinking milk from their mother, and eating fresh branches and leaves. Now, that doesn’t sound like something I’d want to eat, but to the little beavers, it was delicious!

Now you might already know this, but young animals grow up very fast, and one summer evening, when those young beavers were just a few months old, they went for their first swim. Beavers are nocturnal, which is a big word that means they sleep during the day, and get up just as the sun as going down. Well, imagine how exciting it must have been for those little beavers to follow their mother and father out through the underwater opening and into the pond for the very first time. There were so many things to see and do out in the world beyond their lodge. There was water to swim in and splash with their tails. There were the silhouettes of trees to look at, and the shining moon, and the great, starry sky. And there were new things to taste as well: roots and ferns and grasses and water lilies.

But as the warm nights of summer gave way to the cooler nights of autumn, the beavers ate more and more of their favourite food: cambium. Cambium sounds kind of like candy – but it’s not. Cambium is the soft inner layer of tree bark, which is just beneath the hard outer layer. The young beaver family especially liked the cambium from willow and alder and birch trees. Mmm! Mama and papa and their three young beavers ate a lot of cambium that autumn – which helped fatten them up for the winter. It’s a good thing beavers have such strong teeth!

But the beaver family wasn’t just filling their bellies that autumn. Mama and papa were repairing their lodge and their dam with fresh mud and rocks and logs – which they chewed down themselves with those big front teeth! They also spent time gathering food for the winter – branches and tree limbs that they carried to a big underwater pile called a ‘raft’ in the deepest part of the pond. As the three little beavers watched, mama and papa swam back and forth, and back and forth, pushing floating logs, and carrying branches in their jaws. They sure were busy!

But here’s something you might now know about beavers. All that hard work they do? It doesn’t just help the beavers and their babies; it also helps other animals! When a beaver builds a dam, it makes a shallow pond. And that pond gives other plants and animals a place to live – like dragonflies and frogs and ducks, even otters and deer and bats!

Mama and papa beaver worked side-by-side all through the autumn – until the air outside was cold and crisp even when the sun was shining, until the willow and aspen and alder trees had lost all their leaves. Finally, when the first snowflakes began to fall, the beaver family settled into their cozy beaver lodge.

Now, some animals, like bears, spend the winter hibernating. They take a long nap that lasts all the way ‘til spring. But the beaver family didn’t hibernate. Instead they spent the winter together in their lodge, sleeping during the day, and going out at night to bring back twigs and branches from their underwater pile. As it got colder a layer of ice formed on top of the pond, but beneath the ice there was still room to swim. And if that winter water was cold – well, at least the beavers had warm fur coats.

In the spring, when the ice melted and the first buds appeared on the trees, the cycle started all over again. Mama beaver had more babies – more beaver kits – four of them this time. But this time the baby beavers had a big sister and two big brothers to help bring them food and guide them when they were ready to take their first swim.

And so it went for season after season, until the young beavers were old enough to go out into the world on their own, to build beaver dams, and beaver lodges, and start beaver families of their own.

Not a bad life – if you don’t mind eating trees!

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