Beaver Dams

Explains the process and materials that beavers use to build dams. This book’s colorful photos, clear text, and “A Closer Look” feature highlight the engineering that makes this structure such a marvel and helps beavers survive in the wild.

A beaver dam is made of rocks, logs, branches, and mud. These materials stop the flow of the stream and create a large, still pond. Find out more in Beaver Dams, a title in the Nature’s Engineers series. Nature’s Engineers is a series of AV2 media enhanced books. Each title in the series features easy-to-read text, stunning visuals, and a challenging educational activity. A unique book code printed on page 2 unlocks multimedia content. These books come alive with video, audio, weblinks, slideshows, activities, hands-on experiments, and much more.

The first year of a beaver kit's life is full of new discoveries and dangers. But the most important lesson the kit learns is how to take care of his family's home. The lodge where he lives is protected by a long dam that many beavers have worked to build over the years. As the kit grows up, he helps repair and add to the family dam—and begins to build a life for himself. Set at what is believed to be the world's longest beaver dam, Build, Beaver, Build—by award-winning author Sandra Markle—provides a glimpse of beaver life, seen through the eyes of one young beaver and his family.

Dams profoundly impact the geomorphology of rivers by altering the natural patterns of water, sediment and energy flow in rivers. These changes have a largely negative impact on aquatic and riparian ecosystems upstream and downstream of the dam. Natural dams also impact river geomorphology, although with positive and negative repercussions for aquatic and riparian organisms. In 2002, the 33rd Binghamton Geomorphology Symposium convened under the theme "Dams and Morphology," and featured invited papers and contributed posters on topics of natural dams, artificial dams, and dam removal. Fourteen of these papers have been included in this volume.

Everyone has heard the phrase "busy as a beaver" and this book illustrates the meaning of that expression. Beavers are extremely industrious animals that can change an entire landscape as they cut down trees to build lodges and dams. There are benefits and difficulties in sharing a place with these natural architects. They provide vital wetland homes for countless animals, but near people, their work can cause flooding that harms homes and farms.

Our modern idea of what a healthy landscape looks like and how it functions is distorted by the fur trade that once trapped out millions of beavers from North America's lakes and rivers. Goldfarb shares the powerful story about one of the world's most influential species. He explains how North America was colonized, how our landscapes have changed over the centuries, and how beavers can help us fight drought, flooding, wildfire, extinction, and the ravages of climate change. -- adapted from jacket

“Unexpectedly delightful reading—there is much to learn from the buck-toothed rodents of yore” (National Post). Beavers, those icons of industriousness, have been gnawing down trees, building dams, shaping the land, and creating critical habitat in North America for at least a million years. Once one of the continent’s most ubiquitous mammals, they ranged from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from the Rio Grande to the edge of the northern tundra. Wherever there was wood and water, there were beavers—sixty million, or more—and wherever there were beavers, there were intricate natural communities that depended on their activities. Then the European fur traders arrived. Once They Were Hats examines humanity’s fifteen-thousand–year relationship with Castor canadensis, and the beaver’s even older relationship with North American landscapes and ecosystems. From the waterlogged environs of the Beaver Capital of Canada to the wilderness cabin that controversial conservationist Grey Owl shared with pet beavers; from a bustling workshop where craftsmen make beaver-felt cowboy hats using century-old tools to a tidal marsh where an almost-lost link between beavers and salmon was recently found, it’s a journey of discovery to find out what happened after we nearly wiped this essential animal off the map, and how we can learn to live with beavers now that they’re returning. “Fascinating and smartly written.” —The Globe and Mail (Toronto)