Sometimes the beaver just doesn’t get enough credit for contributing its life to its country. For it was the beaver, or more precisely, demand for its pelt that spurred the shift of civilization westward during America’s youthful years.

Outposts that later grew into towns and cities began to pop up out of the wilderness as fur trappers pushed farther into remote and dangerous territory west of the colonies. Beavers had become scarce in western Europe by the 1600s, but the demand for fur hats, coats and other beaver-garnished garments remained high. At the same time the popularity of beaver apparel was growing among the sophisticates of America’s burgeoning cities.
That made the American beaver population of untold millions vulnerable to exploitation by the hunter and his steel-jawed traps.

According to Animal Life and Lore by Osmond P. Breland, one beaver skin would buy a pound of tobacco, four a blanket and 12 a rifle. Some people even ate beaver meat, including its tail, which was considered a delicacy. John Jacob Astor, America’s richest man when he died in 1848, made his first millions in fur-trading companies.

When silk hats became all the rage in the latter half of the 19th century, the bottom began to drop out of the market for beaver pelts. That development, along with conservationists pushing for protection laws, led to the eventual recovery of the beaver population, though unregulated trapping continued well into the 1900s. The North American beaver population is now estimated at 10 to 15 million. So robust is the population that beavers are considered pests in some regions.

What made this pudgy rodent – the biggest beavers approach 75 pounds – so valuable was its undercoat of soft fur, which tradesmen rendered into felt. The felt was then used to make hats called castors or “beavers.”

Today, beavers are better known for their skills at the natural “engineering” of wetlands and chopping down trees with the efficiency of a chain saw.

Visitors can watch beavers in action at the Children’s Zoo. A large pool allows viewing of the beavers above and below water, indoors and out at the exhibit. Most days they will receive cuttings from twigs and branches, which they can use to add to their lodge. More than 300 aspen saplings, which have a two-to-three-year growth cycle, have been planted on zoo grounds. Several  aspens will be cut down weekly by animal keepers and inserted into standing PVC pipes. The beavers can then gnaw on the saplings. (Beavers can buzz through a tree trunk five inches in diameter in three minutes, so what they are allowed to chop down in the exhibit must be monitored.)

Two cameras were installed in the beavers’ lodge so scientists can study the animals’ behavior. Visitors can observe lodge life on a TV monitor in the main hall of the exhibit.
Beavers in the wild construct dams in streams or rivers to create ponds. The ponds over time bloom into meadows and forests that become populated by dozens of species of plants and wildlife. Their lodge homes of mud, sticks, logs and bark are built on the ponds. An underwater entrance makes it difficult for predators to enter the lodge, especially when the pond freezes in winter. Beavers, who can stay submerged for 15 minutes, also store food underwater near their lodge to eat when ice and snow cap the pond and nearby woods. A beaver’s diet in the wild includes greens like ferns, cattails and water lilies and trees such as willow, poplar, birch and aspen.

Their paddle of a tail comes in handy in a number of ways for beavers. They use it, for example, to balance their bodies when they squat to gnaw at a tree, or to warn other beavers of a predator like a wolf or a bear by slapping its on the pond.

While beavers may be nature’s most effective conservationists, too many beavers and too much engineering in one area can cause timber and crop loss, damage to roads and septic tanks and flooding.

Consequently, trapping of pest beavers is common.

Trapping beavers for sport or profit also is legal today in many areas of North America during regulated seasons. Pelts, however, are no longer the kind of commodity that can spur a country’s expansion and make men rich. Pelts are now sold for as little as $15 apiece.