Escaped Beavers, Nuisance Deer, and Dying Wolves

As human numbers have grown over the millenia, we've worked tirelessly towards setting the messy house of nature in order. We are busy like the proverbially productive beaver, always thinking not what we can do for the tree, but what the tree can do for us. 

Last week the BBC reported that three beavers, members of a species hunted to extinction in Britain hundreds of years ago, escaped from a farm owned by a conservationist and wildlife photographer. The farm's owner, Derek Gow, is duly licensed by Natural England, a government agency, to keep beavers. He's been able to catch two of the fugitive aquatic rodents, both of which are females. The one still at large is a male, who may be out looking for a mate, or maybe even another mate. (See http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/7805128.stm , "Escaped beaver fells river trees," 30 December 2008.) 

The runaway beaver "broke out" of his confines in October, but it seems that he's given away his hideout's rough location to observant individuals who noticed trees were being cut down by distinctive beaver tree-felling methods. The presumptuous creature has also apparently established a territory, and is going about the business of making nature's disorder into something he can better live with. 

But it's only a matter of time before The Authorities and Mr. Gow close in on the errant animal. Traps baited with the scent of his species' female will eventually stop him from acting out his grandiose fantasies of independent living according to his own instincts. He'll return to the fold at the farm where other "wildlife" continue to be conserved and preserved. 

I live in one of those neighborhoods that's close to a city's edge, one where all the trees weren't cut down to build the houses, so deer still roam freely in fairly large numbers. A recent homeowners' association newsletter carried a short article about the problem of the area being "plagued with deer. . . . [that] eat azaleas, excite dogs and run in front of cars." Since we're not allowed to hunt in our suburban city, we have few defenses against these pesky ruminants in our midst. Though some homeowners think they're "cute and interesting to watch" we are asked not to feed them, which "encourages them to stay in the neighborhood [and] interferes with the normal cycle of wildlife."

In my yard, they leave the azaleas alone and go after the hostas. It's also occurred to me that they were here before the cars and landscaping. And, a long time ago, we killed off their natural predators to make the world safe for our own ruminants. We're still doing that, too. 

But I guess trapping beavers and advising against feeding deer are an improvement from earlier times. And we've even given the wolf a chance in a few places, though not without an ongoing fight. The most moving and poignant expression I know of one person's awakening to the folly of human contempt for the wild is Aldo Leopold's short essay "Thinking Like a Mountain," collected in almost any available edition of his nature-writing classic A Sand County Almanac.

The story central to Leopold's essay is about killing a wolf and watching it die. He was young at the time, and would eventually be known not only as a writer but as the wildlife biologist who figured out that a top predator actually fulfilled an important function in an ecology. When he learned to "think like a mountain," he acquired a longer view of things. The mountain, Leopold understood, had been there long enough to watch what happens without wolves to thin the deer herds that ate the vegetation growing on the mountain. He writes:

We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes--something known only to her and the mountain. 

And, near his conclusion:

We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness. The deer strives with his supple legs, the cowman with trap and poison, the statesman with pen, the most of us with machines, votes, and dollars, but it all comes to the same thing: peace in our time. A measure of success in this is all well enough, and perhaps is a requisite to objective thinking, but too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run.

And now a lot of us strive for the dullness of safety from ravening deer and beaver. From concern for physical safety, we've moved to concern for a kind of safety that's about not having our landscape views disrupted, or our dollars-and-cents wealth compromised, as if that was really the only kind of meaningful wealth. 

Is there another way of knowing about wealth, or perhaps more properly, well-being, for those patient enough to listen? What knowledge was in the eyes of the dying wolf Leopold watched? Whatever it was, he was permanently changed by it.