Retained to survey a wooded site for trees to preserve in the pending construction, I walked down the slope considering a grouping of massive tulip poplars. As I gazed up, evaluating the 100’+ tall trees, I began working my way down the slope into the adjacent creek’s riparian plain, paying far more attention to the trees than to where I was walking. Upon hitting level ground and with my eyes fixed upon the poplar canopy, I sank ankle deep into mud, though a good 50’ from the creek.
There in Carmel, Indiana, adjacent to houses and commercial buildings, a pair of beaver had taken residence: cutting trees, scooping mud and building a dam and lodge, flooding the creek bank and my boots!
Allow me to make an consideration of the “the history” of water, or more accurately, water impoundments in America. Before 1600 in North America, the continent was primeval with minor human inputs. Native American actions were light and localized. Even large permanent settlements like Ke’keonga (Fort Wayne, Indiana pre-1750) impacted only a few hundred acres along the confluence of the Maumee, St. Joe and St. Mary’s Rivers. Even the mound builders along the Ohio River drainage, who moved vast quantities of dirt in their constructions created no long-term impact.
The mammal who controlled North America and is the cause of this thread, which altered the environment in post-glacieral North America, was not Homo sapiens; it was the beaver, Castor canadensis! The beaver is one of the few animals, which must purposefully change and manage its environment to accommodate its needs and expand its population. Their natural and on-going activity creates three conditions that are off “the norm” of the riparian micro-environments, as we understand it today:
1. reduction of tree canopy along water ways, allowing more light to the ground,
2. permanent impoundments and wet lands, and
3. the establishment of seasonal wet meadows and wet site grasslands.
Succeeding posts in “Blue Planet, Wet Place” will follow “this trail” to some logical conclusions and propose a macro-environment scenario which may challenge current thought on environmental history and our understanding of today’s climate.
