Leave it to beavers

"A man's reach should exceed his grasp," famously wrote Robert Browning in "Andrea del Sarto," a poem about an Italian Renaissance painter who was known as an "artist without error." What is true about men—and women, it goes without saying—is also true, I have learned, about beavers, and this afternoon, when I was trekking though the Tefftweald refuge, I noticed an example of grasp-exceeding ambition on the part of those busy, busy rodents. Beavers have clearly played a major role in re-engineering the wetland, which is filled with many dead trees incapable of handling the flooding that Castor canadensis crafted to meet its needs. There are also numerous spiked stumps that are testaments to the beaver's ability to gnaw down small trees for food and dam-building. But sometimes the builder's reach exceeds his grasp, and so it is here, where the tree-chomper took on too big a job. The cut marks look old and weathered, so I think the beaver realized the impossibility of the task and gave up. Still, as Browning wrote, maybe it's a task for the rodentian afterlife... "or what's a heaven for?"