Not beaver Pentway

One sign that my expertise might be at least semi-useful is that I get calls from time to time to use my natural history skills to try to resolve local disputes. Today's challenge involved determining whether beavers had moved into the neighborhood and were threatening to flood a development. While I'm no fan of badly placed developments, I'm also not naive: these hard-working aquatic engineers can sometimes wreak genuine havoc on an area. But it didn't take very long to determine that there were no beavers at work here. This tree, for example, clearly fell from natural causes, and there were no signs of toothmarks on any of the downed logs. The so-called dam seemed to be more the result of folks dumping brush in the area. The one footprint I discovered was left by a raccoon, And the little drainage ditch said to be the result of Castor canadensis toil had definite human origins. "We have met the enemy and he is us," famously said the cartoonist Walt Kelly, and it was pretty clear to me that any untoward manipulation of the wetland bore human fingerprints. Beavers, after all, don't use shovels.

Not beaver Pentway shovel