This is CBSI of the world. Behind the Black, Bob Zimmerman is here. I'm John Batchler.

In the 1940s after the war, the people of Idaho needed management of the waterways that were running every which way and flooding some people.

So the solution wasn't to move in with the Army Corps of Engineers.

It was to parachute beavers into Idaho.

That's right.

There are photographs of it.

You can find them online.

And it was an enormous success because beavers always work to manage waterways.

Bob, you have a story that reminds me of the beaver parachute drop. Yeah, this is a side outside of space. There was a story this week

that I posted on behind the black. After Mount Sail Helens erupted in 1980, the ground all around was devastated.

Plant life was burned off.

It was all lava.

There was nothing growing.

What they thought was that if they could get the ground plowed up a bit, they'd get

the fungus and microbiology that's buried under the lava near the surface, plants could prosper again.

So what do they do? They shipped, dropped six gophers into one meter square enclosures each and let them

dig for a day, one day in those enclosures. Forty years later, they discovered a gigantic bloom of life in these one meter square

enclosures while the ground around is barren.

Forty years later, because what happened is the growth gulf has dug.

They dug things up.

They got the microbiology to the surface

fungi so the plants could prosper in the soil and they did in those particular

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