Leave it to Beavers

Outside/In

NHPR

Documentary, Society & Culture, Natural Sciences, Nature, Science

4.7 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 13 April 2017

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Beaver (Castor canadensis), have been kicking around in North America for 2 million years. Ecologically they do all sorts of great things: their ponds ease flooding downstream, and support large numbers of bird species, fish, amphibians, and otters. They're what's called a keystone species, as in the keystone to an entire eco-system. But they're also the world's second largest rodent and a nightmare for property owners. Humans and beavers have a long history together because they like to live in the same places, but the way we've built our infrastructure has almost guaranteed our two species will be locked in eternal conflict. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Okay, to start things off, I'd like you to meet Carol. I, let's see, I'm a woman of a certain age, and I was a midwife my whole life.
0:13.4	Actually, I was the first midwife
0:15.2	to be licensed to practice legally in New Hampshire.
0:17.8	Carol Leonard is an author who lives in rural Maine
0:20.8	close to Acadia National Park. And in what is the weirdest twist I've
0:25.2	ever experienced while interviewing anybody as I was talking to Carol, I
0:29.3	learned this. I may have, and you have to ask your mother this but I may be the first
0:35.6	woman to ever touch you Sam. Yeah. Yeah. Turns out Carol was midwife at my birth.
0:44.0	I did some fact checking by the way and learned it was in fact not Carol, but Carol's business partner,
0:51.0	who was the first woman to touch me at delivery.
0:55.4	But anyway, that's not why we got in touch with Carol.
0:58.2	We reached out to her because of what happened once she was done being a midwife.
1:02.3	When she retired, she and her husband decided to move to Maine.
1:06.0	We had the really good fortune in 2005 to find a great piece of land is 400 acres.
1:15.0	Near where her great grandfather was buried.
1:17.1	It was their dream property, and they set about building
1:20.1	their dream home.
1:21.7	But almost right away, they started to have trouble.
1:26.0	So we've got, I don't know, I would say at least 25 acres underwater probably.
1:35.4	Some of the flow had just gotten ominously close to where we, you know, you have to be 75 feet away from a wetlands in order to put in a septic system and that was starting
1:45.8	to be an issue.
1:50.3	As Carol and her husband settled into their dream property, they soon realized a family of Beaver
	...

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